The trust fund cannot now meet its obligations to the 420,000 people currently receiving benefits - up from 139,000 two years ago, before the recession. Weekly cash payments average $320; the maximum is $558 per week.
In recent months, the trust fund has borrowed more than $500 million from the federal government. It expects to borrow an additional $1 billion before the year ends. This pattern, by law, can't go on forever.
Gergely and other legislators said the final decision on whether the state sought the $273 million in stimulus money might depend on broader negotiations over shoring up the trust fund. Employers and employees might be asked to pay more in taxes.
It's time to "get control of the system," not to broaden worker eligibility, said Gene Barr, vice president of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry.
Republicans, in control of the Senate, are in position to block eligibility changes unless a compromise is reached. But no compromise is in the offing.
Rendell in December appointed an advisory council composed of Republicans and Democrats, business leaders and labor leaders, to resolve the unemployment fund's problems.
Central Pennsylvania Republican John R. Gordner, chairman of the Senate Labor and Industry Committee, said the commission had met six or seven times without reaching a resolution.
Gordner said Republicans might be willing to write a "sunset" provision into a new law saying that as soon as the stimulus money was used up, the eligibility rules would revert to what they are now.
But the Obama administration won't permit that, he said.
The immediate change sought by Washington deals with the period in which a laid-off person must have held a job to get benefits.
Current state law says any work done in the current quarter and the previous one does not count toward eligibility. The state looks only at the work a person did in the four quarters before that.
This means that if a person got laid off today, during the middle of a quarter, none of the work he or she had done at any time this year would be considered. Only 2008 would count.
The state could qualify for at least one-third of the stimulus funding if it made eligibility more current. This would help construction workers and other seasonal employees.
Pennsylvania could get the additional two-thirds of the $273 million by liberalizing its rules in other ways, such as allowing at least $15 a week for a worker's dependents or permitting benefits for people seeking only part-time work.
The Obama administration wants stimulus money to be spent as quickly as possible. But it will give states until Aug. 22, 2011, to access the jobless aid.
Sharon M. Dietrich, president of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, an advocate for the changes, suggested a solution to the assertion that, once the extra federal money ran out, the state would be left holding the bill.
Change the law, again, she said - to the way it was. Nothing in federal law prohibits that.
"There's no reason, if we decide it's a bad matter of public policy, that the legislature couldn't change it back," she said.
But Gordner said thatonce benefits were enacted, it became "very difficult," politically, to take them away.
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