When the federally funded Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program expired on Dec. 28, 1.3 million Americans lost their long-term unemployment insurance -- a number that continues to rise as people across the country exhaust regular state benefits.

President Obama has appealed to the nation’s chief executives to hire job applicants who’ve been unemployed long-term. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates nearly 4 million Americans have been without work for 27 weeks or more. On Friday, the president…