The following article by Eliza Schultz, Anusha Ravi and Rebecca Vallas was posted on the Center for American Progress website November 2, 2017:
Taking away food, shelter, and health care from jobless workers won’t help them find work any faster. But that is exactly what President Donald Trump and his colleagues in Congress are proposing to do. While they call their proposals “work requirements,”1 what these policies would do in practice is to kick people while they’re down, punishing unemployed or underemployed workers for not being able to find a job with enough hours and penalizing those who face barriers to work. As this issue brief sets forth, proposals to take food, shelter, and health insurance away from struggling workers would only exacerbate poverty and inequality, while putting opportunity even further out of reach for the very “forgotten man and woman” President Trump famously pledged to help.2
Certain groups of workers are left behind
The recovery from the Great Recession has, by many measures, been a success: Today, the national unemployment rate is 4.4 percent,3 compared with 10 percent in 2009.4 But these figures obscure significant variation by factors such as geography, as well as persistent discrimination in the labor market based on race, ethnicity, age, and disability status—not to mention labor market disadvantages faced by workers with limited educational attainment or a criminal record. Continue reading “Work Requirement Proposals Would Kick Struggling Workers When They’re Down”