From Welfare to Workfare

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr

For five years Maria Unzueta's sole source of income was a monthly welfare check. Separated from her husband, the San Diego mother of four made do on benefits totaling $7,920 a year. But now Unzueta, 39, is part of a local job- training program for welfare recipients in which she works 40 hours a week as a hospital file clerk and makes roughly the same amount of money she was getting on the dole. Under the workfare program, she still receives child- care benefits worth about $130 a month, but she hopes to be completely self- sufficient soon. "For me it's important to try and make it on my own," says Unzueta, "and provide an example for my children."

Requiring welfare recipients to work for their checks is not a new concept. Nor are the programs, which usually affect poor mothers with children to raise, as simple in practice as they are in theory. But workfare, which has slowly evolved from a somewhat cranky conservative notion to one with broad support, seems to be an idea whose time has come. Able-bodied welfare beneficiaries must accept occupational training and jobs in more than 20 states, and the number is growing.

In Washington, legislators are mired in trying to find ways to cut spending in accordance with the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction bill (see Essay). Confronted with severe cutbacks in revenue sharing, states are searching for innovative ways to make their social programs more effective. Workfare could prove to be an important example for future experiments.

The idea has enjoyed an unusual bipartisan harmony: in statehouses around the country, Democrats and Republicans have joined forces to support legislation that combines the job programs traditionally favored by liberals with efforts to pare the welfare rolls advocated by conservatives. Jo Anne Ross, a Reagan appointee at the Social Security Administration, describes workfare as the "top priority of the Department of Health and Human Services." Says Joseph Califano, Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter Administration: "If the kids are in school, then the mother can be working. Nearly everyone accepts that concept now."

Welfare has been a political battleground since federally financed public assistance was made law under the Social Security Act of 1935. Traditionally, conservatives have viewed welfare programs as handouts to the poor and an | insult to the American work ethic. Liberals generally have considered it compassionate compensation for victims of economic and social circumstances beyond their control. But with the startling growth in the number of children being born to unwed mothers from the underclass, many of welfare's long- standing supporters have begun to question whether Aid to Families with Dependent Children programs may be exacerbating the problems they were designed to alleviate. Even some civil rights leaders and welfare recipients in the nation's inner cities are criticizing the system for helping perpetuate dependency from one disadvantaged generation to the next and for unintentionally encouraging the breakdown of the underclass's family structure.

California is embarking on the most sweeping statewide plan so far. Encouraged by the success of San Diego's local workfare system, the state legislature last September approved a program known as Greater Avenues for Independence, or GAIN. Approximately one-third of the state's 586,000 AFDC cases will be affected. As in most workfare plans, handicapped people and single parents with preschool children are exempt but may volunteer for the program. Welfare beneficiaries who do not register in GAIN stand to have their payments cut off.

After an evaluation of their skills, GAIN participants are given any necessary training, ranging from remedial math and language classes to high school equivalency courses. Once training is completed the welfare client has three months to find work in a job-search program. A trainee whose search is unsuccessful is enrolled in a one-year pre-employment preparation program to work off the welfare grant in an assigned job, with time off for job hunting. Typical jobs include clerical positions or maintenance work in a parks department, day-care centers or programs for the elderly; the pay is the California starting wage, currently $5.07 an hour. If after a year the client still has not found a job, he must begin the evaluation and training program again.

The GAIN bill won in the state senate by a vote of 32 to 2 and in the assembly by 60 to 9. Republicans were all for a mandatory work requirement, while Democrats liked the education, child-care and job-creation provisions that were written into the legislation. GAIN is enrolling members gradually and will be fully operational in 1988. Though the program is expected to cost $304 million a year, GAIN supporters estimate that it will have saved the state $115 million by 1992.

While California's program is being touted as a model for the future, other ambitious workfare operations are in place around the country. New York hopes eventually to enroll more than 200,000 of its 1.1 million AFDC recipients in a revamped workfare program that went into effect last November with the support of Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo. "We're not letting them sit at home and get into the welfare syndrome," says Cesar Perales, New York State's commissioner of social services. "Exposing them to the workplace has real value." A program in Massachusetts instituted in 1983 led to employment for 19,000 former welfare clients and saved the state an estimated $54 million over two years. Other notable programs are operating in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Michigan.

Workfare first became government policy, at least in theory, more than a decade ago. Congress strengthened a Work Incentive (WIN) program in 1971 during the Nixon Administration. But WIN suffered from inadequate funding, mismanagement and weak enforcement. In 1981, with the advent of the Reagan Administration, Congress passed legislation granting states more flexibility in administering WIN. For the first time, AFDC recipients could work in public agencies rather than in private-sector jobs. States were also allowed to use part of a recipient's welfare grant as a wage subsidy to his or her private employer. Given these new liberties, state governments began cooking up fresh workfare programs. "Obligation" is a word that workfare supporters use frequently, arguing that welfare recipients have not fulfilled their responsibilities as citizens. Lawrence Mead, professor of politics at New York University, makes such a case in his new book, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (Free Press; $19.95). His most controversial theme: the poor need to have standards of behavior set for them. "We have to say, 'You have a real obligation we're not going to let you get away from,' " says Mead. Workfare, he maintains, can give poor people the discipline he feels they lack. Mead advocates expanding workfare programs to include mothers with children above age three rather than simply those whose children are old enough to be in school.

Workfare's philosophical opponents see it as a sort of punishment for being poor. They contend that the vast majority of welfare recipients are young unwed mothers with few if any marketable skills, who are often forced to take demeaning, low-paying jobs under workfare. Critics question whether there is even enough work to go around for the programs' undereducated participants. Says California Democratic Assemblyman Tom Bates: "When Ronald Reagan says, 'Go to the want ads and look for jobs,' he doesn't point out that they're for electrical engineers and highly skilled people."

There are other well-reasoned objections to workfare: that it displaces people in the regular labor force; that by exempting single parents with preschool-age children, it excludes 60% of all adult AFDC recipients; that, as Ohio has experienced, welfare savings can be less than program costs; that workfare places too much emphasis on getting clients into the job market quickly rather than enrolling them in education courses that could help them gain entry to more useful and lucrative lines of work.

A report released last month by the House Government Operations Committee criticizes programs that do not provide adequate child care for participants. Said the study: "The lack of safe and affordable child care can foreclose the possibility of employment, training, education and even opportunity to job hunt." Moreover, say critics, workfare does not address America's most serious unemployment problem: the jobless rate among black teenagers is currently 41.6%, compared with 6.9% for the U.S. as a whole.

Nevertheless, growing numbers of officials think that work-for-welfare programs are at least worth trying. And many workfare participants seem to agree. In Des Moines, Ruth Breitzke, 34, has been working since September as a volunteer at the juvenile court in return for her welfare check. "I enjoy what I'm doing here even though I don't get paid for it," says she. "It gives you the feeling that you can get back into the working world. It gives you that boost."

With reporting by Hays Gorey/Washington and Jon D. Hull/ Los Angeles