Conservatives want unemployed to fill jobs going to temporar

[MikeNB]

As left wing as BC might be, there is still a stigma to living off EI. I understand that the Maritimes is much like England - one is proud to be on the pogey.

You understand wrong, it's only the loser crowd that thinks that way, same as most places.

[MikeNB]

replied twice weeks apart

[LAR]

I wonder what would happen if terminated workers were forced to work on a Langley mushroom farm with lax safety standards and a number of them died or were permanently brain damaged as a result. It could get very expensive for taxpayers.

[WestViking]

I wonder what would happen if terminated workers were forced to work on a Langley mushroom farm with lax safety standards and a number of them died or were permanently brain damaged as a result. It could get very expensive for taxpayers.

If there are jobs available and a EI claimant is cut off benifits, the claimant is not forced to take a particular job or any job at all. The claimant loses the option to subside on EI belefits - all other options are still open. There is no public liability involved. Your mushroom farm employees will put in claims under the provincial workers' compensation plan which is employer funded, not publicly funded.

[WestViking]

Did no one in the NDP take any economics course
Taking a job is squandering whilst sitting at home on the dole is a good thing according to the NDP. Are these people completely loopy.

Tories trying to impose ‘nanny state’ with EI reforms, NDP says

Mark Kennedy, Postmedia News May 15, 2012 – 1:50 PM ET
OTTAWA — Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has come under political fire for saying — as the government contemplates reforms to the employment-insurance scheme — that there is no such thing as a bad job.

The criticism came Tuesday from the NDP, which accused Flaherty of proposing a “nanny state” in which unemployed Canadians will lose their EI benefits unless they reluctantly accept jobs for which they are overqualified.

“Why would we squander the skills that we already have?”said NDP finance critic Peggy Nash.........................http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/05/15 ... -ndp-says/

EI is the fountainhead of the nanny state. Any move to introduce the real world to EI is more than welcome. Nash worries over teachers and nurses having to work in the agricultural sector. Nash seems unaware of the desperate nursing shortage in Canada. The idea that if you go to university and train as a (fill in the blank) that EI will ensure you have a lifetime job in your chosen profession is nanny statism at its worst.

[LAR]

I wonder what would happen if terminated workers were forced to work on a Langley mushroom farm with lax safety standards and a number of them died or were permanently brain damaged as a result. It could get very expensive for taxpayers.

If there are jobs available and a EI claimant is cut off benifits, the claimant is not forced to take a particular job or any job at all. The claimant loses the option to subside on EI belefits - all other options are still open. There is no public liability involved. Your mushroom farm employees will put in claims under the provincial workers' compensation plan which is employer funded, not publicly funded.

I'm just saying if an EI claimant is cut off because there are jobs available and those jobs turn out to be unsafe EI could be found to have contributed. It would be up to EI to investigate those jobs before deciding they are safe employment. Which would add to the expense of the program.
I understand what Flaherty is trying to say and I don't doubt there are people who would rather be on EI than work. I've heard about them and even knew one a number of years ago. But governments don't seem to think things through some times.
It might make more sense to just lower the amount an EI claimant would receive to make it more likely they would seek work.
I've never collected EI but I believe they already make people go through the motions of looking for work. It ends up being nothing more than a make work project for rubber stampers.

[WestViking]

I'm just saying if an EI claimant is cut off because there are jobs available and those jobs turn out to be unsafe EI could be found to have contributed. It would be up to EI to investigate those jobs before deciding they are safe employment. Which would add to the expense of the program.

I got that the first time. Workplace safety is a provincial jurisdiction. If a workplace is unsafe, that is not an EI responsibility.

[LAR]

I'm just saying if an EI claimant is cut off because there are jobs available and those jobs turn out to be unsafe EI could be found to have contributed. It would be up to EI to investigate those jobs before deciding they are safe employment. Which would add to the expense of the program.

I got that the first time. Workplace safety is a provincial jurisdiction. If a workplace is unsafe, that is not an EI responsibility.

I understand that but I'm not sure that WCB would protect EI if they refuse a claim because unsafe work is available.

[RedDog]

There was an interesting segment on Rutherford yesterday. Small and medium sized business owners were calling in saying how they take calls and emails on jobs, set up interviews (now committing their busy time) and the people don't show and are never heard from again. It's believed they're just filling the required number of "applications" to maintain benefits.

One woman who simply can't get staff (long before wages and perks ever come up in any discussion) says the system should have an avenue for business to report names who didn't show when they might have been minutes from employment. Her view was that if the system logs that an individual didn't appear for say 3 scheduled interviews they should be cut off poggy altogether.

[BlawBlaw]

I have never been able to figure out why an employer has to pay EI premiums for the employees he hires.

EI premiums are high enough, but the employer has to match the premium his employee pays and add another 40% for the privilege of providing employment. It would be better if the employer was allowed to use those premiums to increase wages or to hire more people.

I also fail to understand why seasonal workers and year round employees pay the same EI rate. Why do a government office worker and a lobster fisherman pay the same EI premium rate?

"Employer contributions" are one of the ways government hide the full magnitude of how much they are being, well, taxed. I think they should change the law and simply make employers show these contributions as part of employee compensation, that is immediately stuffed away in government coffers. For anyone making just over $40k a year, you would see your paycheque increase by about $3k while your takehome stays the same. With that honesty in reporting people might be open to the idea of scrapping EI and CPP and simply give it to people to put in their RSP or TFSA.

EI rates are the same but they tie the qualification for benefits, and the length of benefits themselves to the prevailing, local unemployment rate. Having said that, the level of your benefits are tied to how much work you did in the last year. You can't simply work 9 weeks or whatever it is and then get the full benefits.

The thing is, EI has simply become another social program that makes inter-regional transfers of money from place with low unemployment to those with high unemployment. Plus, throwing in disability, maternal leave, and a bunch of other things was done to make it a social engineering program.

As far as temporary foreign workers are concerned, a buddy of mine is a crown attorney in Vancouver in one of the biggest EI scams around (one or two hundred people). BC based Indian fruit growers would get people from India to come to Canada and get them to work for free, and then doctor all their employment records so they could get the maximum EI payments (a year at about $23k, which is a mint for some peasant in the Punjab). This new policy would cut down on those sorts of abuses to an extent.

[styky]

EI system no longer works

By: Editorial
The Conservative government says Canadians receiving an income under the Employment Insurance program will be required to lower their standards when looking for work or risk losing their benefits.

It's a small step, but it should be the start of a major overhaul of a system that often seems to reward seasonal workers in regions with high unemployment, while punishing those who live in low-unemployment areas. As numerous studies have concluded, Canada's EI system is not only inequitable, it discourages labour mobility and encourages dependency, even while thousands of jobs are unfilled in areas of high unemployment.

Canadians looking for work while collecting EI are currently entitled to turn down jobs that are "unsuitable," which could be work in a different city or in a different occupation with dramatically lower pay. The federal government intends to redefine the term "suitable" in a way that would require unemployed workers to accept different or lower-paying jobs, although the precise terms haven't been revealed, which will lead to unnecessary and likely extreme speculation.

It shouldn't mean that a laid-off engineer would have to take a job on the bottle line in a brewery. If a professional is out of work, presumably he or she would use their unemployment benefits as a stop-gap measure while looking for work in the same field, even if it means relocating.

Nor should it mean a 50-year-old shoe salesman will have to start digging ditches, but the salesman might have to take a different job, even if it pays less...............http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinio ... 67445.html

[PoliticallyIncorrect]

EI is not welfare. It's teporary and only those employees had EI premium deducted from their paycheck. After proposed changes nobody would be able to claim EI benefits because there is always some kind of a job available somewhere. EI would become just another tax on already overtaxed employees.

Attitudes to work have changed since then, but no one should expect the system to subsidize their wages in a seasonal industry, or to write cheques for those who don't want to dirty their hands.

There should be a limit on how often one could claim the benefits, e.g. once in three or five years. This would address the seasonal industries issue without penalizing anyone else.

[WestViking]

EI is not welfare. It's teporary and only those employees had EI premium deducted from their paycheck. After proposed changes nobody would be able to claim EI benefits because there is always some kind of a job available somewhere. EI would become just another tax on already overtaxed employees.

Attitudes to work have changed since then, but no one should expect the system to subsidize their wages in a seasonal industry, or to write cheques for those who don't want to dirty their hands.

There should be a limit on how often one could claim the benefits, e.g. once in three or five years. This would address the seasonal industries issue without penalizing anyone else.

How to Make EI Fairer for All Canadians

Toronto, Nov. 2, 2011 – The federal Employment Insurance (EI) program plays favorites among Canada’s regions and sustains costly, long-lasting pockets of high unemployment, say the authors of a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Mending Canada’s Employment Insurance Quilt: The Case for Restoring Equity,” Senior Policy Analyst Colin Busby and Professor David Gray say the EI program should be simplified, with nation-wide standards for the number of hours of work needed to qualify for benefits, and for how long benefits should be received.

“The last recession made the inequity of the current regime glaringly obvious,” according to David Gray, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, “with the unemployed in Ontario’s hard-hit manufacturing sector facing longer qualifying times and getting skimpier benefits than laid-off workers in other regions. Reform is overdue.”

Currently, note the authors, laid-off workers in regions with high unemployment rates have easier access to long-lasting EI benefits than laid-off workers in regions with low unemployment rates. One main consequence is the creation and preservation of pockets of high, chronic unemployment in labour markets that are dominated by seasonal employment. The program slows or stops the adjustment process and deters people from moving to better opportunities, hindering cross-country convergence of wages and unemployment rates.

The EI program should be simplified to better address unemployed workers’ needs, say the authors. Reform should aim at a more dynamic, flexible and buoyant labour market. This means ending regional criteria for eligibility and the length of the benefit period, to be replaced by uniform, countrywide standards. This would strengthen all communities over time, and leave Canada’s regions less susceptible to the harms that inevitably follow from global economic shocks. Source

For the study in brief click here

[WestViking]

I'm just saying if an EI claimant is cut off because there are jobs available and those jobs turn out to be unsafe EI could be found to have contributed. It would be up to EI to investigate those jobs before deciding they are safe employment. Which would add to the expense of the program.

I got that the first time. Workplace safety is a provincial jurisdiction. If a workplace is unsafe, that is not an EI responsibility.

I understand that but I'm not sure that WCB would protect EI if they refuse a claim because unsafe work is available.

Workplace safety will require an employer to make his premises and operations safe for employees or shut him down. Your contention is that the province allows unsafe workplaces to operate with impunity. Since that does not presently effect Employment Insurance, it will not do so in future. Again, no one is forced to take work. An employee has many options available. Why would an employee finding himself in an unsafe workplace not file a complaint with workplace safety? There is legislation in the provinces and federally that allow an employee to refuse unsafe working conditions and operations.

[LAR]

There is legislation in the provinces and federally that allow an employee to refuse unsafe working conditions and operations.

I can see how that would play out with a policy of no claim if there's work available. Band aid solutions on a broken system just lead to a bunch of over paid bureaucrats denying benefits to the people forced to contribute.