I Once Needed Unemployment Insurance, and I Was Glad I Had It
Sometimes you just lose your job, and you can't do anything about it
About ten years ago, I worked in a small coffee shop at the back of a bookstore.
I worked there through the first Trump election, in fact. I vividly remember that day; I had an opening shift, and my first customer of the day was in before the sun was up. He was in a business suit, juggling a phone and his wallet in one hand and a briefcase in the other.
He was already talking business on the phone, so he used hand signals and a smile to tell me his order, pointing at the coffee pots for a regular drip, then indicating the size of the cup he wanted with a shake of his head or a nod as I held them up.
Yes to cream, yes to sugar. Thumbs up when I pointed at the price on the machine.
It was as he shuffled everything around to grab his cup and started out the door that he lowered his phone briefly to call back at me, “I hope she wins!”
He meant Hillary Clinton. Because even in Canada, everybody knew Trump was the worst choice.
I didn’t work at that coffee shop for too long. We were a licensed store that belonged to a major chain — we used their branding and their logo and their recipes, but we were technically employees of the bookstore, not the coffee chain.
One day, the bookstore decided to sell that cafe back to the chain, which meant that our positions suddenly ceased to exist. We found that out one dreary morning before our shift, when the manager met us with free coffee and snacks and chairs set up in a circle.
I remember us all kind of sitting there, stunned, as we were told we would no longer have jobs in a few months.
We were told that the coffee chain would give us preferential hiring if we wanted to apply to them, but otherwise, our jobs were just… going away.
By the way, retail and food service work — the so-called ‘entry-level jobs’ — are harder and more demanding than people like to think. I’ve got so many stories, but I’ll settle for linking this one.
I had been there long enough to have paid into Canada’s EI system — employment insurance, which exists for just such an occasion. I was able to receive a little bit of pay from the government while I searched for a new job.
In the end, I wound up cancelling it because I decided to go to college instead, but it kept me going until I was able to secure a bursary. It allowed me to keep eating.
In the States, Unemployment Insurance can be a lifeline for people. Jobs can disappear for a million reasons, ranging from mass layoffs to companies going under, from a fire burning down a mom-and-pop restaurant to a licensure sale like what happened to my coworkers and me.
Sometimes it’s your fault, like if you get fired for cause, but when it isn’t, you’re entitled to assistance. That’s how it works. You need help to stay afloat until you find work elsewhere.
It’s one of the safety nets that both my country and the U.S. used to agree are super important and ought to be protected. Used to.
Because now, Trump is threatening to tear it all down.
He has just threatened to stop sending Federal payments to the States to prevent Unemployment Insurance payouts until the States ‘get fraud under control.’
To be clear, he cannot do that.
But that doesn’t mean he won’t.
Millions of Americans depend on it, just like they depend on Medicaid and SNAP. Once again, Trump is fleecing the average American in ways that make it damn near impossible to eke out a basic, substandard living in this capitalistic hellscape, all so the wealthiest can squeeze out a few more dollars.
He calls that a waste of money, while he brags about how much cash he spent to murder children in Iran.
It’s fucking disgusting.
Solidarity wins.