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Comparing Jobless Benefits By Curt Nickisch  Listen to story (Real Audio)
Unemployment benefits are far from a perfect safety net. In Massachusetts, only about a half of unemployed workers receive benefits. Even so, those who do, get more money, for a longer period of time, than their New England neighbors. WBUR's Curt Nickisch reports. TEXT OF STORY: [SOUND OF ELEVATOR] CURT NICKISCH: Jay Thompson is riding up to the third floor of a financial office building in Salem, New Hampshire. The elevator's mahogany panels and Persian rug make Thompson look very out of place, in his threadbare grey tank. He's here to check in with a temp agency. But, like they told him last week, there's no work for him. TEMP AGENCY REP: I'll be calling you Jay if anything comes in. All right, bye bye. NICKISCH: Thompson got laid off a month ago. He's a forklift operator, and sales at the company he was working for part time are down. Now Thompson's left to live off checks from the unemployment office. He keeps the statements in his car as a constant reminder. After taxes, he gets 103 dollars per week. NICKISCH TO THOMPSON: So when you see that amount what do you think? JAY THOMPSON: Ouch. Ouch. I mean I'm barely cranking by on my bills. Visa's about to kick my butt. My financial status, my credit's going down the toilet. [SOUND OF DRIVING IN THOMPSON'S CAR] NICKISCH: To try to make ends meet, Thompson has moved in with his brother and sister-in-law. But he still can't quite make it on four hundred plus dollars a month. THOMPSON: Two of that goes to my brother. Plus I gotta buy food, I gotta buy gas, and I'm single but I guess I'm gonna stay that way because I can't afford to take a girl out. And it's killing me. I'm 43 years old and I'm having a hard time. A real hard time. It's just really difficult. NICKISCH: It would be somewhat less difficult if Thompson lived and worked in Massachusetts, like Olga Hartzavalos. [RESTAURANT SOUND] OLGA HARTZAVALOS: This is to stay. CASHIER: Just a small chili with cheese? Yes. NICKISCH: She's in a fast food restaurant just over the border from Salem, in Lawrence, Mass. Hartzavalos pays under two bucks for her order and then asks for extra crackers. HARTZAVALOS: I like chili, I like chili because it's a filler-up. NICKISCH: Hartzavalos is a bookkeeper and got laid off the same time as Thompson. She was making about the same wage he was ? twelve and a half dollars an hour, part-time. But she's better off for being in Massachusetts. She's getting half again as much in unemployment benefits as he is. HARTZAVALOS: That money can go towards gas?one or two utility bills. NICKISCH: The rest she pays for with child support from her ex, help from her Greek immigrant parents, and her teenage daughter, who works at a donut shop. Hartzavolos thinks she can eke it out until December. That's when she finishes a job training program... right about the same time her unemployment benefits will run out. HARTZAVALOS: Yeah, I'm piecing it together. You have to synchronize, organize, prioritize everything, and that's how you can make it. NICKISCH: How well you can make it really depends on the state. In Massachusetts, you don't have to have had a job as long to start getting benefits. You get them longer ? about a month more than most other states. And you get more money. The average weekly benefit in Massachusetts is more than a hundred dollars above that of New Hampshire's. All that adds up to more stability for the Bay State's jobless. STEVE POFTAK: People don't immediately have to dump their house on the market or immediately leave. I think there's clearly a societal benefit. NICKISCH: Steve Poftak researches for the Pioneer Institute, a conservative Boston think tank. Still, he says the relatively generous benefits here have come at a cost to competitiveness for many of the state's businesses, which pay the highest rate in the nation into unemployment benefits. Poftak warns against raising them beyond where they are now. POFTAK: There are limitations on how strong you can make that safety net before it becomes a disincentive. That's a tough thing to talk about at this period of time, but that's the reality. The point of unemployment is to be a safety net, it's not really meant to be a wage supplement. [SOUND OF RAIN] NICKISCH: That different states have different safety nets is a hard reality for Jay Thompson, the out-of-work forklift operator from New Hampshire. He's sitting in his car outside the Salem career center, waiting out a downpour to go inside. THOMPSON: On a hundred bucks a week it's hard, but there's so many people out of work that our government don't have a choice. They have to have these guidelines. I kind of agree, but I kind of think it sucks. It really sucks. NICKISCH: Thompson just hopes that by early next year when his benefits would run out, that the downturn will have ended and he'll have found a job. If not, he's really not sure what he's going to do.
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