Working on Welfare

Would-be welfare reformers have long raised a basic question: Why not require able-bodied people on the dole to perform worthwhile labor for their checks? Five years ago, California's then Governor Ronald Reagan introduced an ambitious program for providing chores or "training" for all healthy adult recipients, except for mothers with children under six. The legislature voted to abolish it less than three years later, however, amid charges that it constituted slave labor. Last year New York City revived a similar program targeted mainly at some 50,000 men and women without children and found work of sorts for 5,700 of them in city agencies.

Now Massachusetts' Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis thinks he may have a more precisely tailored solution. Having already cut off welfare payments for childless adults capable of holding jobs, Dukakis last week revealed details of a "work experience program" for men with families. Beginning in September, some 2,000 Massachusetts fathers who have been jobless for two years will have to work for a government or nonprofit agency for three days a week, 96 hours a month. The penalty for refusal: denial of the father's share of checks issued under the classification of "aid to families with dependent children." the costliest category of welfare.

Dukakis' workfare scheme represents a novel attempt to zero in on the most exasperating welfare problem of all: the consistent failure of men, physically fit and in need of work to support families, to find jobs, either through state agencies or the federal work incentive program. Workfare confronts one legal hazard that could destroy it: Congress has enacted a law that bars the use of federal welfare funds as salaries, and the U.S. Government matches the state's $11 million contribution for jobless fathers of needy families. Dukakis' aides have discovered, however, that authorities in Utah have been getting around this problem for three years with a "work experience and training project." The Utah plan, covering approximately 475 welfare recipients at a time, pays no wages as such. But it does provide transportation and other minimal expenses for three days a week of "on-the-job training" in tasks ranging from tree planting to house painting to typing.

New Experience. Dukakis argues that workfare may provide the new Administration with the formula it needs to put some of President Carter's own ideas on welfare into effect. Says the Governor: "Carter is committed to a reform that distinguishes for the first time between employable and unemployable people, and only the unemployable will be eligible for welfare benefits. The employable will be offered a job."* The architect of workfare in Massachusetts is Richard Anderson, the state's assistant secretary of economic and manpower affairs. He figures the program will cost $700,000 a year but eventually will save the state $2 million annually. Anderson claims that 25% of the fathers in the program will find jobs within several months, thanks to their new "experience," and that another 25% will be dropped from the welfare rolls for failing to show up.

The program has its strong critics.

One member of Dukakis' own welfare advisory council derides it as "a foolhardy adventure, conceived in haste, doomed to failure and meant to punish the poor." But workfare seems assured of political popularity in a state that still prides itself on its Puritan work ethic.

* Of more than 16 million welfare recipients in the U.S., approximately 1.5 million are considered employable.

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