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From: by way of Michael Eisenscher <meisenscher@igc.apc.org> <aenglish@crl.com> To: Recipient list suppressed <Recipient list suppressed> Date: Wednesday, March 25, 1998 10:07 PM Subject: Welfare Justice
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Copyright ) 1998 by Against the Current
Activists Speak Out:
The Poverty of Welfare Reform
interviews with Theresa el-Amin, Amy Hanauer, and Heidi Dorow
Theresa el-Amin is Program Organizer with Southerners for Economic
Justice (SEJ) in Durham, North Carolina. SEJ was founded in 1976
as a community-based organizing project. In Rhode Island she was
a state coordinator for the Jobs With Justice (JwJ)
Welfare/Workfare Action Day. She was interviewed by Dianne Feeley
for ATC.
Against the Current: What was the organizing approach for the December 10 JwJ action?
Theresa El-Amin: The Rhode Island Jobs with Justice chapter decided to partner with organizations resisting the loss of aid to families and children.
The key JwJ community partner, Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), led the way in identifying other groups organizing around welfare-to-work issues. We held a planning meeting with representatives of JwJ member organizations, RI Parents for Progress and Sisters Overcoming Abusive Relationships (SOAR).
Lead organizers at DARE (Rob Baril) and Progresso Latino (Mario Bueno) worked to recruit and build for a community hearing. Rob, as co-chair of the chapter, helped to coordinate activities statewide. Since the national JwJ strategy focused on media attention, we worked to maximize press coverage.
ATC: What were some of the issues in Rhode Island?
TEA: Because of efforts by the Campaign to Eliminate Childhood Poverty, DARE, Parents for Progress, Progresso Latino and SOAR, the state Family Independence Act passed in May 1997 is not as punitive as welfare-to-work laws in many states.
Rhode Island has a population of about one million, with only two Congressional districts and five counties. Half the population lives in Providence County.
The big issue remains the lack of full-time jobs. Temporary employment has become the major source for new jobs. Manpower is the largest employer in the state. Due to high unemployment, Rhode Island was granted waivers when the PRWORA was passed in 1996.
Rhode Island has a large immigrant community. Abuses by temp employers are rampant. The fight over the last two years has been to ensure that immigrants and poor families were not devastated by welfare reform.
Access to child care, and fair compensation for child care workers, ranks high on the list of demands. Public transportation top get to jobs during evening hours and on weekends has been a real problem.
Food stamps for immigrants has been a key demand of the struggle for welfare justice in Rhode Island. Groups organizing during the months prior to RI welfare reform won continued food stamps for legal immigrants through a state-requested waiver.
Groups resisting the punitive impact of welfare reform are fairly well organized.
ATC: How did these groups participate in the National Day of Action?
TEA: We wanted to put a human face on the impact of losing the entitlement for families and children. Our planning meeting was also an educational for JwJ member representatives from the AFL-CIO and other labor groups. Stories from women present influenced the decision to hold a community hearing.
Groups did turnout and supplied speakers for a two-hour hearing that we held on December 10. Testimony supporting key demands for jobs, child care, education/job training and health care was heard by a seventeen-member Workers Rights Board.
Child care workers testified that the state pays them at a rate of $2.36 an hour per child. (As members of DARE, child care workers in 1996 won a five-year battle with the state to receive health care benefits.)
There were a number of reports by members of Progresso Latino regarding temp employer abuses. The statements were so powerful that at one point, a state legislator sitting on the WRB promised that something would be done in the next session on abuses by temp employers.
The event was videotaped by the Institute for Labor Studies and Research. Laborvison, the Institute's community-access channel labor program viewed by union members throughout the state, aired the hearing the following week.
ATC: How did the event advance welfare justice organizing in Rhode Island?
TEA: The media coverage in Rhode Island and nationally was great for Jobs with Justice and for the issue. Stories focused on the lack of jobs. Three major TV network local stations aired coverage, along with two days of articles in the Providence Journal.
The main message promoted in cities where actions were held is the lack of "living wage" jobs for families formerly on AFDC.
The action helped build the labor-community alliance as a strategy for economic justice for welfare recipients and for all workers. The AFL-CIO as a JwJ in Rhode Island has pledged to work on the issue of contingent worker abuses. Two public sector locals joined the JwJ chapter after the December 10 action.
It is important that we continue to reshape the debate. The measure of success or failure of welfare reform is not how much caseloads are reduced. Continuing to raise the issues of jobs, child care and health care helps to shift the discussion and provides a real measurement for whether "reform" is working.
ATC: Now that you've moved from Rhode Island to North Carolina, what's the situation you confront there?
TEA: North Carolina is one of the states that started early "reducing the caseloads." Since 1995 women have been forced into various "Work First" schemes. Now all 100 counties in North Carolina have developed plans and submitted them for state approval.
SEJ is based in Durham, which is considered the most "progressive" area in the state. County commissioners approved the Durham County Work First plan on January 12, 1998.
At the county hearing Jayreza Jarvis, a Work First participant testified, "I made $6000 last year and it was too much money for me to receive Medicaid, but thank God my daughter still has hers."
ATC: How are groups organizing in North Carolina?
TEA: I am impressed with the level of resistance and the connection between community-based organizations and advocacy groups. On January 20, 1998 the Durham City Council approved a living wage ordinance of $7.55 an hour.
The former Legal Services reorganized and declined federal funding, in order to act as more of a voice for low-income and unemployed workers. Renamed the North Carolina Justice Center, it is a hotbed of activity linking the efforts of non-profits working on immigrants rights, welfare and other justice issues.
Three organizationsSEJ, North Carolina Fair Share and North Carolina Hunger Networkin 1997 formed the NC Welfare Reform Collaborative. This is a statewide effort to address the crisis of the highly punitive NC welfare reform program, Work First.
Women around the state meet regularly to tell stories of sanctions reducing benefits, and of their fightback efforts. At a recent meeting, women echoing the Jobs with Justice message of welfare justice as a human rights issue help up small blue books with the text of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
ATC: How are your concentrating your efforts?
TEA: It's important to make links with the small organized labor movement and the community-based and religious organizations. Here in right-to-work North Carolina, where unionization is about 4% (compared to Rhode Island at nearly 20%) of the labor force, it's especially important to build the labor-community-religious alliance.
There are obvious links among the right to organize, privatization and welfare justice. I will continue to work on building the community-labor alliance for unity of effort.
I'm very glad to be in the mix with folks who have been working in
North Carolina to organize unions and build worker organizations.
Being in North Carolina realizes a twelve-year goal of returning to
the South to organize.
_________________________________________________________________
AMY HANAUER RUNS the Milwaukee office of the Center on Wisconsin
Strategy. She previously worked as a policy analyst for State
Senator Gwendolynne Moore. Dianne Feeley interviewed her for
Against the Current.
ATC: What are the barriers to employment for people being kicked off welfare?
AH: The single biggest barrier is finding a decent job. By that I mean full-time work with some job security, paying a minimum of $7-8 an hour, with potential for advancement, regular raises and benefits, particularly of course health insurance benefits.
Finding a decent job is a bit less of a problem right now in the Milwaukee area, where there's a resurgence of manufacturing and construction employment and the economy is growing. But it's more of a problem in the rest of the country, and at most times in history.
We happened to get lucky in that welfare was eliminated at a time when the official unemployment rate is extremely low, but at most times in the last twenty years there would have been substantially more hardshipand there will be, in the next downturn.
After job quality, the three biggest barriers to employment are transportation, childcare and educational training.
Transport is a huge, huge problem for central city residents and can be an even bigger problem in rural areas. The bus system here isn't great at all, and our economic reality is that most of the unemployed live in the central city while the jobs are out in the suburbs.
In dealing with childcare, people are enormously resourceful, having sisters and boyfriends and mothers take care of their children, or trading child care with neighbors who work different shifts. But it remains an enormous issue, especially for single parents with more than one child.
Then there's access to educational training. Any job requires some training, especially any decent job with a career ladder; job-linked training is a very important need in our system right now.
ATC: Milwaukee has passed a living-wage ordinance. Does that have any impact on the private sector?
AH: Living wage ordinances are a great way to establish a basic floor for public sector wages, and I think eventually we'll see those floors forcing a boost in private-sector wages as well. For communities where lots of former welfare recipients are being pushed into county-level home health care jobs, or jobs with the parks department, this wage floor is a crucial component.
In Milwaukee, we're fortunate enough to have a lot of private-sector employment available, where the wages are already quite a bit higher than our living wage ordinance mandates. [Milwaukee's ordinance mandates wages of $7.70 an hour plus benefits for jobs with the school board, and $6.05 plus benefits for jobs with the city.]
I think also right now, given the economy, wages here are being pushed up because of the labor shortage, rather than because of the living wage. But especially if the economy worsens, that floor will be enormously helpful for those working in low-paying jobs, private or public.
ATC: What's the way to deal with the barriers you've described?
AH: The key is to recognize that we need to get adequate funding to pay for these servicesand that this is going to be much more expensive than the old AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) used to be. AFDC was really cheap--less than 1% of the federal budget, and about 2% of the state budget.
Dealing with the barriers may sometimes mean building political alliances that are unusual, which may be our greatest hope for getting these things funded.
One thing that's true about job-linked training is that it's as much a subsidy to the employer as to the employee. So it should be possible to get employers to bring pressure on legislatures and governors for this funding.
In Milwaukee, I think we've done a good job in getting organized
labor, community leaders and business leaders to sit down at the same
table and push for some collective solutions. They aren't going to
agree on everythingthere are people there who pushed the W2
("Wisconsin Works," the state welfare reform) program and others who
fought against it.
But they all want public money for training, transportation and child care, so that central city residents can make it in private sector jobs.
ATC: Was W2 in effect before the federal law was enacted?
AH: They were passed more or less at the same time, but the (Governor Tommy) Thompson administration has been putting through changes in the welfare system for ten years.
ATC: We understand that it's a very repressive lawbut the repressive provisions haven't worked?
AH: Right. Most elements of the new law were just put in place a few months ago. Older features, like learnfare [which cuts a family's benefits if a teenage child misses school] have been really unsuccessful.
Because the economy has been relatively good, the newer elements haven't been as awful yet as some had predicted. But it puts a two-year lifetime limit on receipt of benefits, which could result in massive poverty when there aren't jobs available.
ATC: Can you elaborate on learnfare and the other repressive parts of the welfare system?
AH: The most repressive components include learnfare, two-tier welfare, the family cap and bridefare. Learnfare was found, in a state-commissioned report by John Pawasarat of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to bring about no improvement in school attendance among kids who were sanctioned, and in some cas
(...)
payments.
But a 1995 Legislative Audit Bureau report found that less than one percent of welfare recipients who come to Wisconsin ranked welfare benefits as the most important reason for moving here. The main reasons ranked first were to be with family here, to escape from a bad family elsewhere or because jobs were easier to find here.
Other reasons, in order of importance, were less crime, better housing, better schools, cheaper prices, and to be near friends. Medical assistance and welfare were the least common reasons cited as "very important." People were also equally likely to come to Wisconsin from high and low benefit states.
The family cap excludes children born while their parents were on assistance from the benefit check. Thus, a family with two kids and one parent would only get benefits for two people, if the second child was born when the mom and older kid were on welfare.
Again, this is based on a misconception that welfare families are very large, and that people have kids for the meager increase they might get in welfare payments.
In fact, the vast majority of families on W2 have only one or two kids, the fertility rate of women on assistance is lower than that of other women, and families on welfare have been steadily declining in size over the last thirty years.
Finally, bridefare reduces benefits to teenage moms who don't marry. This of course assumes that teenage moms have control over the behavior of the men who impregnated them. But it also forces girls in abusive relationships to make dangerous choices between poverty and violence.
ATC: Could you say more about the issues of providing the services you've already mentioned?
AH: Money for training is crucial. We should also make sure that the training is linked directly to guaranteed jobs, because too many women have been put through too many training programs with no jobs at the end.
Then we should ensure that the job quality, and retention of those jobs, is reflected in any incentive system for case workers. Right now in the new system in Wisconsin, case workers get credit for placing people in jobsbut that's all. They get no more credit for placing someone in a $10 than a $6 an hour joband of course it's easier to find someone a low-paying job.
For transportation, there are different approaches. Obviously the better one, which I favor, is really supporting mass transit in a systematic way, with light rail and highly accessible bus systems. But that's a long uphill battle.
At the same time, then, we need stopgap solutions: van pools and attention to carpooling, special bus lines that can run central city people out to a factory that employs lots of people.
Then, for childcare funding: I think the best approach is simply giving parents options, money or voucher assistance to purchase the care they are most comfortable with, whether that means a family or institutional childcare arrangement.
It's complicated, because it can be a problem if the care isn't certified or monitored in some way, but the point is that more money needs to be going into child care.
We have always known that people get off welfare by themselves, and always have done so, but they don't get out of povertyand they don't always stay off welfare. So everything we do must acknowledge that reality.
It isn't people's will to get off welfare that's missingit's the nature of the system once they get off that's at fault.
ATC: As you see it, what are the worst features of this new system?
AH: The absolutely worst feature is the possibility of removal from assistance. It's completely ridiculous, based on a real lack of understanding of the economy.
We don't have a full-employment economy, and the new system is based on the assumption that we do, that work is out there for anyone who wants it. That isn't the case, especially in worse times than we see in 1998.
A further flaw is the lack of attention to quality of jobs, a failure to demand employment that supports families. There's the lack of attention to what I'd call the "demand side" of the labor market.
The whole premise of the new system, federal and state, is that this is a supply-side problem, i.e. a problem with the quality of the worker. Like all markets, the labor market has a supply and a "demand side" (the quality of jobs offered), and both need to be stimulated.
ATC: What do you think are the positive features, if any?
AH: Just the fact that it pays some attention to job placement. Under the old system, case workers didn't have any reason to focus on getting people jobs. This is a positive change that can't be overlooked.
One other positive by-product of the change in welfare: I think there's less demonization of low-income women, and more recognition that these are systemic issues.
ATC: A number of people on welfare who are in school have not been allowed to finish their education. They would have a good chance to get decent jobs if they could continue, but the system won't allow them the time they need.
AH: I think it's incredibly short-sighted to cut someone off education right in the middle of finishing a degree. That's been a huge problem both at the technical college and bachelor's degree level.
Yet because education isn't a right in this country for anyone, there's going to be public resentment over letting welfare recipients stay in college.
I guess I'd rather see access to undergraduate education for everyone. Just as with transit, we need universal access to these services for anyone who needs them. But at the same time we can't expect this welfare population to get back to work without providing these services.
ATC: So on balance, is the verdict on welfare reform positive or negative?
AH: Not positive. Eliminating welfare wasn't a good idea. It's absurdimplying that it's all about people's motivation to work.
That said, the previous system was fatally flawed. Lots of people were trapped, couldn't get training, transportation, childcare or jobsand didn't have enough money to live on.
The new emphasis on work and the respect it accords to low-income
women is the positive side. The problem now comes when people are
working forty hours a week, and still don't have enough money to live
on.
_________________________________________________________________
HEIDI DOROW IS the director of the Urban Justice Center Organizing
Project in New York City. She was interviewed by Dianne Feeley
and David Finkel of the ATC editorial board.
ATC: What are the state and city workfare programs that you're confronting?
Heidi Dorow: As you know, in 1996 the federal law was changed regarding welfare monies for the states. The states must now apply for block grant funding; part of the requirement is to place more and more recipients into "work-related activities." Most states have interpreted this mean "workfare," or work-for-benefits programs.
At the state level there are in turn various municipal programs. Our New York City administration beat the federal government to the punch by creating WEPWork Experience Program.
WEP is a work-for-benefits program. But the work assignments people get aren't jobs; they are unpaid labor that people perform to work off their benefits.
For example: If you're a single adult in New York City receiving public assistance, you're entitled to a monthly $215 rent allowanceif you can find a place to live for $215 a month, Welfare will pay your landlordand in addition you're entitled to $105 in food stamps and approximately $137 cash.
This all adds up to $457 per month. WEP takes that total amount, divides it by the minimum wage, and that's the number of hours you have to work at your assignment every month to get those benefits.
Most of the roughly 40,000 participants in the WEP program here are placed in city agencies, meaning they're working for Parks, Sanitation, the Board of Education, Human Resources Administration, welfare officesany city agency you can name. Several thousand more are working for non-profits or religious institutions.
The program originally targeted single adults and has since expanded to adults with children, former ADC recipients (they only work twenty hours a week).
Some of the organizing that's going on around this issue includes attempts to organize these WEP workers at their work sites. I won't go into that, since my organization's not working on that.
What we're doing is the WEP Pledge of Resistance. We created a Pledge, targeting non-profits and religious organizations, to promise that they will not become placement centers for WEP. We are trying to shut down that avenue for the city to expand the WEP program.
Our appeal is that WEP is not a just programit's not something that people of conscience should engage in. Rather, we argue, we should be demanding the creation of living wage jobs.
ATC: How are you working on your Pledge?
HD: We contact congregations and non-profits, we phone and mail them information and follow up by phone again, we try to have a meeting with the congregation or a committee in the church. We do staff meetings, teach-ins, all the tactics of grassroots organizinganything to get people educated on the issue.
While it's important to get people and institutions to sign the Pledgeright now we have about 170 signed onthe main goal is education around the issue. In addition, we're working with folks who have signed the Pledge to get more involved.
We're co-sponsoring a demonstration next Thursday (February 12) with Riverside Church. The target is HS Systems, a for-profit agency with an $18 million contract to give medical and psychiatric evaluations to people going into the WEP program.
They see over 700 people per day, and they have a notorious reputation for giving "evaluations" without even examining people. In one case, they found someone "able to work" when she had a -year history of heart disease. She went to her WEP assignment and died of a heart attack.
ATC: So this kind of action is one of your tactics for going public? What would be other possible targets?
HD: It's a public campaign anywaywe had a press conference to launch it in June `97 and got front-page coverage in the New York Times. What's new about this demonstration is that it's church-initiated, the first time a congregation came forward and said it wanted to do an action.
It's really up to them to determine the targets. For example, there's a place here called the Office of Employment Services, part of the city's welfare agency, who administer the workfare program.
ATC: We spoke with someone working on welfare issues in Milwaukee, who mentioned that the experience there was not as disastrous as had been expected, because there are actually job openings in manufacturing and construction. How does that compare with the New York City experience.
HD: The official unemployment rate here is slightly under ten percent, but in the outer boroughs where recipients are concentrated, like the Bronx, it's eleven percent. Furthermore, since implementing WEP the city has eliminated 22,000 municipal jobs through attrition and buyouts.
Municipal employment, in New York as in other cities, historically has been a stepping stone for minorities to move out of poverty. Now WEP removes that possibilitythis program is systematically eliminating the possibility of any city jobs.
Why would the city do anything but decrease its work force, when there's an unlimited supply of welfare recipients who can be forced into them as WEP assignments?
ATC: What about the response of the city unionspresumably it's primarily AFSCME that's affected?
HD: Some unions have been very vocal in opposing workfare, but unfortunately not the ones most directly affected. CWA Local 1180 has been outspoken, as well as the UAW, which represents legal aid attorneys, and also the carpenters' union.
But while some of these unions are affected in small ways, it is AFSCME that's most directly affected, and in my personal opinion they haven't been strong on this issue. Their presidents will tell you "there are no official layoffs," but they won't tell you that those jobs lost by attrition or buyout won't be filled.
The District Council of AFSCME endorsed Rudy Guliani, the mayor who's the mastermind of workfare.
ATC: Are there programs to put people into training?
HD: There's lots of training and "jobs readiness" programs in New York Cityto learn how to do cold calling, preparing your resume and so on. There's good programs and there's bad ones. But the plain fact is that there simply aren't jobs for the numbers of welfare recipients who need them.
Sure, some people get jobs. But without some kind of large-scale job creation program, all this talk about welfare-to- work programs won't do the trick.
If people can't get living wage jobs to improve their income, workfare and WEP can't do what they're supposed to do, which is to move people into real work.
ATC: It strikes me also that people are taken out of circulation doing all this unpaid work, when they could be looking for or getting prepared for real jobs.
HD: That's correct.
ATC: So essentially you're calling for an end to WEP, and for a massive jobs creation program.
HD: I don't see any other way to solve the problemyes. ______________________________________________________________________
Index of Welfare-Workfare-State Archives
Last Modified: April 20, 1998