New York ? For more than two decades, many autoworkers who lose their jobs have been able to enjoy one of the best unemployment benefits in the nation: receiving nearly full paychecks without even leaving home.

Since the 1980s, the industry’s “jobs bank” has allowed thousands of laid-off workers to get paid for staying home or sitting in a union hall.

The practice began as a way to entice the United Auto Workers to accept robots on the assembly line. Now it appears headed for the scrap heap as the union takes drastic steps to help automakers get a financial lifeline from Congress.

“I don’t think they conceived of themselves as ever having to worry about this,” said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. “I think their view was that they could still produce sufficient capacity in the United States to satisfy the market need.”

In Washington, desperate automakers seeking a $34 billion bailout renewed their pleas to lawmakers Thursday, a day after the UAW offered concessions that included ending the jobs bank program, which has become a much-maligned symbol of Detroit’s largesse.

The program started in 1984 as something both the United Auto Workers and their employers supported to promote factory automation and innovation, according to labor and industry experts.

The bank continues to compensate about 3,500 laid-off union employees with the hope that they can eventually be rehired.

The original intent was to allow factories to be modernized with robots and other improvements, so Detroit could better compete with overseas manufacturers without jeopardizing employees’ job security.

In the past, employees could stay in the program indefinitely. At its peak, as many as 7,000 to 8,000 workers at General Motors Corp. were in the jobs bank. That figure is now down around 1,400, according to the UAW. After a new contract was approved last year, some strict limitations were put in place.

The terms and conditions vary by automaker because each labor contract is different. But GM factory workers who get laid off start out at “sub pay,” in which they receive unemployment benefits, and GM pays the difference, up to most of their salary, for 48 weeks.