WASHINGTON (AP) – Mary Taboniar spent 15 months without pay, thanks to the COVID pandemic. A cleanup of the Hilton Hawaiian Village resort in Honolulu, the single mother of two children, saw her income disappear completely when the virus devastated the hospitality industry.
For more than a year, Taboniar relied entirely on the increase in unemployment benefits and a network of local food banks to feed his family. Even this summer, when the vaccine implantation was consolidated and tourists began to travel again, their work took a long time to return, reaching a maximum of 11 days in August, about half of its load. of pre-pandemic work.
Taboniar is one of the millions of Americans for whom Labor Day 2021 represents a dangerous crossroads. Two main anchors of the government’s COVID protection package are ending or have recently ended. As of Monday, an estimated 8.9 million people will lose all of their unemployment benefits. The federal eviction moratorium has already expired.
While other aspects of pandemic assistance, including rent subsidies and the extension of the children’s tax credit they are still widely available, millions of Americans who are bluntly told will face Labor Day with a suddenly reduced social safety net.
“This will be a double whammy,” said Jamie Contreras, secretary-treasurer of SEIU, a union that represents custodians of office buildings and airport food service workers. “It simply came to our notice then. People still need help. … For millions of people, nothing has changed since a year and a half ago. ”
For Taboniar, 43, this means that unemployment benefits will disappear completely, even when his working hours disappear again. A new wave of viruses motivated the governor of Hawaii to recommend it that tourists delay their plans.
“It really scares me,” he said. “How can I pay the rent if I’m unemployed and my job doesn’t come back?”
He plans to apply for the recently expanded SNAP assistance program, better known as food stamps, but doubts will be enough to make up the difference. “I’m grabbing anything,” he said.
The administration of President Joe Biden believes that the US economy is strong enough not to fall due to evictions or falling unemployment benefits. Officials argue that other elements of the safety net, such as the child tax credit and the SNAP program (which Biden permanently promoted earlier this summer), are enough to smooth things over. On Friday, a White House spokesman said there were no plans to re-evaluate the end of unemployment benefits.
“Savings of twenty-two trillion dollars work largely on momentum and we have a strong push in the right direction on behalf of the U.S. workforce,” said Jared Bernstein, a board member. ‘White House Economic Advisers.
Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said he believed the country’s workforce was ready for change.
“Overall, the economy is moving forward and recovering,” Walsh said in an interview. “I think the American economy and the American worker are in a better position to get into Labor Day 2021 than Labor Day 2020.”
Walsh and others aim to boost the number of jobs; on Friday, the unemployment rate fell to 5.2% quite healthy. But Andrew Stettler, a senior member of the Century Foundation, a left-wing think tank, says the end of the expansion of unemployment benefits is still coming too soon.
Instead of setting an arbitrary deadline, Stettler says the administration should have tied the end of protection to specific economic recovery metrics. It suggests three consecutive months with national unemployment below 5% as a reasonable benchmark to bring about the end of unemployment benefits.
“It seems like this is a wrong political decision based on where we are,” Stettler said.
The end of these protections while the economic crisis persists could have a devastating impact on lower-middle-class families who could barely stand the pandemic. Potentially, millions of people “will have more difficulty regaining the middle-class base they lost,” Stettler said.
Biden and the Democrats who control Congress are at a crossroads, allowing aid to expire as they focus on their broader package of infrastructure and other spending. The $ 3.5 trillion proposal would rebuild many of the safety net programs, but faces obstacles in the tightly divided Congress.
In the meantime, families will have to make do.
“These are two very important things that are expiring. There is no doubt that there will be families affected by their expiration and that they will have additional difficulties, “Sharon Parrott, president of the Center for Priority Budgets and Policies, said in an interview.
COVID-19’s response has been radical in its size and scope, about $ 5 trillion in federal spending since the virus erupted in 2020, an unprecedented commitment.
Republicans in Congress had supported some of COVID-19’s initial spending, but earlier this year voted the Biden $ 1.9 trillion recovery package unnecessary. Many argued against extending another round of unemployment benefits, and Republicans pledge to oppose Biden’s $ 3.5 trillion packages that are expected to be considered by the end of this year. month.
Several avenues of support are still available, although in some cases the actual delivery of this support has been problematic.
States with higher unemployment levels can use the $ 350 billion in aid they received from the aid package to expand their own jobless payments, as noted in an Aug. 19 letter from Walsh and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Federal rental assistance funds remain available, although money has been slow to come out the door, leaving the White House and lawmakers pushing state and local officials to disperse the funds more quickly to both landlords and to tenants.
Investment bank Morgan Stanley estimated on Thursday that the economy will grow at an annual rate of 2.9% in the third quarter, down from the previous forecast of 6.5%. This decline largely reflects a decline in federal aid spending and supply chain bottlenecks.
And the economy still faces obstacles. Union officials say sectors such as hospitality employees and office cleaning staff have been the slowest to recover.
“Our industry is the spearhead when it comes to COVID,” said D. Taylor, president of UNITE HERE, a union representing hotel mistresses, a field “primarily made up of women and people of color. “.
Many of these housewives never returned to full employment, even when Americans resumed travel and hotel occupancy rates rose during the summer.
Taylor said several large hotel chains have decided to permanently reduce labor costs by reducing service levels under the guise of COVID. The Taboniar Hotel in Hawaii, for example, has changed to clean rooms every five days, unless the client specifically requests otherwise in advance. Although August occupied more than 90% of the hotel, it was only occupied for half the usual number of days prior to the pandemic.
The delta variant of the coronavirus also poses a challenge, threatening future school closures and delaying plans to return workers to their offices.
Walsh called the delta variant “an asterisk for everything.”
The sudden lag of a crucial element of the pandemic safety net has fueled the demands for a reassessment of the entire unemployment benefit system. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Chairman of the Finance Committee, said in an interview that it is crucial that Congress modernize the unemployment insurance system as part of the package.
“It’s heartbreaking to know it didn’t have to be that way,” Wyden said.
One of the changes he proposes is that unemployment benefits be more closely linked to economic conditions, so that they do not expire in times of need. “We need to bring the unemployment system into the 21st century,” he said.
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Associated Press writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.