Unemployment still in season in suburbs

The crowd jamming this unemployment office in Arlington Heights on the first work day of 2011 doesn't look any different from a “Black Friday” throng flocking for bargains at a discount store. There are young dads and moms with kids in strollers, small packs of twentysomethings on their cell phones, guys with gray hair, men with Cubs caps, a woman with a fur (possibly fake) coat, middle-aged men with bushy beards and uncombed hair, women of a certain age who look as if they just stepped out a beauty parlor, and conversations in English, Spanish, Polish and other languages.

But good luck finding a parking spot in the crowded lot, where cars circle in the hope of finding a vacancy.

“Mondays and Tuesdays are the largest customer days,” says Greg Rivara, communications manager for the Illinois Department of Employment Security. “We have seen increases for the demands on services since the recession began in 2007.”

Some hail signs such as Monday's stock market's rise to a two-year high as evidence that the economy is recovering. But for the couple hundred people in line at this unemployment office, the reality is that any recovery hasn't trickled down to them.

“I've been unemployed since 2009,” says Anthony Pistone, a new dad who grew up in Palatine and rents an apartment in Wheeling with his wife and son. He arrives about a half-hour after the doors open and people start taking numbers so customers can be waited on in an orderly fashion.

“I come here and bam, the parking lot's full,” Pistone says. “I've got a while. I'm number 94.”

He was disappointed and surprised that he started 2010 without a job, never dreaming that he'd spend the first Monday of 2011 at the same unemployment office.

“I figured I'd be unemployed for a few weeks, maybe a couple of months,” says Pistone, who says he applies for jobs online every day. “I got a temp job for a couple months and then got laid off again.”

He notes that he's always had a job since he was 16 and was making about $25,000 a year as a customer service employee for a company in Bannockburn, where he worked for four years until March 20, 2009.

“I didn't know it was coming,” Pistone remembers. “Just one day, they told me to go to the main office and they laid me off.”

The Regular Unemployment Insurance program doles out payments for 26 weeks. In 2010, the average duration in that program was 20.6 weeks, marking the longest period on unemployment since that rate hit 21.6 weeks in 1983, Rivara says.

With extensions and emergency relief programs initiated under presidents Bush and Obama, the maximum period anyone can qualify for unemployment subsidies is 99 weeks. In 2010, about 95,000 unemployed workers in Illinois exhausted their maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits, Rivara says. The website www.ides.state.il.us/resources offers suggestions for the “long-term unemployed.”

“It was never intended to replace an income. It was always intended to be a bridge,” Rivara says, adding that unemployment benefits aren't enough to live on, especially in the suburbs.

Pistone says he's fortunate because his family gets health insurance through his wife's job as a special-education teacher's assistant, and his family pays rent through her salary. The one benefit of unemployment is that he's been able to stay home and care for their 6-month-old son, he says. But he's working online to get a degree in criminal justice and hopes to find a job working to prevent Internet fraud.

“I want to work,” says Pistone, who adds that he'll probably celebrate his 33rd birthday Thursday quietly at home. He has high hopes that he'll land a job in 2011 before his benefits expire.

If not, Pistone says, he's on schedule to graduate in February 2012.