As soon as I wrote the title for this post I had to laugh to myself about the irony of the words. To clarify, what I am asking is should unemployment recipients have to work at the government’s discretion while receiving benefits?
This is a tough question to answer for two primary reasons. First, everyone on unemployment receives a different level of benefits based on their wage history. Second, recipients are comprised of different backgrounds in education, physical capability, and age. The bottom line is it would be difficult to provide an equal work environment for all of the different people involved.
Now to answer my own question directly – yes, I do feel you should provide something in return for receiving unemployment benefits. My vision would be to have a job bank of service opportunities at places like the Red Cross, homeless shelters, and perhaps even the EPA. Those who want to receive benefits would have to work 10 hours a week or 40 hours per month. Your first benefit payment would be approved after logging 40 hours of service.
This idea is not going to balance the expenditures for unemployment benefits but I do believe it would save some money while also providing a community service. My assumption here is that some people won’t want any part of “donating their time” and thus will never file for benefits. The most likely candidates being those who are gaming the system and costing America millions of dollars in fraudulent claims. I also believe this program would push people harder to find work and subsequently get them off of unemployment. Again, I doubt many folks would enjoy having to find a service opportunity and submit paperwork regularly in order to qualify for their free money.
The biggest negative to the plan as I see it is administration. It will take thousands of case workers and supervisors to manage the program, which of course costs money. But as I discussed in my post about adding more fraud protection to unemployment, the amount of money saved by monitoring benefit payouts should easily outweigh the costs of adding more employees.
There is a never-ending cycle to entitlement programs. As long as you keep giving, the people will keep taking. Granted there is a small percentage of abusers who ruin it for everyone, but at the same time what is the percentage of benefit recipients who dedicate 40 hours a week to job hunting? And how about those who turn down job offers that don’t match their former salaries?
Sadly, we can no longer provide benefits based on the assumption that everyone is doing all they can to find a job. If we are paying out unemployment benefits then expecting a minimal return in exchange is not out of the question.
