Universal Health Care and Welfare Reform Gone Awry
Monday, January 31st, 2005 at 10:04 pm
Two things I am in favor of:
1) Universal Health Care - providing equal access to all.
2) Welfare Reform - Getting lazy people off welfare, when there are jobs available.
However, Germany's latest reforms seem to be taking these ideas too far:
A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.
Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.
The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.
She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.
Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.
Continue reading at: The Telegraph
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The Telegraph is like the Bild newspaper, a little sensationalistic, so I hope this was twisted a bit, otherwise Hartz IV would really stink and I can’t imagine the Social-Democrats winning the next election. Germans are more open about sex, but hopefully they know some borders.