treated like thieves by welfare officer

When the small business run by Minette and her husband folded, they spent four months looking for employment and, after many job rejections and mounting debts, they asked the welfare office for financial assistance -- as was their right to do -- but never expected to be humiliated and treated like thieves.

"Honestly, we were treated like thieves trying to gain unlawful benefits or something," says Minette. "We had to expose every aspect of our private lives to a supercilious clerk who, at another time in history, would have made a great concentration camp guard, and when she saw that we had quite a bit of equity in our home she enquired why we were seeking benefits when we could sell our home and support ourselves."

"When we protested, she pointed out that selling up would allow us to move to an area with higher employment prospects," explains Minette. "We sat there stunned and wondered about all the tax we had paid over the years to protect us from this very situation."

"Why should we sell our home? We weren't expecting to be unemployed forever," cries Minette. "Every industry goes though seasonal slumps and if we couldn't find employment in the areas of our expertise then we needed help finding alternative employment. That help, and financial assistance, was why we turned to the welfare office in the first place and we couldn't believe how unhelpful and rude the social security clerk was!"

"Were they running a racket or something? Was the game to target the more well-off unemployed, brow beat them, encourage them to sell their homes at a loss and either buy them up themselves or get a cut from the agent or purchaser?"

"Sure, we'd heard horrible stories about the welfare office," says Minette, "but that sort of stuff only happened to the deadbeats, the drug addicts and the serial single moms didn't it? Wrong, it happens to decent people like us, too."

"So, what is the alternative to accepting welfare?" asks Minette. "Sure, we could have sold our home at a loss and used the money to rent a place and pay for expenses while waiting for a suitable job to materialize -- but eventually we would have been forced into a career change, having to re-train and do all of that stuff -- and in the meantime we would have lost our home and eroded our finances to such an extent that it might be years before we built up enough to pay a deposit on another home."

"I know that a lot of people are so turned off welfare and being treated like a social pariah that they resort to pawn shops and loan sharks, run up huge credit card debts, redraw from their mortgages until the debt is worth more than the asset or beg loans from family members," says Minette. "Some even think that prostitution and crime are better alternatives than going to the welfare office for assistance."

"And this is the sort of reckless behavior that our government encourages by making welfare benefits so hard and humiliating to get, and by turning all welfare recipients into thieving social pariahs."

"Proposals to cut payments and bring in a system of food, gas and clothing vouchers is just another draconian idea designed to abuse the unemployed -- and the sick, disabled and elderly," says Minette. "Sure, they say it is to prevent abuse of the system, but in countries where food stamps are used their recipients only exchange them at half face value for drugs -- and the point I'm making is this: why should the majority of genuine unemployed people looking for work be penalized by the minority of those abusing the system?"

"We both found good jobs eventually," says Minette, "but our experience with the social security system -- which is a total misnomer -- will live in our memories forever as the most humiliating experience of our lives and never again will we be so naive as to believe that the taxes we pay are any sort of insurance for us and that our government cares."

"The government, as far as we are concerned, is a big fat thief," says Minette. "It takes our money and pretends it's using it for social services, but when you need to tap into those social services you're given a kick in the guts."

"Frankly, we have less respect for the government than we have for the guys who regularly raid our neighborhood for items of value they can sell to support themselves," says Minette, "and we've now found a clever accountant who has arranged our finances and assets in such a way that we hardly pay any tax and can draw on our own funds should we ever get into trouble again."

"And that, guys, is the best alternative to welfare should you be in a position to do it," laughs Minette. "If we had known these 'tricks' when we had our business maybe we could have remained afloat, but we were young and naive and thought we knew it all, you know how it is."