Why Black Workers Will Hurt the Most if Congress Doesn’t Extend Jobless Benefits

When Congress expanded unemployment insurance this year to meet the staggering economic toll of the pandemic, it had one less-noticed effect: It made America’s fractured jobless benefits system more fair.

Starting in April, the federal government provided $600 weekly payments to unemployed workers in addition to state jobless benefits, smoothing sharp differences between more and less generous states. It also broadly expanded who qualified, removing barriers for lower-wage, seasonal and gig workers, who are typically excluded from aid. All of this had the added effect of reducing racial disparities in unemployment benefits that have for decades disadvantaged Black workers in particular.

Now, with the $600 payments expired as of the end of July and with congressional leaders and the White House debating whether to extend them, Black workers stand to be hurt the most if they fail to reach a deal.

This is in large part because Black workers disproportionately live in states with the lowest benefit levels and the highest barriers to receiving them. Without the $600 federal payments, the most an unemployed worker in Florida or Alabama can receive is $275 a week. Workers still covered under the expanded gig worker categories would potentially get even less.

“It’s just a pretty straightforward fact that one of the biggest problems facing unemployed Black workers is that they live in places with particularly inadequate unemployment insurance systems,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who served as chief economist to Joe Biden when he was vice president.

The geographic pattern is not as stark for Hispanic workers, who have also been hit hard in the coronavirus recession. But they make up more than a quarter of workers in two states with maximum weekly benefits of less than $300 — Florida and Arizona.

Among Black workers, about one in four live in just three states: Florida, Georgia and Texas. And nearly 60 percent over all live in the South, in states that tend to put the interests of businesses ahead of those of workers, and where race itself has historically been inseparable from policy decisions about the safety net.