Through the passage of recent welfare reform legislation, President Clinton has delivered on his promise to “end welfare as we know it.� This has not put an end to the discussion of welfare reform though. The federal decision to move from welfare entitlement under Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) to welfare block grants under Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) has left state and local governments scrambling to redesign their welfare programs accordingly. In order to handle the reduction in federal aid, New York State and New York City have begun to expand their respective workfare programs.
New York City’s workfare program, know has the Work Experience Program or WEP, is designed to put welfare recipients to work in exchange for their benefits. Recipients must work at menial tasks such as street sweeping and park cleaning for about 20 hours each week in order to receive their barely-subsistence-level benefits of approximately $320 each month. Mayor Giuliani believes that forcing people to complete these tasks (I would call them jobs, but they have none of the characteristics of actual employment) is in the city’s best interest.
WEP places welfare recipient with City agencies, like Sanitation, or Human Resources in order to do work that isn’t getting done. The work that WEP participants are doing does not constitute employment because the workers have no job security and do not receive paychecks, they simply continue to receive their welfare benefits. If the worker misses an assignment for whatever reason, he or she is usually sanctioned for a period of 90 days during which the worker is not eligible for any benefits; no home relief, no AFDC and no health care. A second violation results in a 150 day sanction.
These sanction periods are really a minor issue when viewed in relation to the federally mandated 5 year limit for welfare recipients. Even if a worker shows up on time every day and follows all the rules, their benefits are terminated after 5 years. It is the belief of the Federal, State, and Local governments that 5 years is plenty of time for welfare recipients to find real jobs. Most welfare rights advocates point out that if there were job openings for welfare recipients, they would take them, but there are not, that is why they are on welfare.
The factors that lead to welfare dependency are lack of education and lack of available jobs. In New York City alone, 95 percent of welfare recipient have a high school diploma, or less (50 percent have not graduated high school) 40 percent read below the eighth grade reading level. There are very few jobs available for people with so little education. Regardless of an individual's participation in WEP, they will not be more qualified or able to find employment if they still lack a basic education.
Instead of encouraging education for welfare recipients, as was done in the past, WEP does not grant exemptions for individual who are engaged in GED programs, work training programs or attending college in order to obtain Associate or Bachelors Degrees. Mayor Guiliani was quoted as saying, “The Single most important thing to move someone out of dependency and welfare is not education; it’s work, then education.� Contrary to the Mayor’s personal opinions on the importance of education, The Ford Foundation and the Urban Institute have conducted research that shows individuals with high school diplomas, GEDs or job training are twice as likely to find and retain employment than individuals without. The Economic Policy Institute has reached similar conclusions. The most recent welfare reforms force students who collect welfare benefits to participate in WEP, often making it impossible for them to complete their studies.
The Work Experience Program is self contradictory. It espouses a rhetoric that welfare recipients should take control of their lives and get real jobs, but at the same time prevents them from getting educated or trained to do anything but clean toilets and sweep streets. The Mayor believes that WEP prepares students for the real world, this shows his view of the capabilities of welfare recipients (read as “CUNY students should get used to menial labor.�)
Another problem with WEP is that it does not properly evaluate participants. There are stories of student being pulled out of school within a semester of graduation so that they can clean parks. There was the recent op-ed in the New York Times by a WEP worker who was an air traffic controller; he only needed to be trained in the new technology but could find no program to assist him, he is now performing street sweeping tasks in exchange for his welfare benefits. WEP makes very little attempt to pair participants with jobs or tasks that meet their skill abilities. Placement, instead, is based upon physical ability to work.
Aside from improper placement and standing in the way of personal advancement through education, WEP is designed to push people off welfare through its system of sanctions mentioned earlier. WEP workers are not employees and do not have any of the protections afforded by real employment. They do not have job security and do not receive pay based upon the hours they work (instead their hours are computed based upon their benefits divided by minimum wage.) WEP workers are not subject to the same safety regulations as employees and are not protected by unions. Furthermore, they have no effective form of recourse to make complaints about work conditions or treatment by supervisors.
A WEP worker can be sanctioned for any violation of their WEP assignment. This includes unexcused lateness or absence. For a worker to get an excuse, they need nothing short of a doctor's note. Even then, actions have often already been taken to sanction the worker. During the 90 day sanction period a welfare recipient can collect no benefits. Welfare is the city’s largest subsidy for low income housing. The Community Service society estimates that $1.4 billion of the state’s $2.4 billion in welfare payments are used for rent. If sanctioned, thousands of people could face eviction. A landlord does not even need to wait for a tenant to fall 3 months into rent arrears to start eviction proceedings. Once evicted, the former tenant/welfare recipient/WEP-worker, now homeless person is thrust into the City’s severely inadequate shelter system. It is a widely acknowledged fact that securing long-term employment is next-to-impossible for homeless people. The City’s brilliantly engineered system has now ruined any realistic chance of successfully escaping poverty. Remember, hypothetically, this turn of events could have befallen a CUNY student a year a way from graduating with marketable job skills.
New York City’s WEP program has shown no definitive signs of success. The Mayor and his aides like to point to numbers that show a 20 percent reduction of the welfare rolls in the last two years. There has been no effort, however, to track participants once they leave the welfare rolls. No evidence exists to show that former participants have been placed into real jobs. With unemployment in the city at above 10 percent, it is certainly more likely that individuals who have been pushed off the rolls have not found employment and are on their way to becoming destitute poor.
A system such as New York’s that places the emphasis on performance measured by numbers, clearly has no regard for the people it is supposed to be helping. Without a focus on education and permanent job placement, WEP will not help anyone in need. The city is using WEP workers as a disposable and cheap labor force. While they are involved in the program and after they have been kicked off the rolls, former participants become part of a new permanent under class pool of available labor. Not only will their presence undermine current wage structures, it will also lead to increases in crime. To this end, the state is preparing itself for more crime by building three new prisons.
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The above argument became brutally clear through my experience interning with the Urban Justice Center’s (UJC) Homelessness Outreach and Prevention Program (HOPP). The UJC acts as an advocate for welfare recipients whose benefits are unjustly reduced or cut completely. Many of the people I saw at our Lower East Side HOPP clinic were seeking help reopening their cases after they had been closed for some kind of WEP issue. Many of them had physical or mental disabilities that prevented them from working their assigned positions. For example, many people with documented respiratory problems like asthma were assigned to street sweeping details that they could not complete without suffering detriments to their health.
After explaining their situations, the details of their welfare and work histories and their case closings, many pause and ask how the city honestly thinks WEP can help them find jobs. To that I, nor the other advocates, have any hopeful response. The system is clearly designed to subjugate these people. Lacking provisions for education and job placement, it cannot be argued that WEP is trying to place people into real jobs. Welfare reform measures such as WEP have torn gaping holes in the safety net that welfare is intended to be. The government has lost sight of it goal of providing assistance to those in need. Instead, welfare reform measures seek to yield as much from the welfare dollar as possible. Workfare is very successful in doing so, regardless of whether it helps people or not.
Bibliography
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Bernstein, Jared, “The Challenge of Moving From Welfare to Work�. The Economic Policy Institute (http://epinet.org/ibbern.html).
Butless, Gary and Kent Weaver, “Reinventing Wlefare--Again.� The Brookings Review, Winter 1997 Vol. 15 No. 1 (p26-29) (Http://www.brookings.org/pub/review/burtwi97.htm)
Firestone, David, “Workfare Expert to Enter Private Sector.� New York Times, 2/12/97.
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