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.

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.

"It raises morale," said Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in labor issues. "You avoid losing experienced workers, and you ensure that workers have an incentive to improve productivity."

The job 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.

After that, laid-off employees go into the jobs bank, where they have the option of taking 85 percent of their base pay — which averages almost $62,000 a year — plus benefits, without reporting to work. In the meantime, the company tries to find them jobs elsewhere.

Or workers can get 100 percent of their pay by reporting to either the union hall or the plant, where they may be called upon to perform tasks around the factory or sometimes community service work.

But if there isn't anything to do, workers simply stay at the union hall or factory and find ways to pass the time.