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I’ve been thinking a bit about the pandemic unemployment payment/travel debate a little today. A short thread:
If you accept that those who are ‘pandemic unemployed’ are categorically different from the ‘regularly unemployed’—and the CSO shows them as counted differently—then why do we have to treat them as ‘actively seeking work’ and thus impose regular travel strictures upon them?
One defining characteristic of the pandemic is its lack of moral hazard. No one is gaming the system. People who were happily working in pubs now shut can’t ‘actively seek work’ in pubs & probably don’t want to. They just want *their* pub to reopen & go back to their old job.
Policies affecting hundreds of thousands of people designed in days are going to have flaws. Everyone understands that. You can fix those flaws. The conflation of the different ‘types’ of payment recipient is clearly a flaw.
I understand the holiday rule and why it is there, but it seems a categorical error to apply that rule to the PUP recipients. They are different. To double down on that rule instead of apologising, making it right, & moving on seems to me a waste of precious governmental energy.
This is what I mean-we count them differently, we treat them differently, because they are different schemes with different purposes. ( https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/mue/monthlyunemploymentjune2020/)
It is important to put this in context. We are talking about a few hundred cases. PUP/TWSS policies are some of the most successful policies in the history of the state in terms of meeting their initial goals, which was to support hundreds of thousands of people through COVID.
It would be a great pity to see such a successful set of policies, which helped many, many people and continues to do so, tarnished in some way because of this categorical error.
