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Antwort in : /alt/activism/d Absender : ww@wwpublish.com (Workers World) Betreff : Real jobs, not workfare slavery! Datum : Sa 22.08.98, 18:02 (erhalten: 23.08.98) Groesse : 7284 Bytes ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ## Ursprung : /misc/activism/progressive
------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug.27, 1998 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
REAL JOBS, NOT WORKFARE SLAVERY!
CLINTON'S WELFARE REFORM EQUALS UNION-BUSTING
By Greg Butterfield New York
Workfare workers are raising their voices on the second anniversary of the federal law that ended a 60-year guarantee of government assistance to the poor.
These workers say they refuse to be drowned out by the media hype about President Bill Clinton's testimony in the Monica Lewinsky case. Clinton signed the "Personal Responsibility Act" into law on Aug. 22, 1996.
The real national scandal, these workers say, is the growing poverty, homelessness and suffering caused by welfare reform.
Groups like Workfairness, Wisconsin's W-2 Workers Together, the Welfare Warriors and others are marking the anniversary with rallies, public meetings and testimony.
A mass march of workfare workers and welfare participants will take place in New York. At 1 p.m. on Aug. 22, protesters will gather at City Hall in downtown Manhattan.
Workfairness called the march. The group is appealing to its 9,000 members, as well as labor and community supporters, to turn Aug. 22 into "Welfare Rights Day."
"Dignity, respect and real jobs, not workfare slavery," is the group's main demand.
Milwaukee workfare workers plan to make the 24-hour drive to join the march in New York.
WORKFARE ATTACK
Workfare--forcing welfare participants to work for their meager benefits--is the centerpiece of the Republican- drafted law Clinton signed.
New York is at the center of the national workfare experiment. Here Mayor Rudolph Giuliani runs the "Work Experience Program," the country's biggest.
More than 40,000 people are enrolled in WEP. Last month Giuliani announced that by the year 2000, all of the more than 300,000 New York adults receiving public assistance-- most of them single parents--will be forced to work or lose their benefits. That includes the disabled and people being treated for drug addiction.
Two-thirds of people on public assistance are children.
WEP workers say workfare is a fraud. Giuliani claims the program provides job training and helps participants get real jobs. But there is no training. There is no help finding jobs.
Instead, WEP workers are used as cheap labor to replace unionized city employees who've been downsized. It's a slave-labor program, the workers say.
"We don't want to be used against the unions," says Workfairness Co-chair Vondora Jordan. "We want to be in the unions. We want equal pay and equal rights for equal work."
A CHALLENGE FOR LABOR
While Clinton and Giuliani say workfare leads to real jobs, a recent New York state report shows otherwise. Just 29 percent of the 400,000 people who left New York City's welfare rolls since 1995 have found jobs, according to the study. And many of those jobs are part-time or temporary.
New York has yet to recover many of the 600,000 jobs lost during the last recession.
Who benefits from workfare? Not the unemployed and the sick, who are forced to work for less than minimum wage, often under terrible conditions and with no legal protections under labor law.
Those who benefit are the bosses. They can wring more profits out of workers who have such low pay and no rights.
Workfare drives down everyone's wages by tossing more low- wage workers into the market to compete for jobs. A federal study found that the wages of the lowest-paid 10 percent of workers in New York fell more than 21 percent between 1979 and 1996.
With workfare, the pace of wage cutting is accelerating.
Now a global economic crisis is on the horizon. Wall Street's stock-market boom is turning sour. The capitalist crisis has already cost millions of workers' jobs in South east Asia and Russia. The effects are being felt in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico.
What happens when the layoffs begin here? This should be of the greatest concern to labor unions and all workers.
Will the unemployed have a safety net? Or will millions be pushed into slave-labor programs that further undermine the strength of the unions?
SOLIDARITY
Organizers of the Aug. 22 march are reaching out. The Million Youth March, scheduled for Sept. 5 in Harlem, has come under racist attack from the Giuliani administration and the whole New York establishment. Officials have tried to cast the event as a violent "hate march." But the organizers are holding firm.
Workfairness has invited a youth representative of the MYM to speak on Aug. 22. Workfairness Co-chair William Mason issued a statement in solidarity with the march:
"In our minds, as workfare workers," said Mason, "this is the struggle against a repressive city hall hostile to the needs of the poor and communities of color. We have an authoritarian mayor who's tried to stop taxi drivers from demonstrating, banned opponents from having news conferences at City Hall, and tried to force vendors off the streets.
"Giuliani even tried to stop a march marking the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, which was led by some of the same labor leaders who endorsed him for re-election last year.
"The only prospect of violence comes from the Giuliani administration, which is threatening to unleash the police on these young people."
DETERMINED TO FIGHT BACK
After Aug. 22, many single adults on workfare will have exhausted their benefits under the new rules. Those who have been unable to find real jobs--the vast majority--will have nowhere to turn.
Thousands are shifted from one WEP assignment to the next. Each time they are promised that the next assignment will lead to a permanent job. But it never does. Meanwhile their lifetime limit on public assistance, mandated under the law Clinton signed, is being exhausted.
It is increasingly common to see women workers cleaning city parks or sweeping dirty streets with their children in tow--since to leave them unsupervised could mean prison and there is no affordable child care available.
But all these injustices have only increased WEP workers' determination to fight back. With few resources and much hardship, they have built and sustained organizations like Workfairness.
They have reached out in solidarity, walking picket lines with striking workers and demonstrating against police brutality--because they know that an injury to one is an injury to all.
Now it's time for organized labor to reach out to workfare workers. Organized and unorganized, together they can smash workfare slavery and open up a new era of struggle for jobs, equality and justice.
- END -
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Index of Welfare-Workfare-State Archives
Last Modified: October 1998