Some time ago I heard a radio drama on one of the Old Time Radio internet streams and I am trying to find the name of the show.
The story is set in a future society which is overseen by a government providing universal social security to all. When a person becomes unemployed they continue to receive their former salary and their dependents (wife and non-adult children) continue to receive free health care, free education etc the same as the rest of society. The unemployed person is also eligible for free education and training to update their current role or retraining in other fields of their interest to fill job vacancies. The society is not depicted as being authoritarian or undemocratic or where everything is owned and controlled by the state but that the benefits for all and rules have been agreed upon by all (or a huge majority) as being in the best interests of the welfare and well-being of all members of the society as well as to the benefit and functioning of society as a whole. Society generally works very well and the people are contented with life and the government and how it operates.
The significant major negative issue is that if an unemployed person fails to gain re-employment after 3 years have elapsed, then the person and all their dependents (wife and non-adult children) are executed (no ifs or buts) in order that they are no longer a burden on society.
In this story a computer hardware engineer is nearing the 3 year limit and despite have received re-training for a newer version of the mainframe computer which he used to work on, every government department or corporation vacancy he has applied to work on maintaining their new computer model, he has been rejected. At the very last moment, the manager at the government department which supervises the unemployed double checks his training record and discovers that the training he received for the new computer model was incorrectly recorded as being training for the old computer model and because the government department needs an engineer for their recently acquired new model, he is immediately given the job and his details entered into the system as now being employed. However because the government computer systems only did batch processing (in the evening or at night) the kill order which had already been automatically sent out was received by the execution unit (and this could never be revoked), his family was terminated and soon after the engineer was also detained (I think even whilst working ion the new computer model in the government building) and taken away to be executed.
At the end of the day, the managers of the two parts of the government (employment and termination) have a meeting about the debacle and discuss how sad it was that the department now did not have a person trained to maintain the new computer model, but that the error over the lack of real time communications between the different sections (employment status and kill order issuing) was just one of those unavoidable problems of life and no big deal in the grand order of things viz. society as managed by the government.
The underlying concept and style of the story gave the impression of Canadian rather than US origin.
