A friend and I were having a discussion earlier today about unemployment insurance. I'm back on it as the short term project I was working on ended successfully last friday. Now, my friend wasn't unhappy that I was on unemployment, the thing we had different perspectives on was that she thought unemployment is welfare. Her reasoning is that she is required to have an amount deducted from her paycheck to pay into a government system that pays people not to work. While I understand that this is the view some people have on unemployment, it is nonetheless mistaken. I pointed out to her that unemployment is insurance against loosing your job, and if it were welfare, then auto and health insurance would be welfare also. With insurance, you pay into a specific pool that others take out of, and that you can take out of if you need it for that specific purpose. But you can only take from the pool if you have paid into it, and only for a certain duration. With welfare, it comes from a general fund, goes to many different types of social funding, you don't have to pay into it to take out of it, and there's no duration limit.
She then said she didn't understand why people just didn't work instead of being on unemployment. My answer to her was that I would work, but in my town, one of the major consumers of IT workers dumped several hundred highly skilled and qualified people on the market in the last few months, right at the time that they dumped me too. Also, several computer stores, consulting firms and agencies have gone out of business, dumping even more qualified and skilled people on the market. Plus, there are 4 schools in this city that graduate 15 or more students 3 or 4 times a year in the IT field, and they just graduated a new batch last month, all with bachelor's degrees. IT jobs are scarce here right now, and whenever one comes up, someone who has several more years of experience, a degree and certifications gets it because hey, what employer wouldn't hire someone who is overqualified and pay them entry level because that's all the person can get, and the employer is getting allot for their money? Which leaves those of us with fresh degrees, or not yet degrees, and only a couple years experience out in the cold. Other industries won't hire me because they know that as soon as an IT position comes my way, I'd go there, and they don't need to put themselves in a high turnover position. I took what I knew was a short term, low paying IT position because that's all I could get. A year ago, I wouldn't even have considered doing that job. And now that it's ended, I'm back where I was 2 months ago, no job and few prospects because of our local economy, just like allot of people in this country.
So, it's not that I don't want to work, that I want to sit on my ass all day while the government gives me a handout, it's that I spent 30 years paying into the government run insurance program and now am in a position of being forced to draw on that insurance or I loose my apartment, my car, most of my posessions and don't get to eat. And none of it is my fault. I didn't do anything wrong.
So no, unemployment isn't welfare anymore than geico or humana are welfare. The only difference is that geico and humana are privately owned for profit insurers and unemployment is government run not for profit insurance.
I wonder how many other people are under that misconception?
