[RD] Are Employment Requirements Reasonable For Access to Welfare?

[Synobun]

@Bootstoots made mention of this in the recent Republican healthcare thread and it brought back to the fore something I've often thought about.

In North America, most (all?) welfare systems typically require that the welfare recipient make an active attempt at finding employment or lose their benefits. This can be fine for the "average" citizen, but may not be quite as fine for those with barriers.

Quantifying, and qualifying, what constitutes a "barrier" is open for debate. Some might consider it only to encompass severe disability. Others may be more liberal in its definition.

Are employment requirements reasonable for access to welfare? Is the current system doing this responsibly or does it need work? What needs to change?

I've had a lot of issues with this very problem/idea/question for the past 3 and a half years. Understandably, I possess a rather strong bias about the subject, and so I'm interested in seeing how others who may not have as much stake in it see it.

 

[uppi]

No.

There should be some baseline welfare that is available to everyone and acts as a safety net in case things go really bad. Even if you ignore the ethical implications of letting people die just because their work ethic is not strong enough, you want to keep people off the streets where they have negative impacts on society in many ways.

 

[Lexicus]

If people have to look for work to find welfare, don't lie and call it welfare.

 

[mrt144]

No.

There's a ridiculous belief that if you make things harder for people that they'll rise up to the occasion and not find some alternative way to live.

 

[Lexicus]

There's a ridiculous belief that if you make things harder for people that they'll rise up to the occasion and not find some alternative way to live.

The bipartisan policy consensus:

We need to stop giving so much money to poor people, it's making them lazy
We're not giving enough money to rich people, it's making them lazy

 

[Valka D'Ur]

In Alberta they have different categories for people who can't work due to medical reasons. Those could be temporary (in the case of someone recovering from an accident), or they could include people who are scrambling like hell to get their AISH applications approved (a lot of people don't make it the first time, because some paper-pusher with no medical credentials whatsoever decides to go on a power trip and decide that he/she knows more than the doctors who sign off on the applications - and it does take a lot to convince them to do this).

 

[Broken_Erika]

If people have to look for work to find welfare, don't lie and call it welfare.

Unless tghey happen to be part-time working poor.(i.e. holding multiple minimum-wage part time jobs that make them like a combined $150 every second week)

 

[Lexicus]

"Hey we're the party that claims to be for family values. Ignore the fact that we nominated and voted for a serial philanderer and rapist for the Presidency; we're here to tell you that family values starts by forcing single mothers to work instead of raising their kids."

 

[inthesomeday]

There’s also the whole problem with how “seeking a job” is defined by these programs, the problem being that it pretty much isn’t to my knowledge. Again my knowledge on this is shaky but I’m pretty sure this leaves the eligibility for many of the programs at the discretion of the court.

 

[Bootstoots]

No. We have a system that produces far more than enough to provide all people with the basics of food, water, shelter, and medical care. And there are a lot of non-visible ways that people may be unable to work - especially the cluster of poorly-explained mental and physical illnesses made up of depression, bipolar, chronic fatigue syndrome, and fibromyalgia, any of which can easily be severe enough to keep people from being able to perform useful labor while not showing any physical diagnostic signs. It's bad enough to be severely ill, worse when the conditions are poorly understood, even worse when they're effectively incurable, and worse than all of those when people disbelieve they exist in the first place and believe sufferers are simply being lazy. Cut them off from any welfare and dump them in the street, and many without family support will just die of suicide, drug addiction, violence, or anything else from being homeless and unable to work.

I wish people who supported this sort of thing would be consistent and support on-demand euthanasia as well. If they insist on having to work to earn the 'right' to live, then they should support at least humane killing of people who can't (or won't) work. Of course that would show that their beliefs are logically not far from this:

...so they tend to balk at that. But strip away the obviously false belief that people who are forced to work will all pick themselves up by their bootstraps*, and that's what it comes down to. Only without a quick and relatively painless death - instead a slow, drawn out one spent as a homeless person.

*This originally meant "something that is ridiculous/logically impossible" because it is obviously not possible to pick yourself up by something attached to your boots. Somehow that meaning disappeared.

 

[Arwon]

It certainly isn't reasonable for aged pensions, disability support, parental payments or student support. And aged pensions, parental support and disability support make up the vast bulk of welfare payments, at least in this country. Unemployment is roughly 6 percent.

For unemployment benefits I can see some limited merit in asking ppl to apply for jobs regularly but I'm also not sure it actually works any more than the intrinsic desire to find a job, earn more money, etc. It doesn't cause jobs to be available where they aren't and it doesn't cause jobs to magically become suitable for the people who are looking.

 

[Ajidica]

For unemployment benefits I can see some limited merit in asking ppl to apply for jobs regularly but I'm also not sure it actually works any more than the intrinsic desire to find a job, earn more money, etc.

I was reading an article a while ago about an unemployed mother and her 3 young kids and how it simply didn't make sense for her to get a job because once she took the cost of child care along with getting a car to get to the job and child care, she was barely breaking even. She viewed it as better to stay home and raise her kids then to be constantly away.

So to answer the OP, it is a terrible idea. Nobody likes being unemployed and is a pretty terrible feeling even if you have people to help financially support you.

 

[Arwon]

That would make sense. There can be some punishing effective marginal tax rates in some welfare systems, where enployment income merely displaces rather than supplements parental or other forms of support.

 

[cardgame]

I've worked in the welfare system and the SNAP work requirement is waived for adults with dependents. Some googling to second-check myself reveals a bunch of people talking about work requirements, but they're exclusively mentioning it for ABAWDs (able bodied adults without dependents).

However my expertise is much more strained when it comes to the medicaid system, especially because that has more variance between states.

So, with that in mind, I do think work requirements for SNAP are reasonable - after all, if you're an able bodied adult without children to look after, you probably should be working - but under a gentler implementation than current (in my state, only 3 months unemployed collection is allowed every 2 years). I've personally been out of work for 6 months over two time periods within 2 years... I think 3 months per year is the harshest it should go, if we're going to do it at all. And the entire execution should change to be more like unemployment benefits where it is allowed to be trying to find work instead of just "you're unemployed, so we don't care how many jobs you've applied for, we're cutting you off," which is the status quo.

Also tying into the implementation, what Arwon and Ajidica said. When you get a part time job and earn $600 a month but your welfare drops $400 a month, you're spending 80 hours for $200 and that's a really crappy tradeoff.

 

[Bootstoots]

I will say that it would be a good thing for there to be substantial support to help people find jobs and match people up with employers, and it's reasonable to require some amount of good-faith participation by able-bodied, able-brained people, mostly for the reason that not having any purpose in life and being openly treated as useless is soul-crushing even if the bottom of Maslow's pyramid is taken care of.

We could have something like a standardized and national version of what temp agencies and job websites use, so that all potential applicants are in one place and easy to find. Other than the high chance it would be done poorly at first by the government, and the obvious effects on temp agencies, Indeed and Monster.com, it seems like something that most people (unemployed people and employers especially) should like.

Now that I'm thinking about this, there's one other group of people that really needs to be considered but that nobody really talks about: people with low-end-of-normal abstract reasoning, which is captured decently well by IQ and would correspond to IQs in the 70-85 range. That's almost 14% of the population. In a cognitively demanding world with large amounts of automation, there will be a chronic oversupply of such people relative to the number available jobs that they can perform. There still are jobs they can do that are unlikely to be automated away, especially low-end service sector jobs, but the supply of low-normal-IQ people is likely to permanently exceed demand so that a large fraction will be unemployed/not in the labor force at any given time. Not that I'm at all sure what to do here other than providing welfare services for those who need them and trying to keep them as employed, satisfied, and away from crime as possible, just like anyone else.

 

[Cutlass]

Every hoop that the assistance applicant has to jump through to get assistance makes everyone worse off.

 

[Azem.Ocram]

Our civilization is doomed if it does not distribute enough wealth to the vast underclass. Making employment a requirement won’t help at all when the Natural Unemployment Rate hits 30%. Such high wealth disparity has fueled bloody revolutions in the past. Of course, technology allows greater wealth disparity before discontent rises too much, and has provided the elites with means of controlling the masses. However, right below the poverty line is not nearly as bad as starvation. What happens in Venezuela through the near future will be an indicator of what will happen around the world a few decades from now.

 

[metatron]

I was reading an article a while ago about an unemployed mother and her 3 young kids and how it simply didn't make sense for her to get a job because once she took the cost of child care along with getting a car to get to the job and child care, she was barely breaking even. She viewed it as better to stay home and raise her kids then to be constantly away.

So to answer the OP, it is a terrible idea. Nobody likes being unemployed and is a pretty terrible feeling even if you have people to help financially support you.

[advocatus diaboli]

1. Well, there should be virtually free public daycare. Should be as in: It's the law. There arguably isn't and i accept it as a given that this is obviously even less true in the US.
But: There should be.
2. Having the car will lead to all manner of quality of life effects. What people in the land of potemkinish daycare call societal shareholdership.
3. Her "view", right... This is the entire point of these requirements: The requirement overrules the "views" of people whose "views" are evidently so reliably errant that they need welfare.
4. And you and i may well agree with her on staying home today.
But there are consequences: All her skills will erode. She will become a bitter femifascist and complain about her pay gap for the rest of her life. And if any of her kids happen to be toxic, by which i mean male, they are going to become avid supporters of the next generation's Milo.
So it's not like there are no additional costs.
This all too would be a function of that fabled societal shareholdership, or lack thereof.​

[/advocatus diaboli]

I will say that it would be a good thing for there to be substantial support to help people find jobs and match people up with employers, and it's reasonable to require some amount of good-faith participation by able-bodied, able-brained people, mostly for the reason that not having any purpose in life and being openly treated as useless is soul-crushing even if the bottom of Maslow's pyramid is taken care of.

[advocatus diaboli]

Well, if the employment agency were not to constantly harass and heckle the recipient and thus money wouldn't be the issue, they could walk into any number places and just offer to help, for free if necessary.
This comes with the benefit that often the very work that isn't viable on the open market turns out to be particularly fulfilling. You know, the various things that naturally occur in the realm of charity work for example.
Like either we believe that the money a person has to live has to relate in some way to the market-assessed productivity of their labor for them to be happy or we don't.
We seem to agree that we don't. So why bully people when they may just naturally avoid the crushing of their souls on their own.​

[/advocatus diaboli]

 

[inthesomeday]

You keep saying this word, “femifascist”, is this a made up word you read in a Tolkien book?

 

[Synobun]

I will say that it would be a good thing for there to be substantial support to help people find jobs and match people up with employers, and it's reasonable to require some amount of good-faith participation by able-bodied, able-brained people, mostly for the reason that not having any purpose in life and being openly treated as useless is soul-crushing even if the bottom of Maslow's pyramid is taken care of.

This is something that I bumped up against in British Columbia. From what I could tell, there are little to no resources available for would-be job seekers. The best you could hope for is that a company would be offering a training program at that moment you could enter and the government would reimburse the company for dedicating their time to training you in a skill.

What went unsaid is that these programs are essentially useless. You are lucky if they teach you anything and they seem to mostly exist to line the company's pockets/up their social cred more than anything else. What's more is that these training programs are exceptionally limited in scope. During a temporary moment when my case file was taken over by a new Ministry worker and they decided to undo all of my paperwork, I was "encouraged" to look into training programs. There were two: the basics of Quickbooks and the basics of Microsoft Word. These were described as training programs that would then transition you into actual work with the company that offered the program.

Only, after conversing with people who've completed the program and with employees of the company, you learn that nobody was taken on as an employee afterwards. Not even on a temporary basis. But they teach you how to use the ribbon menu at the top of MS Word, so... why aren't you employed? You're trained now!

I'm not opposed to pressuring able-bodied people into finding employment if they are in the welfare system. Even those with negative habits generally aspire to feel more than useless and employment is an excellent path to that. The government, however, is woefully incapable of considering its citizens as individuals worthy of compassion. There is a set path to employment set out for you that you are simply expected to adhere to, and any failure or obstacle is a personal failing of the citizen and not the path.

It would be ideal if the system were revamped to be more individualistic. Welfare recipients should have social workers that meet with them regularly to discuss their life and what would lead them to fruitful participation in society in a way that takes their reality into consideration. But this would require that welfare become redefined from a trap for the temporarily embarrassed millionaire and instead become a system of personal well-being. I have little hope something like this would ever come to pass.