Pa. governor signs jobless-benefits bill

Associated Press

HARRISBURG

The state narrowly beat a Friday deadline to maintain 13 weeks of emergency unemployment benefits for an estimated 135,000 Pennsylvanians this year while benefits for displaced workers in the future will shrink to help contain the growth of a massive recession-fueled debt to the federal government.

Gov. Tom Corbett signed the bill into law, just a few hours after state senators voted unanimously in an unusual Friday morning session called specifically to pass the measure. The House of Representatives approved it Thursday.

The bill was hand-carried to the Republican governor, who was traveling in western Pennsylvania and signed it in private, his staff said.

The legislation would make a technical change in state law to ensure that the 45,000 residents already receiving an extra 13 weeks of federally funded benefits would not suddenly lose them. It also permits about 90,000 others to qualify for them by the end of 2011.

“These are existing benefits that would have ended today if we were not here on this Friday, if the House wasn’t here yesterday and if the governor wasn’t prepared to sign this today,” Senate Labor and Industry Committee Chairman John Gordner, R-Columbia, said in comments on the chamber floor.

Lawmakers in the Republican-controlled General Assembly have known for a month of the deadline to preserve the benefits without interruption, but still ran their votes into the final days as they looked for common ground on ways to lower the future cost of benefits.

The bill, however, does not substantially address Pennsylvania’s $3.7 billion unemployment compensation trust fund debt to the federal government for the cost of benefits during and after the recession. The debt, which began accumulating in 2009, is the second largest in the nation behind California’s, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

“This legislation is a good and important step toward reforming our unemployment compensation law,” Corbett said in a statement. “While these reforms will benefit employers and the workforce, there remains more to do, in the long-term, to restore the trust fund’s solvency and repay our federal loans.”