Page 70 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

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Many legal aid offices also assist poor clients in accessing unemployment compensation when they lose work . Again, there are gender imbalances in this area: the state unemployment compensation programs treat women worse than men . A U .S . Department of Labor-funded study noted that women are “appreciably” less likely to receive unemployment benefits than men because of disparities in the type of work they perform .8 Because more women are in lower paying jobs (sixty percent of minimum wage workers are women), work more part time jobs, and leave the work force more often to provide family caretaking, they have trouble meeting the eligibility requirements for the unemployment insurance programs, programs which were designed before the increase of women’s participation in the workforce .9 Indeed in 2000 the U .S . Government Accountability Office found that higher wage workers received unemployment benefits at more than twice the rate of low wage workers, thus compounding the negative impact of women’s lower wages .10
When I started my legal aid career, I handled many disability cases . In the early 1980s, I represented numerous single or widowed women who had worked in Philadelphia’s sewing or candy factories, and others who had served as domestic workers until carrying heavy vacuum cleaners and buckets of supplies up and downstairs became too much for their aging or sick bodies . Supplemental Security Income, which does not require a history of work with Social Security tax payments and thus is available even to sporadic and very low wage workers, kept them out of abject poverty in their final years . Some women had lost husbands who had enough of a work history to entitle them to Social Security widow’s benefits, which usually put them in a better financial status than they would have based on their own wages . Those who could not prove disability and were not yet old enough to receive old age benefits, were forced to live on subsistence General Assistance benefits, a state run program . That program has since been ended, leaving a group of Pennsylvania women (and men) with absolutely no safety net income program, besides food stamps . Despite claims by some that our government coddles the poor, our current system, in the richest country in the world, now leaves over 10 million people with zero monthly income for housing and other necessities .
Older women suffer more poverty than older men and are more dependent on Social Security to avoid poverty, even though they receive less from Social Security . Without Social Security, over half of older women would be living in poverty . Because women make lower wages and take more breaks from work to care for family, they are entitled to smaller amounts of Social Security each month and are less likely to have other pension or retirement saving resources . Fixes have been proposed to provide more assistance to women in view of these gender differentials,11 and legal aid advocates are in a position to play a role in pushing for them, in addition to representing individual women seeking benefits .
8 marios michaelides & PeTer mueser, IMPAQ inT’l, ui benefiTs sTudy: recenT changes in The characTerisTics of unemPloyed workers 36 (2009), available at https://www.impaqint.com/sites/default/files/files/report_20characteristicspaper_ aug20.pdf.
9 See Testimony of Vicky Lovell, Ph.D, The unemployment Insurance Modernization Act: Improving uI Equity and Adequacy for Women, Before the house Ways and Means Committee, Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, Sept. 19, 2007, available at http://iwpr.org/publications/the-unemployment-insurance- modernization-act.
10 Id. at 2.
11 See carroll l. esTes eT al., breaking The social securiTy glass ceiling: a ProPosal To modernize women’s benefiTs (2012) (report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare Foundation, and the National Organization for Women Foundation), available at http://www.iwpr.org/ publications/pubs/breaking-the-social-security-glass-ceiling-a-proposal-to-modernize-womens-benefits.
Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice