As benefits run out, jobs scarce

WASHINGTON - In the coming months, hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment benefits, just when it has never been harder to find a job.

"What comes next, I'm afraid, will be the mother of all jobless recoveries," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, a consulting firm. "While we may emerge from recession from a statistical standpoint later this year, most Americans will be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a recession and a recovery the next 12 months."

That's grim news for Sterling Long, 40, of Pittsburgh, who said he was willing to take any job available to support his wife and four children. He has cleaned houses and done other odd jobs since being laid off from a plumbing distributor in March 2008. He is dreading the expiration of his benefits this month.

"I'll work in McDonald's," he said. "I got no pride as long as the people in this house eat, have hot water - that's all I need."

Long, like many of the long-term unemployed, has tried to learn new skills. For three months, he spent Saturdays and Sundays working to get his commercial driver's license. That led to work as a cargo loader for a couple of months at the supermarket warehouse. But since then, nothing.

States typically provide 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, an average of about $350 a week. Last year, Congress tacked on 20 extra weeks of benefits, and later it added 13 additional weeks for people in states hardest hit by unemployment.

Experts said food stamps and other social programs provided a partial backstop for many recipients who exhaust benefits. Some will also take low-paying "tide-over" jobs - if they can find them, said Rebecca Blank, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

One of them is Rainie Uselton, 39, who also lives in Pittsburgh. She took a course to become a certified nursing assistant after being laid off from a restaurant early last year. She landed a job at an assisted-living facility but lost it after her car broke down and she could not make it to work.

Uselton is caring for a friend's mother part time in exchange for a meal, bus pass, and $50 a week. She hopes to use that money to help pay for car repairs before her benefits run out in four weeks.

"It takes a little longer to fall asleep because of all the scenarios in your head," Uselton said.

Precise figures are hard to determine, but Wayne Vroman, an economist at the Urban Institute, estimates that up to 700,000 people could exhaust their extended benefits by the second half of this year.

Some will find new jobs, but prospects will be grim: Layoffs are projected to go on, and many economists expect the jobless rate, already at 8.5 percent, to hit 10 percent by year's end.

"It's going to be a monstrous problem," Vroman said.

U.S. employers shed 663,000 jobs in March, and the jobless rate now stands at 8.5 percent, its highest in a quarter-century, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Friday. Since the recession began in December 2007, a net total of 5.1 million jobs have disappeared.