From unemployment line to welfare to the soup line

>> Reforms to Employment Insurance are adding people to the welfare rolls

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

Pierre Céré has met workers who have lost their jobs for the pettiest, most ridiculous and unfair of reasons. He's met people who have brought their stories of unjust dismissal and false judgments to employment insurance officials who refused to believe them. Céré, of the Comité chômage sud-ouest de Montréal, works on these ex-workers' behalf to counter employment insurance officials who seem more inclined to blame workers themselves for being fired than admit another Canadian to the employment insurance rolls.

Take the example of the Vietnamese immigrant who did not speak either French or English very well, but who had been a model employee at the same grocery store for 11 years. He was fired for theft when his wife forgot to pay for a 50-cent can of juice she had taken off the store's shelves to give to their crying 13-month-old baby. EI officials said he had been fired for his own misconduct and denied him employment benefits--even when a union grievance committee later vindicated the man and got him reinstated.

The theory coming down from Liberal government policy makers is that cuts to Employment Insurance will motivate the unemployed to quickly find work. They point to low unemployment rates in the United States as proof that stingier unemployment benefits are good for the economy.

Thus EI, which has been "reformed"--meaning cut--four times since 1990, has degenerated so much that only 43 per cent of unemployed Canadians received benefits last year compared to 83 per cent in 1983.

The declining number of EI recipients has resulted in huge surpluses accumulating in the EI fund. In 1997 the surplus was $7 billion, $2 billion more than the year before. It's been estimated that in recent years the federal government has collected nearly $14 billion more in the EI account than it has paid out.

Described by policy makers in terms of "giving the private sector the right conditions for growth," "creating an environment for people to get back into the labour force" and "curtailing programs that diminish personal incentives to upgrade skills," the reforms to employment insurance succeeded only in sending nearly 200,000 Quebecers who lost their jobs not to new employment, but directly to the welfare lines.

So says a study released last week by UQAM economists Pierre Fortin and Pierre-Yves Cremieux. When the other provinces are included, the report's authors say, the number of Canadians who are on welfare as a result of the new restrictions on employment insurance expands to 730,000.

The information is nothing new, says Céré. From his perspective, the political spin that can be put on the figures--that responsibility for social support is being increasingly dumped on the provinces--hides the fact that, through cutbacks, both governments have been progressively gouging benefits to levels undreamed of a decade ago.

Céré says he has seen cases of people denied employment insurance by federal officials and then, because they owned a car or house, denied welfare benefits by their provincial counterparts. In fact, Fortin himself called for more coercive welfare policies in the 1996 Fortin-Bouchard Report. One of his recommendations was to deny welfare altogether to applicants aged 18 to 24 who refused employment programs or turned down a job.

Céré says he's profoundly weary of the Quebec-Canada one-upmanship that takes place as the jobless are cut from either side: "They're both just pulling off the same cheap theatrics," he says.

Their goal? To groom a more malleable Canadian workforce, Céré thinks. He says he is constantly hearing cases of bosses blackmailing their employees into performing some duty they don't want to do by threatening to fire them and mark the dreaded words "misconduct" or "voluntary dismissal" on their severance papers so they're ineligible for EI.