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

[Lemon Merchant]

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So there you go. If this thread can't remain on topic it will be closed. It's a good topic. Please enjoy the discussion.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

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.

The problem with social workers is that they start out optimistic when they're in college/university, but when they get into the real world, that attitude often takes a nosedive as soon as they realize how many hundreds of files they may have to juggle. I met a lot of these people when I typing students' papers. Maybe a couple of them would be really good, I figured, and most would be competent. One of them was so obviously just going through the motions that I wondered what she was even doing in that program. I never said anything, of course, just kept quiet and took her money. It would surprise me greatly if she ended up completing the program.

I've had exactly four caseworkers, in three different government departments, who honestly tried to help me to the best of their ability and left me with a feeling of gratitude that they were willing to do this.

The rest of them can go <fly a kite>. Some of them decide that it's their place to become judgmental, pushy, and not even slightly respectful of the client's wishes, needs, or issues that would present complications.

 

[Bootstoots]

[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]

I'd want very mild pressure, with actual viable options presented to people along with no suspension of payments if they can prove they're involved in a substantial amount of volunteer work or anything similar. If the result was that people were being paid a basic living wage to volunteer or do other meaningful activity that isn't rewarded by the free market, that would be an excellent outcome.

Many people with no obligations at all fall into depressive/anxious/nihilistic/emptily hedonistic ruts, and a totally unconditional minimum income would make those outcomes more common. Providing some sort of function in society makes life meaningful for people and it does require nudges. But threadbare systems that exist mostly to impose as much shame and virtue-signaling as possible (even where such moves actually increase costs and complexity) are needlessly horrible.

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.

Yeah, that's one of the dumbest things about job searching - very little useful help is offered to actually match unemployed people with jobs. Basically everybody is simply supposed to apply everywhere and find out what sticks, with everyone knowing that each individual application is very unlikely to result in employment, no way to find out which job searches are genuine and how many applicants there are, and a very large fraction of all hiring simply decided by personal connections anyway. We could actually fix this problem to some extent because computers are excellent tools for matching things like sets of skills and desired environments with available jobs. It's a coordination problem that is most efficiently solved with one monopolistic, standardized database rather than several smaller databases which only have access to subsets of the available data.

Of course, employers demand low-wage, no-contract, minimal-to-no-benefit employees for frustrating, tedious tasks. Even granted that, socializing the costs of "benefits" would reduce costs for employers and could be advertised as good for them (although they might still oppose it in the US, because a worker who depends on them for health insurance is a worker who isn't going to organize or otherwise rock the boat).

If we just accepted that welfare is supposed to exist to smooth out life and make it minimally tolerable, and was not a sign of being a failure - actually worse, a contemptible parasite - then we'd be much happier as a society. Part of what makes a minimum income appealing is having everyone see it and use it visibly, eliminating most of the imposed shame. It still might be a better idea to leave it conditional on at least minimal employment/volunteering/other prosocial behavior in people who can engage in it, but it should be far better than today.

 

[cardgame]

I don't know if this is a state level policy or not, but in Missouri at least a SNAP recipient can get a signed letter from a supervisor of a volunteer organization to substitute for work requirement. This is already in place.

 

[metatron]

I'd want very mild pressure, with actual viable options presented to people along with no suspension of payments if they can prove they're involved in a substantial amount of volunteer work or anything similar. If the result was that people were being paid a basic living wage to volunteer or do other meaningful activity that isn't rewarded by the free market, that would be an excellent outcome.

Yeah, but with that you are bureaucratising the thing.
My presupposition is that the impulse to utility is often fragile enough to be impeded by that.
Like, do a bit of imagining here with me:

You have your rut-afflicted person nihilisting about by way of, say, having a walk and in a fit of spontaneity they walk into some faith-affiliated community center, or say the public library and run into proverbial elderly female employee there droping something. "Oh, thank you." "Oh, let me help you with that." "Wow, how time flies, you helped me for two hours." "Can i come back tomorrow?" [...] "I appreciate your help all week, but it's a bit of a waste having you here. Soandso want to do stuff about the whatever to help themfolks and you could be of so much help there. There's no money there either, though."​

And now you want to bring forms and files and codes into all of this.

I don't know if this is a state level policy or not, but in Missouri at least a SNAP recipient can get a signed letter from a supervisor of a volunteer organization to substitute for work requirement. This is already in place.

That sounds comparatively easy. Here you'd better chop down some small forest...

 

[Bootstoots]

Yeah, but with that you are bureaucratising the thing.
My presupposition is that the impulse to utility is often fragile enough to be impeded by that.
Like, do a bit of imagining here with me:

You have your rut-afflicted person nihilisting about by way of, say, having a walk and in a fit of spontaneity they walk into some faith-affiliated community center, or say the public library and run into proverbial elderly female employee there droping something. "Oh, thank you." "Oh, let me help you with that." "Wow, how time flies, you helped me for two hours." "Can i come back tomorrow?" [...] "I appreciate your help all week, but it's a bit of a waste having you here. Soandso want to do stuff about the whatever to help themfolks and you could be of so much help there. There's no money there either, though."​

And now you want to bring forms and files and codes into all of this.

That sounds comparatively easy. Here you'd better chop down some small forest...

Yeah, there's no way to know ahead of time which is better. It would all depend on details that wouldn't be known without running actual good experiments on UBI to compare with existing generous-but-not-quite-unconditional welfare systems. A few are in the works, although no thanks to Finland for dropping its already-inadequate study.

I have a fairly strong suspicion that it's easier to get a system with a small measure of forced "responsibility" implemented than a UBI, as well, because people have a negative reaction - quite possibly innate - to things that seem like freeloading. But maybe resistance to minimum income schemes will drop over time.

 

[FriendlyFire]

In Japan if your able bodied your cant get welfare. which is restricted to the old, disabled and pregnant
Honestly this worked during the boom plus Asians with extended family. Now days its not so great with homeless population increasing and suicides

I think government should balance welfare, you dont want to create dependency and abuse. But you also dont want massive poverty, misery and crime
Putting welfare into public housing, spread the housing out in small projects, healthcare and education. I think rather then work requirements if your able bodied the longer on welfare you are the less generous the payments become until it becomes bare minimum. You also want some carrot and stick measures as well. Punishment for cheating, or being a criminal as well as bonus for those doing part time study or charity work

 

[metalhead]

Unless you are willing to impose the death penalty for paupers and debtors, you're never going to avoid the problem of "creating dependency."

I personally don't understand why anyone draws a distinction between dependency on a government benefit, and dependency on charity in the form of a food pantry or a shelter. We decided a long time ago that modern society should not be leaving people to starve and die without food, shelter, and emergency health care - even if what is provided is largely inadequate.

It's insane to me that somehow government directly providing these things is considered bad despite the fact that government can and will bring the force of law against those who refuse to provide these things.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I don't know if this is a state level policy or not, but in Missouri at least a SNAP recipient can get a signed letter from a supervisor of a volunteer organization to substitute for work requirement. This is already in place.

Unless things have changed in the last few years, one of the worst requirements Missouri imposed was that you couldn't have any savings to qualify for SNAP (at least as a childless adult). When I lived there, we qualified by income for SNAP but at the time we still had some savings to deal with life's challenges. That disqualified us from SNAP and we slowly depleted our savings. Then the Mrs got a slightly better job that took us out of the income bracket for qualifying for SNAP but still wasn't enough to make ends meet.

I ended up finishing my education with almost $20k in credit card debt in addition to a mountain of student loans and almost all of that money was spent on basic necessities. The state basically used our personal responsibility against us - saving for a rainy day to avoid future government assistance was actively discouraged.




Another big topic no one has talked about -

What about employers that are able to pay so little specifically because they depend on government programs to make up the difference? Wal Mart employees are regularly on government assistance because they make so little. This is direct corporate welfare that basically means the government is subsidizing the profits of corporate owners.

 

[metalhead]

I feel like that's an integral part of the "living wage" argument that frequently goes unsaid, to the detriment of actually getting a livable minimum wage passed.

The WWC is resentful of the idea of increasing the minimum wage, particularly since $15/hr is as good as many union jobs pay starting out these days. And those workers pay dues and deal with a surprising amount of crap and uncertainty on account of being union workers. They also, many of them, get to subsidize their wages with unemployment benefits, but that's kind of beside the point.

However they might be more receptive to the argument, "your tax dollars make up the difference anyways, so why not save your tax dollars and pay everyone a living wage?"

 

[warpus]

Are employment requirements reasonable for access to welfare?

In the current system? Yeah, if you want welfare, you should have to prove that you are looking for work, on a regular enough basis.

In a hypothetical future with free basic income implemented and the existing model abolished? No

 

[Synobun]

Unless things have changed in the last few years, one of the worst requirements Missouri imposed was that you couldn't have any savings to qualify for SNAP (at least as a childless adult). When I lived there, we qualified by income for SNAP but at the time we still had some savings to deal with life's challenges. That disqualified us from SNAP and we slowly depleted our savings. Then the Mrs got a slightly better job that took us out of the income bracket for qualifying for SNAP but still wasn't enough to make ends meet.

Same thing here. If you somehow manage to not spend every dime of your monthly cheque (unlikely given how small it is, but in theory) you're not allowed to save it for an emergency. If you have a sudden cost, you're told to get family to pay for it. They openly assume that you have a support structure that can handle your emergencies. There's also an application where the government will cover an emergency, but they put the situation under scrutiny and then every future cheque will be $25 less until you've paid it off.

If you do run into money and want to keep it for an emergency, you're forced to go the "money under the bed" route. Hope you live somewhere safe.

 

[warpus]

Same thing here. If you somehow manage to not spend every dime of your monthly cheque (unlikely given how small it is, but in theory) you're not allowed to save it for an emergency. If you have a sudden cost, you're told to get family to pay for it. They openly assume that you have a support structure that can handle your emergencies. There's also an application where the government will cover an emergency, but they put the situation under scrutiny and then every future cheque will be $25 less until you've paid it off.

If you do run into money and want to keep it for an emergency, you're forced to go the "money under the bed" route. Hope you live somewhere safe.

This is insane

and exactly why a good social safety net should form the basis of any modern society

 

[rah]

Yeah, that one was obviously not thought out all the way through. Just silly.

 

[warpus]

Yeah, that one was obviously not thought out all the way through. Just silly.

I'm starting to think America as a whole was not thought out all the way through.. but I realize that is not going to be a popular point of view

 

[Lexicus]

Unless you are willing to impose the death penalty for paupers and debtors, you're never going to avoid the problem of "creating dependency."

Don't have any new babies either, they're really dependent and they seem totally incapable of taking personal responsibility.

 

[Traitorfish]

There is one grim silver lining to this sort of policy: it makes it nakedly clear that moderate and right-wing political leaders do not support even a limited welfare state for any sort of public good, let alone because they care in even the most distant and fleeting way for the well-being of the citizenry, but because it acts as a subsidy for a capitalist class intent on paying poverty wages.

Lays the cards on the table, so to speak.

 

[Bootstoots]

Don't have any new babies either, they're really dependent and they seem totally incapable of taking personal responsibility.

Their parents should charge them for their services by taking out loans on their behalf. Set the interest rate equal to that of student loans, generously grant them an 18-year childhood deferment as they accumulate a load of interest, and sell them to Chase and Citigroup to be rolled into Child-Backed Securities. Leave no services uncommodified!

 

[Ajidica]

Their parents should charge them for their services by taking out loans on their behalf. Set the interest rate equal to that of student loans, generously grant them an 18-year childhood deferment as they accumulate a load of interest, and sell them to Chase and Citigroup to be rolled into Child-Backed Securities. Leave no services uncommodified!

Hush now! Don't give them any ideas!

 

[metalhead]

Their parents should charge them for their services by taking out loans on their behalf. Set the interest rate equal to that of student loans, generously grant them an 18-year childhood deferment as they accumulate a load of interest, and sell them to Chase and Citigroup to be rolled into Child-Backed Securities. Leave no services uncommodified!

So you're saying if my kids stay in my house past their 18th birthday I can have them repossessed by a bank?

Go on . . .