Success Difficult to Achieve in Welfare-To-Work Plans

September 1, 1996

Success Difficult to Achieve in Welfare-To-Work Plans

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By JON NORDHEIMER

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Deborah C. Washam shook her head with an emotion that appeared to be equal parts sorrow and exasperation.
Of the more than 80 women she has hired over the last 17 months as part of a generous welfare-to-work program sponsored in part by this city's corporate community, fewer than 25 remain on the job. Many of the others quit in a huff over perceived slights to their dignity -- Mrs. Washam calls it their refusal to follow directions.
"I don't think they've had much exposure to structure in their lives," said Mrs. Washam, president and chief executive of Community Home Health Care, a licensed agency that dispatches homemakers to assist elderly and disabled residents of Kansas City's urban core with light housework and shopping.
"As single mothers, they are on their own and think of themselves as authority figures," Mrs. Washam said. "They won't take routine supervision at work."
President Clinton, in accepting the Democratic nomination Thursday, declared "a moral obligation" under the Welfare Reform Act he signed two weeks ago to move Americans off welfare and into jobs. But the magnitude of this task seems best appreciated by those already dealing with the challenge.
Overcoming years of dependency on open-ended entitlement programs is daunting, those who administer welfare-to-work efforts say.
Employers express satisfaction with new employees who show initiative and a willingness to learn, even when that has required training in rudiments like the proper way to answer phones. But as the program here shows, business people are frustrated by many welfare veterans.
Many among those hired, while the most qualified of those screened, have problems that include absenteeism, lack of discipline about work hours, poor reading and communications skills, and open resentment when given direction. And the current programs have not even reached people on welfare who have more serious problems, like alcohol and drug abuse or low intelligence.
These concerns resonate nationally with business leaders, who are only beginning to figure out employers' roles as the states begin a trek this fall into uncharted territory under mandates that those on welfare must find work or face the loss of benefits for themselves and their children.
"In the view of the small-business person, welfare is right up there with balancing the budget as what's wrong with big government," said Jeffrey R. Joseph, vice president for domestic policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Yet the average business person -- or the average politician, for that matter -- has no clue as to what's coming now that the welfare bill has been passed. They want welfare people to go out and work, but there's a big difference between visceral reactions and actually dealing with programs that can help lead them to work."
Joseph said a "hodgepodge" of plans had been advanced to ease the welfare-to-work transition, adding that the national picture is more confused than coherent.
"Those with low unemployment are serious about finding reasonable ways of accomplishing the goals of reform -- they need every worker they can get," he explained. "Areas with high unemployment and low sophistication, where they can't figure out what to do with people who already have skills, may be less interested."
Clinton challenged "every business person in America who has ever complained about the failure of the welfare system to try to hire somebody off welfare, and try hard." Yet some leaders of business groups are blunt in disavowing any suggestion that the private sector should assume responsibility for making welfare reform work.
"Business is not in the business of providing jobs for welfare recipients," Robert T. Jones, president and chief executive officer of the National Alliance of Business, said in a telephone interview before the president's speech, contending that it is up to the states to prepare people for entering the work force.
Still, some communities -- notably places where unemployment is low and unskilled workers are in demand -- have already undertaken efforts to move welfare recipients into the work force.
In Tulsa, Okla., for example, the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce created a nonprofit corporation in 1992 to train adults on welfare for assembly and manufacturing jobs at companies that pick up the training costs.
Tim Westberry, the program manager, said that in the first eight months of 1996, 60 full-time and 13 temporary jobs were filled by the heads of families on Aid to Families with Dependent Children who underwent training with them. The overall retention rate, he said, is above 80 percent over the history of the program.
In Indianapolis, existing community-based groups accustomed to assisting the urban poor with housing and other social needs have redirected their energies, with the aid of business leaders, to find work for those on welfare.
"Functional illiteracy and alcoholism are the biggest barriers to employment for our clients," said the Rev. John Hay, a minister who runs a community center on the city's east side.
Here in Kansas City, an alliance called the Local Investment Commission , financed by public and private sources, is quietly shaping a model of inner-city dynamics for the post-welfare world.
Backed by corporate leadership groups and the purses of the Kansas City Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the alliance is striving, with blessings from the state, to change the focus of the existing social-service apparatus from assisting people in getting welfare benefits to finding them jobs, among other far-reaching plans.
As part of LINC, an agency called the Full Employment Council is using federal welfare and food stamp funds to subsidize new jobs for welfare recipients.
When a participant is hired, $500 a month in wage supplements goes to the employer, explained Clyde McQueen, the council's president and chief executive. That works out to about half the $6 an hour at which most of those hired start.
Families also continue to receive full Medicaid benefits and day-care coverage for four years -- services that would cost ordinary workers another $600 or more a month in after-tax income, he said.

Though under the Welfare Reform Act beneficiaries will have no choice about going to work, the Kansas City program's extended benefits are designed to attract people who believe they would gain more by staying home than by going to work.
Critics of the new law say it will cost states billions each year to extend such benefits to everyone who will have to move off welfare. Yet the legislation calls for spending $55 billion less over six years, rather than more.
McQueen said the Kansas City program is also designed to give people new to the work force some practical experience and self-confidence before they are made to fully support themselves.
And that has happened in a lot of cases. Randy Teghtmeyer, general manager of Midwest Typewriter and Computer, said he found "a gem" when he hired Rene Moore, a 20-year-old single mother, through the Full Employment Council's 21st Century program. And Ms. Moore expresses delight at obtaining a job she confessed she never would have found on her own.
"When I came in for the interview, I saw only one or two black faces in the office, and I thought I might have problems with racism here -- not just because I'm black, but because I'm young and on welfare," she said, going about her clerical duties clad in a tailored green suit.
Instead, she said: "People have been very nice and helpful to me. It's like they have a real interest in seeing me succeed."
But overall, McQueen said, Kansas City's welfare-to-work experiment has turned out to be more trying than was anticipated. Since the program began in April 1995, 545 of the 1,162 job openings certified for participation have been filled by welfare recipients, but only 217 of those hired remain at work.
Most of the rest have returned to the welfare rolls -- a high failure rate, even though those selected for the program were among the highest qualified from the 7,726 eligible families.
"We had mistakenly assumed that the $500 monthly subsidy was sufficient motivation for the businessmen to hire our participants," McQueen said. "But increasingly we got feedback from employers who said, 'Send us people who get to work on time, can read and follow instructions and want to stay on the job."'
Teghtmeyer, for instance, talked to 11 other welfare beneficiaries before he hired Ms. Moore -- none of whom, he said, exhibited even minimal aptitude for what is essentially an entry-level office job.
"I'd love to hire another Rene, but I don't have the time to go through that number of interviews again," he said.
The council provides three days of job readiness training for participants and assigns a case manager to work as a liaison with the employer to mediate potential problems. Still, some employers think the preparation is inadequate.
"A lot of the problem we encounter is that the participant gets advice on how to deal with problems in the workplace from friends who have never held a job," said Gerry Buchman, a 33-year-old case manager.
"If someone tells them what to do, they think they are being disrespected," Buchman said.
Phyllis Ray-Taylor, a former AFDC recipient who helps run the training program, said most of the participants initially came to the program angry that they were being forced to work.
"Perhaps 20 percent are ready for the job market and just need a little push," Ms. Ray-Taylor said. "Many of the others have been so brainwashed by the welfare system for so long you have to de-program them and get them into another mode."
Then there are people like Alex Haley. The 41-year-old father of two young sons said he had been a productive worker for years in a variety of jobs before diabetes and hypertension forced him on the welfare rolls two years ago.
This spring, he was told to report to the Full Employment Council to be screened for work. Haley said he was hired by a microfilm company and was paid $6 an hour "to remove staples from paper all day." He was the only man in a room filled with women, he recalled, and when he started to take days off to look for a better job, he was dismissed.
Mrs. Washam at Community Home Health Care said welfare recipients with similar attitudes were in for a rude awakening once limits were placed on the duration of benefits.
"Ladies with initiative and drive will get out of the welfare system," she said. "But a lot will have to fall before they realize there's not going to be a safety net below them anymore."
Sharita Hargrove, a 28-year-old office worker at Mrs. Washam's company, understands why so many of her former co-workers quit. "They felt they were disrespected by supervisors who talked down to them like children," said the mother of three.
Ms. Hargrove is far from content herself. "I don't see where work is benefiting me at all," she scowled during an interview. "My two-week take-home pay is $523, and since I've been working my rent went from $25 a month to $277. And I used to have $364 a month in food stamps."
The Kansas City program's financial arrangements, she said, failed to take into account the realities of life on welfare. "I've been employed forever even if it was under the table," she said. "The money I got from welfare was a joke; it isn't like you could live on it."
What have the administrators of such programs learned about how to make them more successful? First, that more training before the job begins can help, on subjects like dressing appropriately, working with other people, following directions and expressing grievances.
Also, McQueen and his staff say, the program administrators must address unanticipated problems outside the workplace, such as getting a new battery for an old car so daily trips to a job do not become adventures, finding an optometrist for those who cannot fill out application forms because of poor eyesight or intervening when distractions at home keep people away from work.
"We spent so much time getting people in the front door we didn't think enough about what was needed to keep them there," McQueen said.
Still, there are enough success stories to give those in the Kansas City alliance confidence the program will be financed by the state of Missouri as block-grant money becomes available.
"This is an enormous challenge to business," said Landon H. Rowland, chairman of LINC and president and chief executive officer of Kansas City Southern Industries, which owns rail and mutual-fund companies.
"Great Society programs compartmentalized social services and kept the business community outside. Now we're seeing firsthand that the issues go far beyond jobs. We've learned that the social context has to be provided so people can remain in jobs."

Other Places of Interest on the Web
Welfare Reform Links from the Electronic Policy Network.

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