Reporting From the Trenches
Reporting From the Trenches Welfare reform is one area where the press has looked beyond the spin to where the rubber meets the road WASHINGTON OFTEN SEEMS TO BE fonder of make believe than of...
...Incidentally, we are proud to note that some of the best reporting on the effect of welfare reform has been done by two alumni of this magazine: Jason . DeParle of The New York Times and Katherine Boo of The Washington Post...
...Slocial policy analysts and welfare specialists here believe Hawaii’s rising caseloads may result from a combustible mix of a stagnant state economy and a welfare system that, relative to others, has yet to be severely overhauled...
...The drop of more than 650,000 in the last four months is nearly double the 377,000 in the same four months of 1995...
...The agency has only five inspectors-half the number of three years ago-to fulfill its public charge of monitoring 350 centers and hundreds of home day-care operations...
...There’s no way under the current system.’ . . . Confronted with these challenges, some states have hired private, profit-making companies to run parts of their welfare, food stamp and other social service programs...
...The clearest evidence of the trait is its tendency to view a problem as having been dealt with when a legislative solution to it is enacted...
...Another is a ‘pay for performance’ plan, which reduces grants proportionately for every hour of work or training that recipients miss...
...Similar efforts led to the hiring of 80 workers at the company’s Philadelphia hub, about 100 in New York City, and additional workers in other cities...
...Too often the press, instead of exposing the make believe, is part of the conspiracy...
...w i t h the exception of UPS, the five employers said they were either just devising programs or were having limited success finding job candidates who met their standards...
...It was scenarios like these in places like this that critics of last year’s landmark law feared...
...Patricia Watson worked a day at a distant catfish-processing plant but quit after returning home to discover that her baby-sitter could not find her 6-year-old daughter...
...As a result, a reasonably clear picture is emerging of the progress stemming from reform and the problems that have followed in its wake...
...The pace of decline is faster than at any time since welfare rolls peaked at 14.4 million in March 1994...
...The county has also never done a survey tracking where its workfare graduates go...
...What explains the 36 percent rise in welfare recipients in this tropical island state...
...In the absence of any computer system to keep track of those cases, she said, state officials may re-examine childless adults every month to determine if they are still eligible for food stamps...
...The 21-year-old single mother was in college full time to finish her degree so she could enroll in training classes to become an ultrasound technician...
...Who wants to troop around rural America finding out if the latest farm legislation is actually producing the reform it was supposed to...
...My favorite example-since I’m from West Virginia-is mine safety...
...Congress created a host of provisions designed to ease the transition for those already receiving welfare...
...The Washington Post “UPS, with 290,000 workers, signed up last August for a state program in Illinois to help create jobs for people on welfare, becoming the first employer to do so...
...Elizabeth E. Miller, a case manager for South Carolina’s Department of Social Services in rural Barnwell, is trying to figure out how welfare recipients will get to jobs because ‘we have no public transportation, no taxis, no buses.’ Lawrence Jackson, a case manager in Bishopville, S.C., said: ‘The paperwork keeps growing and growing...
...Those who miss appointments or decline work assignments surrender not only their entire cash grant, but all their family’s food stamps and the medical insurance of adults...
...The New York Times “The Congressional Budget Office says one million immigrants may lose food stamps because of the new welfare law...
...Nonetheless, the municipal union’s position is that W P s should not take over jobs previously held by their members...
...How will I know if somebody had aid in Massachusetts if they don’t tell me...
...2 percent Hawaii +36 percent istically expected welfare recipients to devote too much of their paychecks for the care of their children while they were at work...
...That has pushed North Carolina’s welfare rolls down by more than IS%.’’ - The Wall Street Journal “Under the governor’s initial plan, families on welfare would have been required to pay up to 46 percent of thei:r income for child care...
...Sanders figures she still is coming out ahead financially...
...Pete Wilson’s] plan would allow counties to ‘enter into performance-based contracts with nonprofit or for-profit companies to operate nearly all or parts of their welfare programs...
...Or has it proved an unnecessary burden on industry...
...It would cost roughly $3.7 billion over six years to restore their eligibility, the agency said.,’ -The New York Times “While states with far less experience are boasting of early success, the first recipients to leave the rolls are often the easiest to employ...
...With out a national automated system, it's difficult to see how we can carry out the five-year limit...
...Reporting From the Trenches Welfare reform is one area where the press has looked beyond the spin to where the rubber meets the road WASHINGTON OFTEN SEEMS TO BE fonder of make believe than of reality...
...Since March, new applications have declined by about 30 percent...
...The Charleston (WVA...
...It’s hurting peop,le like me who are trying,’ she said...
...The Boise Rescue Mission, which provides free food and housing in the downtown area, serves about 240 meals a day, almost double the 125 meals served at this time last year...
...The Wall Street Journal “The best guess is that as many as 100 local companies have hired welfare recipients as a result...
...Caseloads dropped in every state in the last four months of 1996...
...The New Kirk Times “State officials, especially those on the front lines, do not have the luxury of criticizing the new policy...
...Republican leaders defend the provision by arguing that people will not need food stamps once they get public-service jobs...
...All told, some 30,000 welfare recipients have moved off cash assistance and into work in the first 18 months of the new North Carolina program, says Pheon Beal, a state official who oversees Work First...
...They will simply report what the union and the company say or tilt the story according to whether they are liberal or conservative...
...We publish the following excerpts from that reporting, first so that our readers will know the story they tell, and second so that other journalists will be inspired to do similar investigations not only of welfare reform but of what is really happening with other government programs where the rubber hits the road...
...The Washington Post “When [Gov...
...Such deficiencies cloud the local forecast for welfare reform, which in coming months will channel another 4,000 District children-and millions of tax dollars-into already overextended subsidize day-care establishmentsl’ - The, Washington Post Research assistance provided by Christine Sosa...
...One who found a job through the new network is Debra Sanders, 34, a single mother of two who had been on the welfare rolls for 12 years...
...Bill Clinton started-talking about the 100,000 cops that his crime bill had put on the street as soon as the bill was passed in 1994...
...Second, aliens who become citizens are eligible to continue to receive benefits...
...They are supposed to make it work, and their concerns are intensely practical...
...USA Today ‘‘Wisconsin] expanded three new programs in Milwaukee last March and saw its caseloads,suddenly plummet...
...The New York Times “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the $29 billion available in the welfare act for child care falls $1.4 billion short of the projected need over six years...
...The company, which is based in Atlanta, gave parttime jobs starting at $8 an hour for roughly 25 hours a week to 31 residents of the Chicago area who completed a training program...
...Welfare caseloads shrank 5% in the last four months of 1996, and 10% in all of 1996...
...Many of the children involved come from troubled homes and need more, not less nurturing, and even mothers of infants only a few months old are subject to work requirements...
...The Washington Times Wyoming -73 percent Idaho -62 percent Wisconsin -58 percent Oregon -52 percent Colorado -51 percent Mississippi -50 percent Oklahoma -49 percent Tennessee -49 percent South Carolina -49 percent Indiana -49 percent Alabama -48 percent Kansas -46 percent North Dakota -44 percent Florida -42 percent Massachussetts -41 percent Utah -40 percent Montana -39 percent Virginia -39 percent Georgia -39 percent South Dakota -38 percent Ohio -38 percent Michigan -38 percent Kentucky -34 percent Maine -34 percent New Hampshire -34 percent West Virginia -33 percent Louisiana -32 percent Maryland -30 percent Missouri -30 percent North Carolina -30 percent Arkansas -30 percent Arizona -29 percent Texas -29 percent Pennsylvania -28 percent Iowa -27 percent New Jersey -27 percent Vermont -23 percent Nebraska -22 percent Delaware -21 percent Minnesota -21 percent Illinois -20 percent Nevada -20 percent New Mexico -17 percent Washington -17 percent New York -15 percent Rhode Island -15 percent Connecticut - 9 percent California - 5 percent Alaska - 4 percent D.C...
...Her welfare and foodstamp benefits are being scaled down, and her rent in government housing will rise as her income goes up, but M.S...
...Savings-and-loan deregulation is the most disastrous recent example of the failure...
...Only half of those-or 21 percent of the totalwere still working after the program’s 15th month...
...But labor unions, fearing the loss of jobs, are planning to oppose the idea...
...About 42 percent of the participants found jobs...
...The New York Times “[Tlhe penalties in Mississippi are the nation’s toughest...
...The new rules will extend her time in school, and as a result, her time on public assistance...
...The New York Times ‘While the five companies together employ nearly 700,000 workers in the United States, they have hired only a few hundred welfare recipients through targeted efforts since the welfare bill was signed last summer...
...Rosenbloom said, ‘was that a state’s standards for employment were not the marketplace’s standards...
...District day care is not an equal-opportunity hazard...
...Officials estimate that 75 percent of those left on the rolls in Oregon suffer from mental health problems that could interfere with a job...
...As a sonographer, she could get a real job at $15 an hour and become the kind of productive and independent citizen she’s always hearing about on television...
...Their supervisor has been absent on a workers’ compensation leave since mid-1996...
...So far, 11 other states, including Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio, have already applied for similar waivers by declaring that there are certain pockets in those states where the labor market is too weak to absorb welfare recipients...
...And the gold rush already has begun...
...The New York Times “So why, in the midst of an unprecedented national drop in public assistance caseloads, has Hawaii remained a stubborn exception...
...The Washington Post “Gov...
...Curley Barron threw up her hands and returned her niece and nephew to foster care...
...Pride in Work . . . is putting 748 childless adults to work at 177 sites...
...The county has been able to put only 160 women with dependent children to work because it has little money to spare for day care...
...But the hotel chain, which has put nearly 600 people through its welfare-to-work program in the past few years, has proved that welfare recipients can work, and its ambitious project may well become a model for corporate America...
...Most had their benefits restored within two months, after complying with the program’s rules...
...The Washington Post “Wisconsin’s incentive system is clouded with uncertainty: The White House has made it clear that states that put welfare recipients in public service jobs must pay the minimum wage...
...The Washington Times “The Westchester County workfare program has become a national model by sharply cutting welfare rolls and putting more than IS,OOO welfare recipients to work since 1989.’’ - The New York Times “Fourteen welfare recipients, many of them homeless, crossed the stage [in Arlington, Va.,] to become the latest graduates of Marriott International Inc.’s welfare-to-work program...
...Half acknowledge drug or alcohol abuse, and half say they have been beaten or sexually abused...
...The unions demand that welfare workers ultimately be made regular unionized employees...
...The New York Times “Misty Greene had a plan to get off welfare...
...By 1998, it will be spending $180 million annually . . . Despite the state spending on child care, which she praises, [Anne Amesen, the director of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families,] says the state’s system will be inadequate for the large numbers of kids it will now have to accommodate...
...They decided recipients had to have work experience, but college didn’t count...
...But this does not take into consideration t-he vast need for child care subsidies by poor families who are already worlung at the minimum wage or only slightly above, child advocates say...
...This failure to report in a timely manner what was going wrong with the S&L deregulation ultimately cost the government-meaning us- $130 billion...
...The strongest attraction, however, is the potential for billions of dollars in new businesses...
...One of the things we quickly discovered,’ Ms...
...The New York Times “‘Everything we do is done by hand with calculators and pen and pencils," "[Lee Hanna, the welfare eligibility manager for Mariposa County, Ca.] said...
...Los Angeles Times “Under the new law, most non-elderly childless adults would not be eligible to collect food stamps for more than three months in any three-year period...
...Papers all over the country have been looking into the actual results of this reform...
...The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) routinely fails to visit each center once a year, as required by law...
...Deregulation was followed by about a decade of journalistic indifference to finding out whether the effects of deregulation were good or bad...
...And community advocates say they are concerned about the ethics of injecting profits into the government’s traditional role as caretaker of the poor...
...Thirty percent have criminal histories...
...The governor proposed to make that formula far more generous yesterday by asking the legislature to require that recipients, no matter how many children they have, pay no more than 16 percent of their paycheck toward day care...
...Republicans exempted three important groups from losing welfare benefits: aliens who have worked for 10 years (including husbands and wives who together meet the IO-year requirement), those who have served or are serving in the military, and refugees (who, because they often have left their countries abruptly, are allowed to receive benefits for five years after entry to give them time to adjust to life in America...
...Dubbed “WEPs,” they work for the city at minimum wage for enough hours a week to earn their welfare stipend...
...The retention rate is a huge problem,’ said Bill Brister, a researcher at Millsaps College in Jackson, who evaluated the program...
...A tougher test of last year’s welfare overhaul will be posed by those who remain, especially over the next few years, as time limits threaten to chase them from the rolls...
...Irma C. Bermea, deputy commissioner of the Texas Department of Human Services, which issues food stamps to more than 2.3 million people a month, said the state might have to keep manual records on cases affected by the new work rules...
...I don’t want to stay on this forever, but it’s going to take me so much longer because I can’t go to school full time.’ ‘They’re defeating their purpose,’ she said...
...She and her kids will be on welfare at least three years longer than she planned...
...We’re definitely feeling the crunch,’ said the Reverend Tony Chung, executive director of the mission...
...The Washington Post Problems “As Idaho’s new welfare law nears the five month mark, the number of people on welfare has fallen sharply, but the lines at soup kitchens are stretching into the streets...
...We estimate that if these categories are combined, around 60 percent of aliens receiving welfare benefits when the bill passed will continue receiving benefits...
...But now I’m happy to report there is an exception to the rule of make believe...
...A third is a program of bureaucratic incentives that measures caseload reductions and threatens lagging offices with a loss of money...
...But today, fewer than 50,000 more cops are actually working...
...Tommy] Thompson took office in 1987, [Wisconsin] spent $12 million a year on child care...
...It is welfare reform...
...You have no idea what it’s like to go from dependence to independence,” she said...
...Already in both states, the opportunities have sparked intense competition among a range of small to giant corporations...
...Moreover, the recipients complain that workfare interferes with the time they need to look for jobs...
...The Washington Post “[l’]ublic-employee unions are up in arms . . . and nowhere more so than in New York City, where Mayor Rudolph W Giuliani has already placed about 35,000 welfare recipients in his Work Experience Program...
...Unfortunately, only about 10 states offer workfare slots to food-stamp recipients...
...At least 18 states have federally approved family cap policies, in which welfare mothers do not receive more cash if they have additional children...
...The welfare rolls in Milwaukee have fallen by 7,235 families in the 10 months since the program began, compared with a decline of 2,753 families in the previous year...
...About 19 percent violated the rules and lost all cash and food stamps...
...No union members have been laid off...
...Has the bill designed to protect miners actually done so...
...One is a ‘diversion program,’ which requires applicants to perform 60 hours of job search activities as a condition of getting aid...
...Indeed, based on Westchester’s experience, there is little evidence so far that workfare leads to the steady jobs its champions promised...
...We are actually lowering Wisconsin’s standards on child care, and that is unforgivable,’ she says...
...Percent change in number of welfare recipients January 1993-July 1997...
...Mississippi began its welfare experiment in the fall of 1995, operating a trial program called Work First in six counties...
...George E. Pataki plans to seek a waiver from new federal welfare rules requiring adults to work in exchange for food stamps, sparing tens of thousands of the neediest New Yorkers from the prospect of losing their benefits, his aides said today, . . . In seeking the waiver, the governor, who has trumpeted his record on economic growth, is basically acknowledging that there are not enough jobs in the state to absorb food stamp recipients...
...The New York Times “Municipal efforts to protect children in washington, D.C.] day-care centers have ranged from haphazard to nonexistent...
...For government officials who are intimidated or confused by welfare reform, the idea might offer relief...
...The Wall StreetJournal “[California Gov...
...First, Congress provided everyone with a one-year transition to adjust to the new policy...
...Busy caring for her ailing mother, she refused to join a work program and therefore lost the $435 in cash and food stamps she was receiving for the children’s monthly support...
...The New York Times “Nearly three years after a controversial ‘family cap’ welfare-reform policy began in New Jersey, the state’s welfare birthrate has continued to drop...
...That is, almost as many people temporarily lost their benefits as landed and kept their jobs...
...Most of those workers were put on the payroll by just one company, United Parcel Service of America Inc...
...Fortytwo percent lack a high school education...
...Progress “More than 1.3 million people left the welfare rolls in 1996-more than 650,000 of them in just the last four months of the year, after the law was signed...
...the city is relying entirely on attrition...
...But governors have argued that they will need more money if they have to pay $4.75, an hour to recipients who resort to the most rudimentary state-created job...
...These workers are saving the city some $600 million a year compared with what it would pay union members in equivalent positions...
...One of them, Rhonda Taylor, rose to sing to the gathering and choked up with emotion...
...In addition to the old forms for determining eligibility, we now have a whole new set of paperwork for welfare reform -employment plans, individual self-sufficiency plans, referrals to job clubs and so on.’ Indeed, case managers still have all the old duties: interviewing applicants, verifying income and expenses, assessing eligibility, visiting welfare recipients in their homes...
...To keep her check, Greene cut her college hours in half, and found a job at the local senior center lutchen where she works half a day...
...Meanwhile, penalty rates were high...
...Reisman and others say that the original plan unrealReducing the Rolls "States with strong welfare- to work programs are cutting their welfare rolls dramatically in just four years, according to one new analysis...
...The purpose is to get off welfare and they’re just delaying that...
...Gazette “Because of union resistance, Westchester’s Pride in Work program is forced to offer nonessential work that provides little preparation for the job market...
...The one thing you can be sure of is that reporters don’t go into the mines to find out...
...Since the contracts being awarded are unprecedented, industry officials said the potential for profit is still speculative...
...Records indicate the majority of centers with lapsed licenses are in the District’s poorest neighborhoods...
...We were being sent people certified by state job training programs who could not do simple math equations, had little sense of grammar and were below standards in performing functions...
...But last year, the federal and state governments devised another plan to get people like Greene off welfare...
...The Immigration and Naturalization Service has a host of waivers for elderly or disabled aliens trying to naturalize...
...Government experts predict that eventually half the aliens who would otherwise lose their benefits will become citizens...
...This time the story didn’t end with the ‘passage of the bill in 1996...
...The New York Times “Last year’s welfare reform law ended most welfare for aliens who have not worked to earn their benefits...
...The program, run with federal permission, placed about 7,000 recipients in job-search classes...
...This is a serious concern...
Vol. 30 • January 1998 • No. 1
