Victory: Ohio’s plan to deny workers their unemployment insurance is shelved

Some stories are just so satisfying that they deserve to be shared.  Here is one.

In early May, Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine began reopening the state economy.  And to support business and slash state expenses, both at worker expense, he had a “COVID-19 Fraud” form put up on the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services website where employers could confidentially report employees “who quit or refuse work when it is available due to COVID-19.”  Inspectors would then investigate whether the reported workers should lose their unemployment benefits and possibly be charged with unemployment fraud.

Significantly, as Sarah Ingles, the board president of the Central Ohio Worker Center, noted in a statement quoted by the Intercept, the form “does not define what constitutes a ‘good cause’ exemption, and by doing so, may exclude many Ohio workers who have justifiable reasons for not returning to work and for receiving unemployment insurance benefits.”  In other words, “while the state did not take the time to define what a ‘good cause’ exemption includes or does not include, it did have time to develop an online form where employers could report employees.”

However, thanks to the work of an anonymous hacker, the site has now been taken down. In officialese, “The previous form is under revision pending policy references.”  Most importantly, as Janus Rose writing for Motherboard reports:

“No benefits are being denied right now as a result of a person’s decision not to return to work while we continue to evaluate the policy,” ODJFS Director Kimberly Hall told Cleveland.com.

According to Rose, the hacker developed a script that overwhelmed the system:

The script works by automatically generating fake information and entering it into the form. For example, the companies are taken from a list of the top 100 employers in the state of Ohio—including Wendy’s, Macy’s, and Kroger—and names and addresses are randomly created using freely-available generators found online. Once all the data is entered, the script has to defeat a CAPTCHA-like anti-spam measure at the end of the form. Unlike regular CAPTCHAs, which display a grid of pictures and words that the user must identify, the security tool used by the form is merely a question-and-answer field. By storing a list of common questions and their respective answers, the script can easily defeat the security measure by simply hitting the “switch questions” button until it finds a question it can answer.

To make the code more accessible, software engineer David Ankin repackaged the script into a simple command line tool which allows users to run the script in the background of their computer, continuously submitting fake data to the Ohio website.

“If you get several hundred people to do this, it’s pretty hard to keep your data clean unless you have data scientists on staff,” Ankin told Motherboard.

The hacker told Motherboard they viewed their effort as a form of direct action against the exploitation of working people during the COVID-19 crisis.  Score one for working people.

The 1930s and Now: Looking Back to Move Forward

My article What the New Deal Can Teach Us About Winning a Green New Deal is in the latest issue of the journal Class, Race and Corporate Power.  As I say in the abstract,

While there are great differences between the crises and political movements and possibilities of the 1930s and now, there are also important lessons that can be learned from the efforts of activists to build mass movements for social transformation during the Great Depression. My aim in this paper is to illuminate the challenges faced and choices made by these activists and draw out some of the relevant lessons for contemporary activists seeking to advance a Green New Deal.

Advocates of a Green New Deal often point to the New Deal and its government programs to demonstrate the possibility of a progressive state-directed process of economic change.  I wrote my article to show that the New Deal was a response to growing mass activity that threatened the legitimacy and stability of the existing economic and political order rather than elite good-will, and to examine the movement building process that generated that activity.

Depression-era activists were forced to organize in a period of economic crisis, mass unemployment and desperation, and state intransigence. While they fell short of achieving their goal of social transformation, they did build a movement of the unemployed and spark a wave of militant labor activism that was powerful enough to force state policy-makers to embrace significant, although limited, social reforms, including the creation of programs of public employment and systems of social security and unemployment insurance.

Differences between that time period and this one are shrinking and the lessons we can learn from studying the organizing strategies and tactics of those activists are becoming ever more relevant.  The US economy is now in a deep recession, one that will be more devastating than the Great Recession.  US GDP shrank at a 4.8 percent annualized rate in the first quarter of this year and will likely contract at a far greater 25 percent annualized rate in the second quarter.  While most analysts believe the economy will begin growing again in the third quarter, their predictions are for an overall yearly decline in the 6-8 percent range.   As for the years ahead—no one can really say.  The Economist, for example, is talking about a 90 percent economy for years after the current lockdown ends.  In other words, life will remain hard for most working people for some time.

Not surprisingly, given the size of the economic contraction, unemployment has also exploded. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “In the past six weeks, nearly 28 million, or one in six, workers applied for unemployment insurance benefits across the country.”  More than a quarter of the workforce in the following states have filed for benefits: Hawaii, Kentucky, Georgia, Rhode Island, Michigan, and Nevada.  And tragically, millions of other workers have been prevented from applying because of outdated state computer systems and punitive regulations as well as overworked employment department staff.  Even at its best, the US unemployment system, established in 1935 as part of the New Deal reforms, was problematic, paying too little, for too short a time period, and with too many eligibility restrictions.  Now, it is collapsing under the weight of the crisis.

Yet, at the same time, worker organizing and militancy is growing. Payday Report has a strike tracker that has already identified over 150 strikes, walkouts, and sickouts since early March across a range of sectors and industries, including retail, fast food, food processing, warehousing, manufacturing, public sector, health care, and the gig economy.  As an Associated Press story points out:

Across the country, the unexpected front-line workers of the pandemic — grocery store workers, Instacart shoppers and Uber drivers, among them — are taking action to protect themselves. Rolling job actions have raced through what’s left of the economy, including Pittsburgh sanitation workers who walked off their jobs in the first weeks of lockdown and dozens of fast-food workers in California who left restaurants last week to perform socially distant protests in their cars.

Rather than defending workers, governments are now becoming directly involved in suppressing their struggles. For example, after meatpacker walkouts closed at least 22 meat plans and threatened the operation of many others, triggered by an alarming rise in the number of workers testing positive for the virus, President Trump signed an executive order requiring companies to remain open and fully staffed. It remains to be seen how workers will respond.  In Pennsylvania, the Governor responded to nurse walkouts at nursing homes and long-term care facilities to protest a lack of protective equipment by sending national guard members to replace them.

Activists throughout the country are now creatively exploring ways to support those struggling to survive the loss of employment and those engaged in workplace actions to defend their health and well-being.  Many are also seeking ways to weave the many struggles and current expressions of social solidarity together into a mass movement for radical transformation.  Despite important differences in political and economic conditions, activists today are increasingly confronting challenges that are similar to ones faced by activists in the 1930s and there is much we can learn from a critical examination of their efforts.  My article highlights what I believe are some of the most important lessons.