× Expand JUAN LUIS MARTINEZ/GDA via AP Image

In his annual State of the Commonwealth speech this month, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló announced a highly anticipated and in many ways conventionally conservative package of policy proposals to address the island's ongoing economic and energy crises: privatizing the island's battered energy grid, cutting corporate and individual taxes, and reforming the education system through charter schools and educational vouchers. Tucked away near the end of the governor's speech and overshadowed by such front-page proposals was a call to enact work requirements for welfare recipients on the island.

“It's important that we protect and strengthen programs for the most vulnerable,” said Rosselló. ”Likewise, we must incentivize those that can work to find dignified work and insert themselves in the economy.”

Puerto Rico's unemploymentrate was almost 11 percent in January. The commonwealth's labor participation rate has recovered slightly from a record low of roughly 39 percent in October, but still ranks among the lowest in the world. In this context, pushing welfare beneficiaries to re-enter a labor market in which non-welfare recipients can't find work looks positively perverse. The requirements can only be understood as a capitulation to the demands of the seven-member federal oversight board tasked with guiding the island through its fiscal crisis.

Fundamentally, the proposal fails to take into account the dearth of jobs on the island after a decade of recession and two devastating hurricanes. Since 2006, when tax breaks that had brought manufacturers to the island expired, hundreds of thousands of jobs have disappeared from Puerto Rico.

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