You know things have tipped too heavily in favor of management over labor when lawmakers in Ohio want to create a public shame list for unemployed people who miss job interviews.
A new bill, H.B. 395, sponsored by Republican state representatives, aims to create a public registry of individuals who fail to appear for job interviews. It’s intended to shame and discredit recipients of unemployment benefits publicly. How nice.
Here’s how it works: If you’re on unemployment and don’t show up for an interview, employers can tattle to the state, and you might lose your benefits. What’s more, the information could be shared with other employers, creating a bureaucratic blacklist of people who dared to be late, sick, or not suited to a job selling printers at 9 AM on a Monday.
Ohio Wants to Create a Public Shame List for Unemployed People Who Miss Job Interviews
Representative Brian Lorenz, an a**hole and one of the bill’s co-sponsors, says the goal is to “reward professionalism.” What it does is give employers more control in a system already stacked against workers, especially when those same employers ghost job seekers, as if it were a sport.
How about the companies that ghost job seekers? Do they get a punishment too? How many interviews have you been on where you’ve heard nothing back, not even so much as a perfunctory “thank you but no” email? They leave you hanging infinitely, forever wondering if you’ll finally get to live out your dream of typing numbers into a spreadsheet for meager pay and no benefits.
Do they get a punishment? No. Because Representative Brian Lorenz doesn’t care about American workers, he only represents the corporate class. Presenting a bill like this that is so explicitly an assault on the American people should get someone tarred, feathered, and thrown out of society.
However, given the state of Ohio’s conservative leanings over the past decade, this man is likely to be the next governor.
The bill does not provide clear guidance on what counts as a “legit” reason for missing an interview. Sick kid? Dead car battery? Mental health spiral? Good luck explaining that to a bureaucrat juggling thousands of cases and employer complaints.
If Republicans actually, truly cared about cutting government waste, they wouldn’t give this proposed bill a second thought. They would toss it directly into an incinerator.
All this comes at a time when Ohio’s job market isn’t even in crisis. Unemployment is slightly above the national average, sure, but labor force participation is higher than in most states. So why the crackdown? It feels like petty revenge against the working class, designed to scare the most vulnerable workers with the threat of public humiliation.
Nothing gets a pro-corporate Republican more erect than punishing the working-class American.
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