The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on communities across the United States; more than 100,000 people have died during the last three months. In addition to a mounting death toll, the pandemic has prompted intense financial difficulty for many Americans. An estimated 40 million are now out of work. Low-wage and undocumented workers whose finances were precarious before the pandemic are especially affected. The federal relief package enacted in March gave workers who lost their jobs an extra $600 each week in federal unemployment benefits, extended the maximum length of time to receive benefits, and changed eligibility requirements to include part-time workers, freelancers, and independent contractors. With these enhanced benefits expiring in July, uncertainty about reopening plans at the state and local levels, and widespread accessibility problems, including large numbers of people who qualify for unemployment insurance but have yet to receive it, the true long-term impact of this crisis remains unclear. 

A recent episode of The Uncertain Hour, a podcast presented by National Public Radio’s Marketplace, explores the difficulty of accessing unemployment benefits during the pandemic. The episode features interviews with former RSF trustee and grantee Lawrence Katz (Harvard University), RSF author and former visiting scholar Alice O’Connor (University of California, Santa Barbara), and RSF author William Spriggs (Howard University). The podcast traces the history of American unemployment from the late nineteenth century to the present, including the Great Depression when the formal system of delivering monetary support to people who lost their jobs was first implemented.  It also examines the ways that racism has impacted the system, with the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from unemployment insurance through the 1970s, which had a disproportionate impact on the poor, people of color, and women. The episodes’ interview subjects include an African American single mother of three who lost her restaurant job but received no unemployment benefits for eight weeks after her application despite being eligibile.

Lawrence F. Katz is the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.  His research focuses on issues in labor economics and the economics of social problems. He is the author, with Claudia Goldin, of The Race between Education and Technology (Harvard University Press, 2008), a history of U.S. economic inequality and the roles of technological change and the pace of educational advance in affecting the wage structure. Katz has been editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics since 1991 and served as the Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor for 1993 and 1994. He was formerly a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation.

Alice O’Connor is Professor and Director of the UC Santa Barbara Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy. She is the author of the RSF book, Social Science for What: Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up (2007). She edited the RSF volume, Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities (2001) with Lawrence Bobo and Chris Tilly. She was a visiting scholar at the foundation during the 1995-1996 academic year.

William Spriggs is a professor in, and former chair of, the Department of Economics at Howard University and serves as chief economist to the AFL-CIO. In his role with the AFL-CIO, he chairs the Economic Policy Working Group for the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and serves on the board of the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 2009 to 2012, Spriggs served as assistant secretary for the Office of Policy at the Department of Labor. Spriggs contributed to the RSF book, Prosperity for All?: The Economic Boom and African Americans (2000).

Click here to listen to this episode of The Uncertain Hour.