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The governors of Connecticut, New York and New Jersey are asking the federal government for a $48 million emergency grant to help thousands of financial industry workers who are losing their jobs.

As the crisis in financial services continues to bite, the tri-state area is expected to lose 160,000 private sector jobs by the end of this year.  That’s after the unemployment rate already jumped from 4.5 percent to 5.8 percent.  Governor Jodi Rell, along with her counterparts in New York and New Jersey, has written to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao urging her to approve the grant.  The money would be used to give each laid off worker more than twelve thousand dollars to help with retraining and relocation.  Rell says this is not about helping Wall Street millionaires. 

“A lot of people think in terms of the Wall Street broker, or the financial analyst and the like – the big salaried individuals.  And while certainly some of those are going, we’re also looking at a lot of what I call the support staff.  People who are in computer programming, the computer support personnel, the administrative, the clerks, the secretaries.  Those jobs will not come back as we know it, and that’s the one thing that we’re hearing over and over.” 

The letter says that just as the federal government acted swiftly to stabilize financial institutions, now it’s time to support workers dislocated from those institutions.  A spokesman for the U.S. Labor Department said Wednesday that the agency was reviewing the request from the three governors.