Kathy Bell opens the door of her Central District duplex in a simple gray pantsuit. She walks with a cane and a pronounced limp. At 52, her left knee barely works and her right wrist is strained from using the cane. Both have gone untreated for more than a year because she stopped paying for health care.
Peter Mumford
Kathy Bell holds the letter announcing that her unemployment benefits are about to expire.
Peter Mumford
Brisk business at North Helpline's food bank.
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On her television, John Cusack is trying to save his family from a Mayan-predicted apocalypse in the movie 2012. Bell watches from a chair next to the couch (the chair is easier to get up from), and hits the mute button as earthquakes tear the world apart.
"Today I'm like, 'What am I going to do?'" she says.
Bell recently went on Medicaid and food stamps, formally known as the state Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Any other expenses are paid for with credit cards. She now has a balance of $8,000, and every month the amount she owes climbs higher. This month she applied for disability status with the Social Security Administration on the basis of her knee problems; she expects to hear in four to six months whether her application was approved. Currently, the maximum Social Security disability payment is $1,000 per month.
A little more than two years ago, Bell never imagined she would be in this position. She worked in the accounting department at Starbucks, auditing 1,300 stores to make sure they were depositing money each night. She had worked for the coffee giant for nine years and enjoyed a high-enough salary to purchase the duplex with her sister.
Then, on July 29, 2008, she received an e-mail summoning her to a room at Starbucks' SoDo headquarters. "Within two seconds I was unemployed," she says. At that time the company laid off about 180 people in Seattle, according to The Seattle Times.
At first, Bell wasn't worried. Since moving to Seattle from Louisiana and taking a class in accounting at age 18, she had been steadily working. "I really thought, 'Within the month I'll find a job, and it'll be fine,'" she says.
But a month passed and she still didn't have a job. Then a year went by. Bell says she typically spends eight hours a day searching online for jobs, filling out applications, and sending resumes to banks, grocery stores, and day-care centers. She attends classes at job-search centers run by the state, where she can get tips on her resume and keep her computer skills current. Most of the time, she hears nothing back from potential employers, and interviews are sparse. "It's very depressing and very stressful," she says.
At the end of June, Bell received a letter from the state Employment Security Department, informing her that the period allowed for collecting unemployment had ended, and she was no longer eligible for benefits.
After a full 99 weeks, she had lost her only source of income.
Shortly after she became jobless, Bell started doing little things to cut costs. She clips coupons and can't remember the last time she bought new clothes, but there are still utility bills and medications and her half of the mortgage, which she increasingly relies on her sister to pay.
That's how Bell started living off credit cards. She estimates that she has maybe two months left before she hits their cumulative limit. If her disability application doesn't pan out, she says, "I don't know what I'll do."
Bell is not alone. The problem of expiring unemployment benefits—for many people, their last source of income—has been a quietly brewing storm. The state unemployment rate is double what it was three years ago: 8.9 percent, down from a high of 9.5 percent in March. ESD spokesperson Sheryl Hutchison says that's the highest it's been "in a generation"—and that doesn't account for people who have gotten so discouraged they've given up and stopped looking for a job. If you factor them in, the unemployment rate is 5 to 6 percent higher, Hutchison estimates.
The state's slow recovery from the recession is one major problem. Between 2008 and 2009, Washington lost 192,000 jobs; this year so far, only 23,000 have returned. To put a finer point on it, there are at least five unemployed people for every job opening in the state. And this spring, some of them, like Bell, started exhausting their unemployment benefits.
It started as a slow trickle, with about 2,000 people per month getting kicked off the dole, as was the case in 2007. Nearly 15,000 have lost their benefits so far this year. But Hutchison says that number is expected to quadruple by the end of the year, with more than 10,000 people getting kicked out of the system each month.
The jobless are running out of places to turn. This month, the state Department of Social and Health Services announced that due to a 30-percent rise over the past year in the number of people collecting welfare checks (a program separate from unemployment benefits), the department is making it harder to qualify for the payouts. Bell can't get welfare because she doesn't have kids. She and others in her position are moving in with friends, depending on their families for money, and flooding the doors of social-service agencies—which are running out of money themselves.
