South By North Strategies, Ltd.

The National Employment Law Project reports that a congressional failure to reauthorize emergency unemployment benefits will  cause 1.2 million Americans to lose unemployment insurance payments in December. Benefit losses will continue over subsequent months. From the report …

Of these 1.2 million workers, more than 828,000 will lose out on weeks of a federal extension that would otherwise be available to them …. These are workers who are currently receiving one of the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) “tiers” and who would not be able to move on to the next tier available in their states after they finish their current set of weeks. In many states, these also include recipients who are finishing out their EUC benefits, but will be unable to receive additional weeks under Extended Benefits due the loss of federal funding for the program.
…
Another 387,000 recipients will lose all access to any form of an extension.These are unemployment recipients enrolled in their states’ regular benefit program, which only allows up to 26 weeks of benefits. This group of unemployed workers, after finishing their state’s program, will have no other benefits available to them after the extensions expire. This means that in most states, recently laid-off workers will receive only six months of benefits or less, even though unemployment is as high or higher than it was when the current federal programs were first enacted and much higher than it was during earlier federal programs. Given the dearth of jobs available for those in need of work and sustained record levels of long-term unemployment, cutting off the benefits jobless workers expected from the federal extensions will result in significant hardship for hundreds of thousands of the recently unemployed.