Welfare to Work

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Robust economy helps many welfare recipients to find jobs, but huge number of less-employable people remain

Three years ago, President Clinton signed the welfare reform act into law, beginning a bold experiment in forcing people off the government rolls and into the workplace. The pledge at the time was “to end welfare as we know it.”

Today, 20 months after welfare reform began in L.A. County, some 100,000 Angelenos have been successfully transitioned into jobs. And while that pace far exceeds original projections, more than six times that many people remain on the rolls in L.A. County, most of them single mothers and their children.

And with the bulk of the most employable welfare recipients already placed, the task of finding work for L.A.’s more-entrenched welfare recipients is a daunting one.

“Over the last three or four months, we’re seeing the more hard-core recipients whose families have been on welfare for years,” said Vivian Seigel, executive director of the Jewish Vocational Service, which contracts with the county to assess and place welfare recipients into jobs. “It’s much more labor-intensive for us. These people need extensive skills training and need much more support all the way through the process.”

While data is scant on how well L.A. has been doing so far in its quest to put welfare recipients to work, some studies that try to track the progress of welfare reform are due out next year. In the meantime, several facts and observations have been gleaned from welfare experts, both in and out of government:

– Of the 623,000 people on welfare rolls in L.A. County, more than three-fourths are single-parent families. About 53 percent of all welfare recipients are Latino, 25 percent African American, 13 percent white and 7 percent Asian.

– Those coming off welfare are paid an average of $6.50 to $6.75 an hour, meaning that most rely on some government aid.

– Many of those with jobs have considerable work experience and high school skill levels. The rest have spent much of their lives on welfare and lack much in the way of schooling.

“The welfare system was intended to help people who had a string of bad luck and needed a little extra push to get back on their feet,” said Alec Levenson, an economist with the Milken Institute in Santa Monica who has studied the local welfare population. “Neither the old system nor the federal welfare reform addressed the problem of these harder-to-employ people.”

Entrenched population

There is no exact count of these hard-core welfare recipients, although they generally are considered to be a minority of the total welfare population. In L.A. County, estimates range from about 10 percent (65,000) to about 40 percent (250,000). By comparison, the total number of Angelenos living below the federal poverty line is estimated at around 1.9 million.

One of the first tests comes next April, as benefits for welfare recipients start to be phased out. The clock began ticking on April 1, 1998, the date the county implemented the Cal-Works program in place of the old federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program.

Throughout the remainder of 1998, the county transitioned all 723,000 AFDC recipients into the new Cal-Works program; each recipient is allowed up to 24 consecutive monthly benefit payments from the date they were enrolled. If they go off and come on welfare again, they can receive a total of 60 months of benefits. (Those who have come onto the welfare rolls since April 1, 1998 can only remain for 18 consecutive months.)

While the bulk of the hard-core group has yet to come through the pipeline, perhaps the biggest test looms at whatever point the economy slumps into its next recession. The impact of that downturn is expected to be severe.

“We’ve been very fortunate that we have started welfare reform in an expanding economy,” said Lynn Bayer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services. “If the economy were to stop expanding, it would become much more difficult for people to get jobs and move up the ladder to become self-sufficient.”

What is likely to happen, economists and advocates for the poor say, is layoffs among many of those who have gotten jobs.

“I would expect about half of the people we have placed would not survive if the economy were to enter a downturn,” said Dwaine Sullivan, director of the welfare-to-work and general relief programs at the Los Angeles Urban League.

Bayer said many of those people would be eligible for unemployment benefits. And they could, of course, return to the welfare system for up to 18 consecutive months.

But that raises the prospect that welfare recipients who leave the rolls could end up right back where they started.

“If that happens, if welfare benefits are extended or new aid programs start up, it’s no longer ending welfare as we know it,” Levenson said. “It gets at the much larger issue of self-sufficiency. That’s a much tougher problem to crack: how to get people who are now on welfare to be able to fend for themselves.”

Skills-jobs mismatch

A study that Levenson co-authored last April found that 42 percent of the L.A. County welfare population couldn’t do basic primary school-level tasks, such as locating the expiration date on a driver’s license or adding up figures on a bank deposit slip. With such a low level of skills, that portion of the welfare population would be qualified for only 11 percent of the county’s 4.2 million jobs (even if employers were willing to hire them).

“Over 50 percent of our caseload do not have high school degrees. It’s pretty difficult to get jobs without that,” said Bayer.

At present, the mismatch is largely hidden by the robust local economy, which has seen a boom in low-wage, entry-level jobs. With unemployment rates in many parts of the county nearing 30-year lows, employers are digging deeper into the labor pool.

“Employers have reached out to us for all types of employees,” said Frank Mora, a supervisor in the South L.A. County office of Greater Avenues Toward Independence (GAIN), a 10-year-old statewide job training program.

“Supermarkets, other retail stores, even Hughes (Electronics) came in here looking for security guards,” Mora said. “They hire people who came into our program not knowing how to add or subtract. Hopefully, they picked up those skills while they were with us.”

But many of these jobs have been part time, averaging about 30 hours a week. And the average starting wage is between $6.25 and $6.50 an hour, only slightly above the state minimum wage of $5.75.

Taking home $800 a month is hardly enough for a single mother to support her children. Many, if not most, of the welfare recipients who take jobs continue to receive welfare payments, most often for child care.

Child care dilemma

Under welfare reform, recipients can continue receiving child-care payments for two years while they are working. But after that, they are on their own.

“I really fear that women are going to start coming back to us once those benefits expire. It will start next year and really build into 2001,” said Bayer. “This could prove to be the Achilles heel of the entire program. We’re going to have to be much more aggressive on a nationwide basis in dealing with this child-care problem.”

Earlier this month, a statewide study from the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network found that the maximum capacity of licensed child-care facilities in L.A. County was only 187,000, while more than 1 million children require child care. A full-time, minimum-wage earner would have to spend 60 percent of his or her income just to cover the cost of child care for one infant; paying for two infants would exceed their total income.

Yet even before the child-care benefits start expiring, an increasing number of people are entering the welfare system each month.

“We’re seeing a lot more cycling in and out of the system than we ever saw before,” Bayer said. “It’s not just the economy that drives people into the system. It’s also family dynamics: If the man leaves the household suddenly, the woman is left with no income.”

Another reason for the increase, Bayer suggested, is that the county is actually offering a higher level of benefits now, under Cal-Works, than it did under the old AFDC program, especially in the areas of child care and health care. Also, she said, the explosion in part-time jobs has left many people unable to provide for their families.

Bayer and others fear that an economic downturn could turn this modest increase into a flood.

In an attempt to head off such a crisis, the county recently allocated $175 million in additional training and support programs aimed at moving welfare recipients up the income ladder into self-sufficiency. Among these programs: training and anti-violence programs for teens, more job skills training for adults, and more access to health care and child care.

But some people are skeptical that even these expanded programs will work.

“We keep hearing about these huge numbers of people getting off welfare,” said Sandra Carter, vice president of programs for the Los Angeles Urban League. “The real question is whether they are going to be able to stay off. We just don’t know. All the training in the world won’t help if there aren’t enough good-paying jobs out there when they are through (with the training programs).”

…But obstacles remain*…

% citing

Reason reason

Child care 34%

Lack of job skill/education 26

Transportation 9

Concerns with immigration status 8

Caretaker for disabled family member 6

Lack job experience 6

No jobs available 4

Other 7

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