All forms of government income assistance, from welfare to Employment Insurance to Universal Basic Income, are primarily a subsidy to landlords & employers. To ensure that employers don't have to pay you enough to survive down times & landlord's cash flow is not interrupted.

Dennis Guest, in his 1980 book on Social Security, characterizes the Employment & Social Insurance Act of 1935 as an implicit admission by the state that unemployment was a socio-economic problem rather than a failing of individual workers.

The economic system was seen as "culpable" in that it "produced recurring periods of unemployment," & also in that wages paid during *good times* were insufficient to permit saving for *rainy days*. The act framed income protection as a worker's right rather than charity.

In this light, employment insurance & other social security programs can be seen as an unofficial supplement to the wage, a subsidy to capitalists that allows them to pay lower wages.

The state maintains & funds social security programs around income & housing because they preserve unemployed workers as a reserve army of labor, particularly at low wages. Unemployment is a factor of employment in terms of wages levels & conditions.

Employment & unemployment are flip sides of the same credit card. Both serve as means of social discipline, threatening workers with a worse fate if they don't accept whatever working conditions bosses present them with (in the process suppressing wages as well)

In the 2000s, the BC Liberals were pouring money into workfare programs like JobWave, run by a private company which also funnelled gov't money into subsidizing the wages of employers who hired welfare recipients (as much as half the wages) for minimum wage jobs.

People tend to think of welfare (Income Assistance) & Employment Insurance as very separate institutions due to social stigma attached to the former, however both revolve around employment by default & each play off the other.

Welfare is conceptualized as for lazy people who don't work, however the system is primarily geared toward reintroducing out-of-work at-the-moment workers back into the lowest wage jobs, subsidizing employers & landlords either directly or indirectly.

People are rightfully pointing out that BC's Income Assistance (welfare) rates, even w/ emergency top up, don't match the emergency EI rates. However, this isn't due to a lack of altruism on the part of gov't but systemic function, as EI is based on not quitting one's job.

Welfare rates are purposefully kept low not so much to be cruel to people (altho they are) as to encourage upward mobility thru the system, low wage employment which if accepted long enough (whatever the conditions) would entitle one to temporary EI during down times.