99ers left out of unemployment benefits extension bill, Hound finds 721,000 jobs nationwide.

Dec. 20, 2010 - PRLog -- Pasadena, CA, December 20, 2010 – The unemployment benefits extension bill passed by Congress does not take into account the 99ers.

The 99ers are Americans unemployed for over 99 weeks and they have exhausted all their state and federal benefits. They have been lobbying for another round of extensions for the federal unemployment benefits, which have come to be known as Tier 5. The current deal that President Obama cut with the Republicans leaves them out. The bill’s main focus was extending the Bush-era tax cuts.

Obama signed the bill into law on Friday. This means around a million people will start getting unemployment benefits again. Their benefits were cut off in November when Congress failed to pass another bill aimed at extending jobless benefits.

The new law now provides 13 more months of extended jobless benefits, but residents of some states are not eligible for the full benefits. This is because states that have lowered their unemployment rate are considered too successful to apply for the program. A state can get Tier 4 only if its unemployment rate is above 8.5% for three months. There are other criteria that states have to meet for getting other extended benefits.

The Labor Department says that around 10% of the 15 million unemployed Americans are long term unemployed. But the situation is not completely hopeless for the long-term unemployed. Hound, a job search engine has been able to find over 721,000 nationwide. Hound CEO A. Harrison Barnes believes that the economy is recovering slowly but people need to be at the right place at the right time to get the job. “We have seen an increase in job postings on employer websites but most people don’t realize what a rich source of jobs these employer sites are for jobs.”

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