Here is a very interesting article in the Post on a little-known program that seems to have bipartisan support for expansion.
Making Up for Lower Pay – washingtonpost.com
When Michael Maynard’s company announced it was moving overseas, the 53-year-old machine technician from Massachusetts quickly found a job at another firm. As the sole provider for his wife and two daughters, Maynard jumped at the new opportunity, even though he had to take a pay cut of nearly $8 an hour.
Then Maynard got lucky. He discovered that, unlike most Americans who lose their jobs, he qualified for a little-known federal program that pays up to $10,000 to certain workers dislocated by trade. In addition to his regular paycheck, he gets a government check for $117 a week, he said, a sum that "helps a lot."
Now, congressional leaders want to expand the program, known as wage insurance, with some arguing that it should be available to any worker who loses a job for almost any reason. The proposal is part of a broader effort to ease the anxieties of middle-class Americans who feel threatened by the globalization of business and a churning U.S. labor market that creates and destroys about 30 million jobs a year….
… The concept has been around for years, but no country has tried it on a grand scale, said Lael Brainard, director of the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. The goal, she said, is to give displaced workers "a strong incentive to search actively for new employment," even at lower pay, by "smoothing over" the reduction in income.
Unlike unemployment insurance, wage insurance rewards a worker for taking a new job, Brainard said. And unlike general job-training programs, which carry no guarantee of future employment, wage insurance subsidizes on-the-job training and, in theory, helps a worker climb back up the economic ladder.
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