Senate Wants to Force the Unemployed to Work For Free
Along with efforts to drug-test the unemployed and deny benefits to those without high school diplomas, Republicans now want to make "volunteer" work a requirement.
20 hours looking for work and then 20 hours volunteering for free...
A law requiring them to spend 20 hours a week looking for work is nothing but an insult to people who are already searching desperately; making it a requirement would likely add a reporting burden that would either detract from their search or force them to spend time beyond their active job searching.
Forcing them to spend 20 hours a week "volunteering" additionally takes time people need for the very hard work of keeping their heads above water on limited means. And of course, creating an involuntary volunteer workforce is no kind of incentive to job-creation—why would any organization being provided free labor by the government ever create a job?
The are basically two reasons for measures like this. First,
"This proposal is very much about 'welfarizing' federal unemployment insurance benefits," said George Wentworth, a senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group. Wentworth noted that the bill borrows language from the 1996 welfare law.
That is, it reframes unemployment insurance as something other than an insurance program that exists for all of us and that we work for.
Second, such measures simply punish and stigmatize people for being jobless at a time when there simply are not jobs in the economy for them. Because Republicans are mean-spirited like that.