Note: Wonder whether the title is a reference? Wonder no more: the answer is a resounding maybe or maybe not.** Call it tasteless, dumb, insulting, or deeply satirical - the simple fact is that the unemployed in many premier economies of the world tend to not be treated well by their governments.
With minimal exaggeration, one can almost call their situation a Catch 22. If unemployment is high, benefits get cut because "we cannot afford" the costs. If unemployment is low, benefits get reduced because "they could find work if they only wanted to", right?
Taxing the wealthy works in a similar but opposite way. If an economy is humming, "we" can reduce taxes on the wealthy because "we don't need the money". If a country is in the doldrums, we need to reduce taxes on the wealthy so they can invest that money and create jobs.
The lipstick on the capitalist pig is then applied liberally, or neoliberally to make life look pretty. In German labor market politics, this comes in the form of "assist and assert", the blogster`s translation of "fördern und fordern" maintaining the alliteration and childishly chuckling at the two asses.
The blogster has kept an eye on social policies for many years because, in its* small mind, how we treat the least fortunate among us shows who we really are as humans. If this sounds a bit Jesusy, rest assured, there is nothing religious about the blogster.
German lawmakers have been busy making long term unemployment as unpleasant as they possibly can, even promoting a crackdown on "anti-social behavior" by recipients of the basic means tested benefits that are your only recourse if you are not eligible for unemployment insurance benefits.
While some "Christian Democrats" and jobcenter workers obviously believe becoming unemployed is the ultimate anti-social behavior, the means tested HARTZ IV is as close as possible as you can get to a socially acceptable form of translating this belief into government policy. Even doing everything right and making an extra effort to not demand benefits won't necessarily save you from scorn and insult, as one young German found on a visit to the jobcenter: you are arrogant and lazy, he was told.
Jobcenter workers can and do cut the already minimal benefits when their "clients" fail to accept "reasonable" job offers, when they blow off an appointment, and for many other "violations".
While the media have reported arbitrary administration of such sanctions, the reports were easily dismissed as non representative, because nobody had a comprehensive picture of the situation until recently.
A German non-profit journalist organization did the hard work and found that jobcenters in some towns do indeed impose sanctions in an arbitrary manner.
Measuring this is not as simple as taking sanction statistics and pointing at high incidences of benefit cuts. When asked why they sanction clients at twice the rate as other cities, the jobcenter folks in Rosenheim, Bavaria, explained that the local unemployment rate was much lower than the national average, thus leading to more jobs being offered to its clientele. This, so the valiant government workers, means more "reasonable" jobs are available, and "refusal opportunities" are higher, thus leading to more sanctions.
You cannot compare apples and oranges, they said.
The journalists, however, had been smart. Aware of potentially skewed interpretation caused by different data sets, the reporters took great care to compare only locations with matching basic data sets.
In the case of Rosenheim, investigators compared the city's numbers to districts with the same basic conditions, i.e. same low unemployment rate, matching ethnic makeup of the clientele, and others.
The researchers still found Rosenheim meted out sanctions at twice the rate as the closest comparable jobcenter district.
* Gender neutral.
** The blogster grew up in a weird family where resistance to chores and work on the farm was frequently met with "Work shall set you free".
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