A single mother in Cambridge loses her job at Microsoft’s Kendall Square office. No longer able to afford to stay in her home, Andrea Russo and her teenage daughter lodge with a friend. Fortunately, Russo is entitled to state unemployment insurance benefits. Unfortunately, five months after her job loss, she has yet to receive a penny. CommonWealth Beacon magazine has the story of Russo’s struggle to have her claim paid by the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance. According to the article, thousands of other unemployed people in the state find themselves in the same pickle.
The story is important, so much so that we aren’t quite content with CommonWealth’s treatment. As the article proceeds to replace Russo with various charts and graphs, it delves into a recent technology “upgrade” installed to detect fraud in DUA’s systems. The parameters of the problem, the glitch that’s plunged thousands of innocent people into financial distress, involves technology, administration, and finance.
The larger truth is that Andrea Russo’s losing battle with the bureaucracy reflects a system designed from the get-go to discourage applicants. Richard Zeckhauser, a Harvard economist and investment banker, once approvingly dubbed this strategy “the ordeal mechanism.” Complex paperwork, long telephone holds, and short office hours worsen the quality of systems and diminish their accessibility. Fraud is nearly always the pretext. The real point is to discourage take-up, to sabotage the subsidy. States save money by not spending it.
The Trump administration has been flexing the ordeal mechanism in every area of federal policy. Yet the cuts, firings, and closures do not represent a new partisan tactic. They radically intensify a strategy loosed on the country during the Reagan presidencies to destroy social welfare. Anyone in Massachusetts who has applied for state welfare benefits or tried to hire a personal care attendant confronts a bureaucracy that has been deliberately rigged to cheat them of their due. The unemployment insurance program was not exactly user-friendly before the recent “upgrade.”
This is the clear-eyed discussion we need our reporters to facilitate. To do so, we suggest ditching the corporate euphemisms. In describing the pain that Microsoft inflicted on Russo and others, let’s not call it “widespread downsizing.” How about “mass firings without cause that threaten loyal workers with poverty”?
Hang in there, Andrea.
Summers is a senior editor at Cambridge Day.
A stronger
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Mr. Summers,
You said, ” In describing the pain that Microsoft inflicted on Russo and others, let’s not call it “widespread downsizing.” How about “mass firings without cause that threaten loyal workers with poverty”?
It is very unfortunate that Ms. Russo lost her job.
However, your implication that there was something morally wrong (threaten workers with poverty), is totally off base.
When Ms. Russo went to work, she went to work at a corporation, knowing full well that in a publicly held company as Microsoft is, downsizing in the future was always a possibility. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the reality.
I would hope that Cambridge Day would not inject a reporter’s personal moral views in a news story.
That is what we see in the vile right wing press, which many of us despise.
I do not believe Cambridge Day should be doing that. Please, just report the news.