West Virginia MetroNews - More than 8,000 state residents receiving unemployment benefits under a pandemic-related program are in their last week of receiving those benefits. Read the full article. Gov. Jim Justice announced last month that the additional $300 weekly benefit would end on June 19. WorkForce West Virginia acting Commissioner Scott Adkins said Tuesday independent…
Income and Work
Charleston Gazette-Mail - Over the past year, the pandemic and our nation’s response have highlighted some of the flaws in our antiquated federal-state unemployment insurance system. Read the full op-ed. The CARES Act addressed some of these well-recognized problems, particularly through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which provides unemployment benefits to people who do…
Southerly, Energy News Network, Daily Yonder - Nina McCoy has been waiting for an answer to a question for 40 years: What happens to a coal county and the people who live in it when all the coal is gone? She still has the 1981 articles from when both the New York Times and the Louisville Courier-Journal posed the same question.…
West Virginia Public Broadcasting - On this West Virginia Morning, people who have been incarcerated, once they get out, often struggle to find a job and a place to live. Those struggles often drive them back to crime, but re-entry councils are helping to address that problem. Also, in this show, Kanawha County has the most…
The Dominion Post - Mason Anderson is a 21-year-old contracted worker at Mobile Power Washing who works at the coal-fired Fort Martin power plant in Maidsville, West Virginia. Last year, he decided he wasn’t going to continue his education at West Virginia University in civil engineering. Instead, he decided to attend asynchronous courses at Salem…
Charleston Gazette-Mail - West Virginia’s bridges, dams, drinking water, roads and wastewater have received a D grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and 24% of the state’s residents live in a broadband desert. Furthermore, 54% live in a child care desert and 19% of children in the state live in poverty. Read the…
Brooklyn Daily Eagle - Businesses could be spared billions of dollars of higher taxes in coming years — potentially freeing up money to spend on employees or invest in their operations — as a result of federal coronavirus aid flowing to the states. Read the full article. Governors and lawmakers in more than half the…
Beckley Register-Herald - For a state that has given much to build this nation of steel, laboring in the coal mines all these years, it is frustrating to watch West Virginia’s two U.S. senators stand in the way of the Biden administrative plan to repay a portion of that debt. Read the full article. Yes,…
West Virginia MetroNews - Gov. Jim Justice touted West Virginia’s improving unemployment rate while also saying not enough residents are going back to work. Read the full article. The statements were in two different parts of his regular pandemic briefing today. In one, he touted this week’s report that West Virginia’s unemployment rate has dropped to 5.8…
Charleston Gazette-Mail - Gov. Jim Justice has joined 20 other Republican governors in announcing plans to end federal supplemental unemployment benefits, claiming “a lot, lot, lot of folks are scamming the system” by accepting the extra $300-a-week payment. Read the full article. Justice said Friday, and reiterated Monday, that he is ordering the $300 payments…