To: The Massachusetts State House, The Massachusetts State Senate, and Governor Charlie Baker
Stop unemployment racket in Massachusetts
Massachusetts Department of Labor has recently implemented a policy requiring people to attend mandatory seminars and workshops in order to be eligible to collect unemployment benefits.
While these programs may be useful and helpful for some participants, they offer no benefit to others, and introducing this blanket requirement for everyone to participate not only reduces the effectiveness of the program for those who could actually benefit from it by artificially and unnecessarily increasing the number of participants, and wasting available limited resources, but is also harmful to participants, who are in many instances forced to cancel or postpone their job search activities in order to comply with the program, which goes exactly against the objective, and increases the duration of time they continue to receive the benefits.
Also note, that unemployment insurance is in fact an entitlement program, funded in effect by the participants. Requiring the beneficiaries to comply with additional requirements in order to claim their benefits should therefore never be possible. Much less, forcing them specifically to utilize a service of a single provider, clearly benefiting from it, which is akin to racketeering.
While these programs may be useful and helpful for some participants, they offer no benefit to others, and introducing this blanket requirement for everyone to participate not only reduces the effectiveness of the program for those who could actually benefit from it by artificially and unnecessarily increasing the number of participants, and wasting available limited resources, but is also harmful to participants, who are in many instances forced to cancel or postpone their job search activities in order to comply with the program, which goes exactly against the objective, and increases the duration of time they continue to receive the benefits.
Also note, that unemployment insurance is in fact an entitlement program, funded in effect by the participants. Requiring the beneficiaries to comply with additional requirements in order to claim their benefits should therefore never be possible. Much less, forcing them specifically to utilize a service of a single provider, clearly benefiting from it, which is akin to racketeering.
Why is this important?
I have been a victim of this newly introduced program last year, and know others who were affected negatively by it, some by being forced to put their job searches on hold in order to comply, others - by having their access to Career Center resources that would be valuable to them restricted because of low availability due to overutilization by those, forced into the program against their will.