Update, April 8: We updated the chart to reflect the March jobs report.



President Obama tonight is expected to call again on Congress to restart emergency jobless benefits for long-term unemployed workers. Here are three reasons why lawmakers need to step up their bipartisan discussions on the issue and reach agreement.

Every week of delay means more jobless workers won’t get needed help. An estimated 1.3 million jobless workers lost Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) benefits right after Christmas when the program expired. If Congress doesn’t restart it, the number of affected workers will continue to climb each week, reaching 4.9 million by the end of the year. (Our report, based on Labor Department data, gives the state-by-state specifics.)Families rely on unemployment benefits to meet basic needs like food, health care, and housing while they look for work. With EUC’s expiration, only regular state unemployment benefits — which last 26 weeks in most states — are available to qualifying workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own.

The labor market hasn’t improved enough to end the program. EUC, like the federal emergency programs enacted in every major recession since the late 1950s, is a temporary program that provides additional weeks of benefits to qualifying jobless workers when jobs are hard to find. Labor market conditions are much better than in the depths of the Great Recession in 2008-09, but they remain much worse than when policymakers let any of those programs expire.In particular, long-term unemployment is nearly twice as high as when any previous program expired (see chart).



