Worker advocates: New rule is Scott Walker’s latest effort to make unemployment benefits harder to

it is suppose to make them use a computer but problem is many do not have access to computers.



Worker advocates: New rule is Scott Walker’s latest effort to make unemployment benefits harder to collect

August 21, 2015 8:00 am • By Pat Schneider

Gov. Scott Walker made drug testing for those receiving unemployment benefits a top legislative priority.



Patrick Hickey says that an additional filing requirement to collect unemployment compensation will lead to late checks and lost benefits, and that imposing it is part of how Gov. Scott Walker is curtailing assistance to state residents.

“This is part and parcel of the administration's goal to stigmatize poverty and shame poor people by making the system so cumbersome and humiliating that people give up,” said Hickey, a member of the Workers’ Rights Center in Madison.

The new rule will require workers making weekly unemployment benefits claims by phone to begin faxing or mailing in a log of their weekly job search efforts, according to a notice on the state Department of Workforce Development web site...............







.......Hickey said that the Walker administration is inflating claims of fraud “as an excuse to create a bureaucratic maze that workers must navigate to get the most basic level of support –insurance they have earned – while they search for new work.”

He compared the specter of unemployment fraud to the claims of voter fraud that the legislature’s Republican majority cited as a rationale for Voter ID legislation: “a boogie man created to demonize people and create additional restrictions that leave workers desperate and insecure.”....................

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