Detroit Free Press – by Kathleen Gray
LANSING — Bills that would deny unemployment benefits to people who refuse to take drug tests required by employers and that would mandate community service for people receiving public assistance were approved in the state Senate and a House committee Wednesday.
The drug-testing bill, which passed the House Commerce Committee on a 12-4 vote with three Democrats passing on the issue, would deny unemployment benefits for people who either refused to take a drug test required by an employer or tested positive.
The community service bill, which passed the Senate on a 27-9 vote, would require people receiving food stamps or other welfare benefits to participate in community service or other work-related activities in order to be eligible for the assistance.
Republicans called the bills common sense.
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with requiring folks to have a little skin in the game,” said Sen. Joe Hune, R-Hamburg Township. “All they have to do is a little community service to get their benefits.”
But Democrats said the GOP was targeting low-income people for political purposes leading into the 2014 election season, as Republicans continued to push bills that the party’s conservative base would support.
The bills continue a trend that began earlier this year with proposed legislation that targets public assistance recipients for suspicion-based drug testing, and a proposal that allows benefits to be denied if a child is truant from school. Those bills have passed the House and await action in the Senate.
“Wholesale drug testing without suspicion is simply illegal,” said Shelli Weisberg, spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan. “If we’re going down the road of drug testing for people who receive benefits, then we better start drug testing legislators.”
State Rep. Jon Switalski, D-Warren, offered an amendment to the drug-testing bill that would do that, but it failed.
“If the majority feels that drug testing for people on the public dole is good policy, then it’s clearly in the interest of good public policy to test all of us on the public dole,” he said. “But this is a bill about the elections in 2014 and nothing else.”
Anti-tax activist Bill McMaster noted that the bills don’t take into account Michigan’s support in a 2008 ballot initiative for the use of medical marijuana.
“It’s somewhat mysterious to me that you’re trying to eliminate the will of the people on the medical marijuana front,” he said. “A good number of people are employed successfully who are using medical marijuana.”
Sen. Vincent Gregory, D-Southfield, said it didn’t make sense to make someone — such as a single mother, for example — have to pay child care costs because of state-required community service. He offered an amendment — which ultimately failed — that would require the Department of Human Services to pick up child care costs while parents performed community service.
“We need to give residents a helping hand and not force them to do other things to get assistance from the state,” he said.
The drug-testing bill (HB 4952) now moves to the full House. The community service bill (SB276) moves to the House for consideration.
Contact Kathleen Gray: 517-372-8661 or kgray99@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @michpoligal.
http://www.freep.com/article/20130918/NEWS06/309180135/food-stamps-welfare-community-service-drug
Ya gotta love it when they target the disadvantadged and low income people like this. Yea, they can test all they want and when they do find people on that food stamp/welfare program useing drugs and they kick them off then those that get kicked off will just continue useing drugs and then not only use drugs but will then probobly start selling drugs or something else………Will this drug testing thing be just for the adults? or will it be for the kids too………. Ya`ll see, around here where I am fron the story is that if you want to buy drugs all you need is to have a kid in school – yea anywhere from 1st grade on up and you will get anything you want for cheap, and that is one way people will make money to pay the reant and feed themselve…….. Hell they did a locker search last year and found prepacked grams of heroine, crack, meth, ecstasy amongst other things like drug utencils for all different kinds of drug use. Nope not much marijuana because of the smell and the bulkiness of pot, but they found anything else you would ever want. Yea they even found needles, and this was in a small town grade school. Yea these kids were only 6 years old and selling hard drugs to their class mates to bring home to mommy and daddy and yes, I have seen kids shooting dope as youg as maybe 9 – 10 yr.s old. Ya see, this is what all this drug testing does…… If they are going to do this to welfare/foodstamp recipients then how about haveing weekly drug testing for the people in govt. and how about the police.
Once these laws are in place, then as in Britain, companies and councils will lay off workers in droves and replace them with forced, unpaid labor. It is neo-slavery which actually leads to higher unemployment because paid workers lose their jobs to it.
One groundsman in the north of England who used to work in parks and hospitals not only found himself laid off and replaced by free labor, but six months later (the time limit before the compulsion kicks in), he found himself forced to do for his welfare check the job he used to be employed to do. Very, very sinister, so be careful. It can happen to EVERYBODY who is low-skilled. We’ll all end up GM-cotton pickin’.
My parents got married when they were 16 years old. My dad worked as a construction worker every day of his life until he got MS and passed away. We lived in a trailer park for a large part of my childhood. At several times we were on food stamps. Not the pretty new card that makes you feel good about it. The paper kind that gets you stared at in the line. They werent proud of it, but it helped feed us when things were tough.
While I think people who will not work should not get assistance. There are numerous families out there that work hard and just cant make ends meet. If they make those people do community service while they still work 6 days a week to pay the bills, it will drive them off of food stamps and it will keep the people who dont work on them. So once again it will screw the middle class and reward the lazy.