The Poverty of Workfare

...Credible social research shows that one group of recipients uses welfare only briefly and never returns...

...And in the short term, a bad situation is likely to get worse for those at the lower end of the labor market...

...According to its findings, only 38 percent of 7,502 adult Milwaukee welfare recipients who were dropped from family cash-assistance rolls in 1996 earned as much as a fulltime minimum-wage worker would have made during the fourth quarter of that year...

...Weisbrot found that the U.S...

...We might also consider the case of Holland, Michigan, one of six sites for an ambitious state welfare-to-work experiment called Project Zero...

...Only 15 percent of recipients stay on welfare continuously for five years or more...

...Children are only children in the short term," argues Sharon Daley of Catholic Charities USA, "and when they are hungry this year or going without health care this year it has a lifelong impact on them...

...Without comprehensive evaluations that include systematic tracking of those who exit public assistance—no such evaluation is required under current welfare law—there is no proof that adults leaving welfare are moving out of poverty and into employment-based "self-sufficiency...

...former recipients are now successfully pursuing opportunities in a free-enterprise system replete with them...

...DISSENT /Fall 1998 n 55 WORKFARE Limits of Work Opportunity Such an explanation may seem odd when the economy is being termed "as good as it gets" by editorial-page pundits and other enthusiasts of growth...

...The first holds that recipients' sense of self-worth is enhanced by any legal paid employment...

...Work First" Given welfare recipients' considerable barriers to employment and employers' lack of interest in tackling those obstacles, any sincere attempt to help welfare families bridge the job gap would involve a significant government investment in training and education...

...These "easy transitions" constitute the labor market "cream" of the adult welfare population—persons with enough education and work experience to move with relative ease into the workplace on a long-term and fulltime basis...

...Researchers find no solid evidence that welfare receipt by parents causes welfare dependency in children...

...But a comprehensive study of state welfare programs by Tufts University Center on Hunger and Poverty finds that only eighteen states have improved their commitment to helping recipients prepare for and find work under new plans formed to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the federal block grants that replaced Aid for Dependent Children under the Personal Responsibility Act...

...Tens of thousands of "workfare" participants in these jurisdictions push brooms, answer phones, pick up garbage, and sort clothes (among other low-level jobs) in working conditions that are often significantly inferior to those of the regular workers performing the same tasks...

...There's just no way the results would be positive...

...That testimony is consistent with a recent study by economist Mark Weisbrot of the Washington, D.C.based Preamble Center for Public Policy...

...The second maintains that the U.S...

...Holt estimates that roughly nine hundred Adams County residents now find work in the Wisconsin Dells...

...Kleppner and Theodore found 56 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 that the odds against a former welfare recipient finding a livable-wage job in the Midwestern labor market between 1997 and 2000 are ninety-seven to one...

...the shelves are bare...

...They constructed that livable wage out of a basic budget covering the cost of household necessities and work-related expenses for a family of three, including food, housing, utilities, transportation, health care, clothing, child care, and personal care, with no budgeting for savings, recreation, or medical or other emergencies...

...Whereas militant "work first" states like Michigan and Wisconsin are already requiring work from all able-bodied recipients, the Personal Responsibility Act set a two-year deadline for states to start cutting off recipients who don't get a job...

...Although more recent policy changes, including the 1996 federal reform, may increase caseload decline, they expect a future recession to swell the rolls, consistent with historical trends...

...As Jim Wallis, convenor of Call to Renewal, an antipoverty network of black churches, evangelical Christians, Catholics, and mainline Protestants, relates it, Project Zero was a momentary success in Holland—until the transitional supports ran out late last year...

...As one workfare worker told the Times, "We don't learn anything here...

...An attempt at such research by Columbia University's School of Social Work collapsed after the city insisted on the right to review and respond to any report before publication...

...His most recent publication is Find a Job: The Recent History and the Future of Welfare "Reform" in the Midwest (Northern Illinois University, 1998...

...Myths of Dependency and the Decline of Caseloads But this tale of triumphant American values and economic betterment wrongly assumes that people need welfare mainly because they refuse to work and that wanting a decent job is the key thing required for getting and keeping one...

...Challenging enough for ordinary job-seekers with years of work experience, this is the competitive job market into which states and the federal government propose to introduce millions of welfare recipients, who are disproportionately young minority women with small children, few job skills, limited education, and low scores on standardized tests of ability and achievement...

...economy) of the 1990s is simply not producing sufficient "work opportunity" for people in the unskilled segment of the labor market...

...In a recent study of six Midwestern states, Paul Kleppner of Northern Illinois University and Nikolas Theodore of the Chicago Urban League defined a livable-wage job as one that pays an annual pre-tax wage of at least $25,907...

...For the very first time," Sharon Daley of Catholic Charities USA reported in December last year, "our agencies and parishes are reporting they are having to turn people away...

...This perspective is dangerously indifferent to the fact that adults on family cash assistance have children whose long-term life chances depend on conditions in the here and now...

...Even if they could earn this wage steadily in a full-time job, he finds, most recipients will have incomes below the poverty level after paying for transportation and child care...

...We're not seeing people rushing the doors of Congress and the White House...

...At the same time, dubious methodology undermines the claim that welfare recipients enjoy an abundance of labor-market possibilities...

...Penney, and Safeway had no such plans...

...Twenty-three states have actually reduced their commitment to job-readiness and job finding for people on welfare in the TANF era...

...Given their special disadvantages, argues senior economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution, recipients can expect to WORKFARE make no more than six or seven dollars an hour in the current job market...

...It doesn't make a difference to poor people...

...And mayoral offices and charities cite cuts in welfare benefits and the insistence that recipients find work in a context of insufficient job market opportunity as the leading cause...

...Even more troubling than a possible shortage of low-skilled jobs is the fact that they pay so little...

...Of thirty-four cities surveyed by the U.S...

...Although it accords strongly with core components of the American creed—the work ethic, personal responsibility, self-sufficiency/ independence, fear of statism, and so on—and the widespread neoliberal notion that the "free market" provides the solution to nearly all social and political problems, it conflicts with a stark underlying reality of the contemporary economy: the shortage of adequate job opportunities for welfare recipients...

...At the same time, the city's "one size fits all" approach puts participants in dead-end, low-skill jobs, often despite work experience and education...

...But Jefferson finds that this "top tier" has already been absorbed by the expanding job market...

...The notion that most people on welfare become dependent on it is a vicious myth...

...At the same time, considerable anecdotal evidence is gathering to counter the tales of individual labor-market victory routinely told by government officials...

...54 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 "Off Welfare and Worse Off" If an expanding job market best explains the declining number of persons receiving cash assistance, what sort of opportunity is that market providing for former recipients...

...The material situation of Glover's family deteriorated in a transition from nonworking to working poverty: they are "off welfare and worse off," according to Bernstein...

...The early results for Wisconsin's more than ten thousand workfare participants are as yet unclear...

...The people at the bottom can be driven yet further down as long as they do not disturb the more comfortable decks with noisy rebellions...

...There is a whole segment of the population who are simply outside the mainstream of society...

...The city's determination to prevent analysts from getting information on its welfare program has led Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson to omit New York—home to the country's largest welfare population—from a multimillion-dollar evaluation of welfare reform's impact on urban mothers and children...

...Between August 1995 and September 1997, the county's welfare rolls fell from 247 to 17 persons...

...In my neighborhood," Wallis reports, "I never see any difference day to day on the street because of these rises in the business cycle...

...To earn this income, a person would have to work full time at thirteen dollars an hour...

...Reform is a friendly sounding term for this decade's explosion of state and federal initiatives that cut welfare benefits, end cash assistance to poor families, and push assistance recipients to get a job—any job—as soon as possible...

...Even big companies that hire large numbers of low-skilled workers, such as Taco Bell, KFC, J.C...

...To make ends meet, Glover gets groceries several times a week from a local charity...

...In two celebrated cases, New York City and Wisconsin (the slogan of the latter's welfare program is "only work should pay") require recipients to work in unpaid, unskilled, and often degrading positions as a precondition for 58 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 receiving welfare...

...There were lots of jobs, and a good economy, and all the neighborliness of western Michigan...

...Consider the case of Adams County, Wisconsin, in the vanguard state of militant welfare reform...

...Chamber of Commerce found that three-quarters of the country's hundred largest firms had no programs to hire people off welfare...

...DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 59...

...Ninety-two percent of the cities providing jobs data in a survey by the Mayors' Conference report that their local economies are not generating enough low-skilled employment to comply with the federal government's new work-participation requirements under the Personal Responsibility Act...

...A recent New York State survey showed that only 29 percent of the more than 350,000 New York City residents dropped from the welfare rolls from July 1996 to March 1997 live in families whose heads found full- or even part-time jobs...

...PAUL STREET is a research associate at the Office for Social Policy Research at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill...

...But far from lifting her out of poverty, Glover now takes home $353 every two weeks, compared with the $417 she got on welfare...

...And good church people were involved in making that happen...

...There is no acceptable moral calculus, of course, whereby children should be judged worthy of basic material supports on the perceived strength or weakness of their parents' work ethic...

...This "livable-wage" cutoff is controversial, but even using the federal government's worse-than-Spartan poverty level of $12,278 for a family of three, long recognized as an insufficient measure of economic well-being, the Midwestern worker-tojob ratio is twenty-two to one for unskilled workers, including welfare recipients (typically among the least advantaged members of the unskilled labor pool...

...In the words of a policy guide recently posted on the Web site of the U.S...

...Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson and New York City's Mayor Giuliani insist that workfare teaches the ennobling value of work (jolting people out of the alleged culture of dependency) and provides a springboard to "real jobs" in the private sector...

...The state counted as employed anyone who made $100 or more in three months after leaving welfare...

...The larger number of participants who lack such credentials receive little, if any, of the training, counseling, and education they will require to move permanently off welfare...

...Consistent with these research blind spots, Wisconsin hires motivational speakers to tell welfare recipients that they can find "good jobs" if only they engage in "positive thinking" and "feeling good" about themselves...

...That is the conclusion of Gary Jefferson, vice president of public affairs at United Airlines, which has undertaken an ambitious effort to hire and retain welfare recipients...

...The Economic Policy Institute, which calculates that this influx of welfare recipients into the low-wage job market, due to begin in the summer of 1999, will reduce by 12 percent the wages of the bottom 30 percent of wage earners...

...One-quarter need assistance in overcoming substance abuse and physical or mental illness as well as intensive training...

...Most of the seven hundred people hired off public assistance by United fall in the category of what Jefferson calls "low-hanging fruit...

...Welfare reform without meaningful labor-market reform is a social policy travesty...

...But now they're losing subsidies for transportation, child care, and food stamps...

...Although its employment opportunities are atypical, Adams County likely reflects the wider national story behind the drop in welfare rolls...

...Add in the Personal Responsibility Act's five-year lifetime limit on cash assistance, the federal government's $60 billion cut from support services for low-income families, the near inevitability of a recession that will push unemployment rates back to "normal" levels, and states' increasing use of sanctions to slash the rolls (so that job expansion is becoming less significant as the explanation for falling caseloads), and you have a recipe for disaster for those in the lower reaches of American society...

...The current recovery, which has reduced unemployment to a twenty-five year low, gives surface credibility to the claim that the system is generating adequate employment chances for anyone willing to work...

...She also had to buy a used car on credit for transportation to work and pay $86 a month for after school care for her children, ages 6 to 15...

...Conference of Mayors late last year, 81 percent said that requests for emergency food assistance rose in 1997...

...The program says you come here for training, but all we do is pick up paper...

...But Jefferson finds that the notion of employing even the cream of the welfare population is a "tough sell," especially to smaller companies, which typically lack the resources for recruiting and training recipients...

...Here we might discern a silver lining in the dark clouds of welfare reform...

...Kleppner and Theodore's finding of a wide livable-wage job gap for Midwestern welfare recipients is consistent with the national calculations of political scientist John Schwarz, an expert on the country's rising number of working poor...

...In what Wallis calls a "crisis of biblical proportions," emergency food and shelter requests rose by averages of 17 and 12 percent, respectively...

...One not-so-happy story, that of Semicoe Glover, was related last December in Business Week...

...The results were only slighter better statewide, where just over one-third of former recipients matched this remarkably low income threshold...

...To make matters worse, welfare reform promises to deepen the problem of low unskilled wages by expanding the supply of unskilled workers...

...Hourly wages have actually fallen 9 percent for the bottom fifth of female wage earners since 1979, to $5.79, according to the Economic Policy Institute...

...But a recent series in the New York Times on Giuliani's larger and older program, through which two hundred thousand people have passed since 1995, found that the city is using workfare recipients as cheap labor to displace relatively well-paid civil servants and is eliminating thousands from its welfare rolls for violating new work rules...

...Even more blunt was the comment of a Chamber of Commerce official who said, "If there's a molecular biologist hanging out on welfare, they may fit the potential job matrix of a major pharmaceutical company...

...A second group cycles on and off, often for short periods and never for five straight years...

...In a March 1998 press release, to take one example, Wisconsin's Department of Workforce Development announced that its economy was generating seven "good jobs" for every adult resident receiving cash assistance...

...They do discover significant labormarket participation by recipients, in part to supplement insufficient cash-assistance grants and in part because most adults on welfare actually prefer to work, even when taking a job means putting their children in day care and risking the loss of medical assistance...

...You evaporate that and you get into the second and third tiers...

...When Glover saw welfare reform coming in Massachusetts a few years ago," wrote Business Week commentator Aaron Bernstein, "she decided to get her high-school equivalency degree at a local school...

...AREPORT RELEASED this February by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Employment and Training Institute uses wage data from Wisconsin's Department of Workforce Development to offer a rare early look at the labor-market outcomes of welfare repeal...

...And thwarted in its effort to obtain the names and addresses of New York City residents leaving welfare for use in a scientific study, the New York Times has sued the city...

...economy will create only about one new low-skilled job for every two adults entering the labor market under the terms of the recent federal welfare reform...

...In the twenty-six states that experienced at least a 20 percent decline in per capita Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseloads between 1993 and 1996, these researchers find that 78 percent of the decline was due to economic expansion ("business cycle factors") and only 6 percent to welfare reform...

...This research emphasizes the cycling phenomenon: most welfare recipients leave welfare for work—more than half within one year—but many also return because the jobs they are qualified to fill do not pay enough to meet basic needs...

...Their numbers support the Council of Economic Advisers' findings that declining unemployment resulting from economic expansion, not welfare policy, was the single leading cause of declining U.S...

...It neglected to mention that many welfare recipients are spatially and racially removed from job-rich areas of the state and lack adequate child care, transportation, and other resources to attain jobs...

...Using conventional employment and population statistics from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, Schwarz figures that 23 percent of American households requiring minimally adequate jobs—he defines an adequate job as one paying $7.60 an hour in 1994 dollars, yielding an annual income of $15,000 a year if worked full time with no vacation— were shut out from such employment because of a structural shortage of decent jobs at the end of 1996...

...Seventy-one percent of cities reported that local providers may have to turn people in need away...

...Consistent with the finding that most recipients prefer work to welfare, the number of Americans receiving governmental cash assistance declined 31 percent between January 1993 and September 1997, mirroring an improved labor market...

...Although a majority of Americans surveyed before the 1996 federal reform supported a two-year welfare cutoff in principle, only 25 percent supported cutting off welfare benefits if available jobs for recipients paid wages so low as to "make it difficult to support a family...

...Meanwhile, thanks to de-unionization, globalization, and technological advances, unskilled wages are currently lower than at the beginning of the current recovery...

...In those areas, Michigan officials surveyed recipients to determine their "barriers to employment" and invited local public officials, employers, and agencies to participate in the development of a plan to help recipients overcome obstacles to steady work...

...It ignores evidence that the new welfare rules are deepening the very poverty that gives rise to the need for welfare in the first place...

...Well in advance of 1990s welfare reform, work has been the leading route out of welfare for most recipients, and recipients have used welfare primarily as a safety net, not a way of life...

...But beneath the common reform notion that "there's no such thing as a bad job" for a person on welfare are two assumptions that find little support in common sense, recipients' testimony, or social science literature...

...Officials from the White House down cite dramatic reductions in welfare caseloads since the early 1990s and present inspiring stories as proof that such "tough love" policies— capped and epitomized by the 1996 federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act—are working...

...And this raises a curious possibility: conservatives' historical triumph on this issue may ironically clear the way for future progressive victories on the more fundamental issue of labor-market reform...

...By this view, the possibility that welfare reform may he deepWORKFARE ening short-term poverty for former recipients is outweighed by long-term benefits to people who abandon welfare "dependency" for work...

...A senior economist for DRI/McGraw Hill, the nation's largest ecoDISSENT /Fall 1998 n 57 WORKFARE nomic consulting firm, put it this way to a reporter for the Associated Press last year: "Most large companies are trying as hard as possible to avoid this...

...By slashing the safety net and pushing more people into bad jobs, the welfare zealots of the 1990s may have unwittingly helped set the stage for meaningful debate on issues they would rather not discuss...

...SEVENTEEN years ago, the Reagan administration's welfare chief, Linda McMahon, claimed that brutal cuts in human services for the nation's poorest citizens were proving to be tolerable because "we're not seeing riots...

...Especially troubling is states' widespread refusal to permit people on welfare to include postsecondary education as an acceptable work activity, something that is leading to an exodus of recipients from community colleges and universities...

...Indeed, the American Management Association found that 63 percent of companies it surveyed either do not hire welfare recipients or have no well-defined program to do so...

...The logic of the Clinton administration and many state governors, who have pulled off a welfare repeal that the Reaganites could only dream about, is much the same...

...Even in Wisconsin, the most aggressive state in denying assistance, these researchers attribute just 11 percent of the rolls reduction (Wisconsin caseloads fell by a national "best" 48 percent) to welfare reform and 53 percent to cyclical and seasonal fluctuations in the job market...

...Skimming the Cream...

...This weak capitalist enthusiasm for tapping welfare's reserve army of labor is hardly limited, however, to smaller employers...

...The leaders and cheerleaders of reform depict a welfare program that is being transformed from a "way of life" into a temporary assist for those who hit a pothole or two on the high roads of an expanding job market...

...A recent study by economists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Institute for Research on Poverty (which supports welfare repeal in its home state) analyzes the factors behind Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) caseload declines between 1993 and 1996, a period of significant statelevel experimentation in welfare-to-work reforms...

...Meanwhile, the program of moving people from welfare to work may have already begun to hit a brick wall...

...Despite research showing that an overwhelming majority of recipients who earn postsecondary degrees become financially independent and that those who complete any post-secondary education have a far greater capacity to get and hold a job than those with no higher instruction, states are forcing recipients one or two semesters away from completing training for useful and relatively remunerative jobs such as surgical assistant to drop out and take dead-end, low-paying positions as sales clerks, fast-food cooks, and telephone receptionists...

...We can't wait and watch this academically over a period of years...

...United Airlines takes its welfare-to-work responsibility to mean providing jobs, training, and retention services to top-tier recipients and convincing other employers to do the same...

...And the same Michigan church people are saying, 'What are we going to do now?' You have people with jobs and they're poorer than they were before...

...None of this surprises an anonymous socialservices researcher, who recently told City Limits, a New York magazine, that Giuliani has "no reason to cooperate with an evaluation...

...About all the welfare recipients were put to work...

...welfare rolls between 1993 and 1997...

...Massachusetts and federal statisticians chalk her up as a reform victory, as someone who went from dependency to "self-sufficiency," but her need for private relief mocks that assertion...

...But in constructing its estimate, the state ignored the high skill requirements of many job openings and made no attempt to evaluate the wages and benefits of the available jobs for which people on welfare are actually qualified...

...It overlooked the fact that people being removed from welfare must compete for jobs with other unemployed workers...

...In those same three months, just one in six of those who lost their benefits had incomes above the poverty level and fully 34 percent had no earnings whatsoever...

...The national consensus in favor of welfare reform is qualified by the widespread belief that people require access to real labor-market opportunity if they are to take meaningful "personal responsibility" for their own poverty and progress...

...The report has been challenged by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a staunch welfare-reform advocate, who criticizes the state for not considering recipients who were working off the books, were self-employed, or had moved out of the state...

...The state provided one year of transitional child care, transportation, and medical assisWORKFARE tance to people leaving welfare for work...

...Employers could eventually create enough jobs to employ most adults on welfare, Burtless projects, "but they would be induced to do so only if the prevailing wage for unskilled workers falls...

...But Giuliani's administration has refused to release records that would permit an independent investigation or to conduct such an investigation itself...

...The department derived this remarkable statistic by dividing the state's total estimated 1998 job creation by the number of welfare recipients in Wisconsin-13,342...

...Department of Health and Human Services, "any job is a good job and the best way to succeed in the labor market is to join it...

...Americans need to devise meaningful, long-term solutions for the nation's haunting and interrelated problems of poverty, work, and inequality...

...A 1997 survey by the U.S...

...The conventional wisdom fails to perceive, however, that the economy is developing along bipolar lines...

...Only 20 percent backed the denial of welfare to recipients who could not find a job...

...We simply cannot employ those individuals...

...The two nonprofits place half of the adult welfare population into the "investment needed" category, meaning that they are unemployable without job training...

...These statistics explain why Milwaukee saw sharp increases in homelessness and the use of soup kitchens during 1996 and 1997...

...That helped the mother of six land a job at a Salem day care center in 1995 after 14 years on welfare...

...Conservative intellectuals like the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector, who speaks DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 53 WORKFARE around the country about "the Wisconsin welfare reform miracle," attribute the decline to a 1995 state initiative called "Pay for Performance," which required recipients to work...

...labor market offers remarkable chances for upward job and income mobility to any and all persons willing to work hard and honestly, no matter how humble their origins and steep their disadvantages...

...Meanwhile, emergency-assistance providers and city officials in New York and throughout the country report the counterintuitive phenomenon of rising desperation among America's poorest citizens in the middle of an economic "boom...

...But the county's human-services director, Richard Holt, recently offered a simpler explanation to a reporter from the Wisconsin State Journal: the county's working poor and jobless are benefiting from an employment boom in the Wisconsin Dells region just south of the Adams County border, especially from an increase in winter tourism and the expansion of jobs being offered by the casino industry...

...Wallis's observation and the reports mentioned above make sense in light of recent research showing that the "amazing American jobs machine" (as a front-page article in the Chicago Tribune recently described the U.S...

...Health disabilities, child-care responsibilities, domesticviolence issues, and transportation difficulties compound their employment problems...

...These concerns echo the findings of a joint study by the National Alliance of Businesses and the Welfare-to-Work Partnership, a business consortium (United is a leading member) formed to help companies hire people off welfare, which estimates that only a quarter of the country's four million adult welfare recipients are "work ready" and therefore capable of what Jefferson calls an "easy transition...

...Why would they want anybody to know what's going on...