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The workers’ movement fought for and won employment
insurance (E.I.) some 50 years ago to help workers survive bouts of
unemployment. But by making it much harder for unemployed Canadians
to qualify for benefits, Ottawa turned E.I. into a rich revenue
stream that contributed more than 70 per cent of the funds required to
balance the budget in the 1997-98 fiscal year, according to a new study.
In other words, the federal government eliminated its
deficit largely on the backs of the unemployed. Since then,
successive Liberal and Conservative regimes kept the E.I. premiums it
collects well above the total E.I. benefits it issues. To be
precise, there were $51 billion more in premiums than in payments, say
economists Monica Townson and Kevin Hayes for the Canadian Centre for
Policy Alternatives.
Astonishingly, they found that “two out of every three
working women who pay into E.I. don’t receive a single penny in benefits
if they lose their jobs.”
Only four in ten unemployed men qualify for benefits.
Thus, E.I. is just a tax that helps fund many things,
but least of all the unemployed.
The apparent reason for this absurdity is that the
eligibility rules “seem to be based on the standard male job of full
time, full year.” The rules simply ignore the many people working
at occasional or part-time jobs.
But more to the point is the underlying reason for
such rules. Essentially, it is a corporate agenda designed to
destroy past social gains, to make workers desperate enough to work at
any job and at any rate of pay, and to subsidize business at the expense
of the rest of us.
All the more reason for the NDP and the Labour
movement to take up the fight for a much lower qualifying threshold (the
report suggests 360 hours of work within the past year, or an average of
at least 360 hours of work in three of the past five years), along with a
pay out at 80 per cent of insured wages, for up to 52 weeks per claim.
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