Working on Welfare

Welfare reform is a complex venture that needs political common ground for those who believe that able-bodied Americans should help themselves and those who insist that government must help the ones who cannot. A new study of “workfare” programs stakes out just such a plot of common ground. It finds that workfare can indeed succeed, although success is not the sure thing that its advocates claim. It also finds that workfare is not as punitive as its critics contend.

To us, the study’s most important conclusion is that introducing the work ethic into welfare could increase support among Americans for the contribution that welfare makes to the lives of people who cannot work. “The case for and against workfare may involve not so much a trade-off between welfare savings and coercion,” it says, “as an opportunity to change the values, politics and perceived fairness of the welfare system.”

The study, conducted by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., looked at programs in 11 states developed under the federal Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981. The law allows, but does not require, states to experiment with putting people in jobs with public or nonprofit agencies as a condition of continued eligibility for some level of welfare benefits. One goal of the law was to cut welfare costs. The most conclusive findings came from projects in San Diego, Baltimore and Arkansas.

In those areas welfare recipients whose benefits depended on their getting jobs more often found permanent employment than recipients who faced no work requirement, which seems sort of obvious. Less obvious was a finding that those who benefited most were the least employable--single women who had been on welfare a long time. The programs were less successful for people who had recently held jobs--usually men. Their big need was retraining.

In San Diego, for example, the study found that recipients who had to work for public or nonprofit agencies to qualify for welfare but who also got help in finding jobs ultimately increased their employment rates and their earnings substantially. They earned about $700 more during the period studied, and got about $288 less in benefits.

An important conclusion is that not every workfare plan will work everywhere. Programs are uniquely fitted to their regions, labor markets and welfare benefits. Some emphasize mandatory work, others emphasize help in finding jobs. “The results do not point to one single, uniform approach,” the report said, that could be copied nationwide, but rather to more experimentation at the state level.

When workfare experiments were examined for savings to the taxpayers alone, the results were mixed. There were savings in some states among some groups but not in others.

Just what the White House wants Congress to do about workfare is still a little vague. The proposed budget says that employable parents eligible for the dependent-children program as well as food-stamp recipients would have to “engage in job search and work activities as a condition of eligibility.” The budget says that they could be trained for work. Another section proposes to cut $700 million from job-training funds.

Whatever Congress does, it should start by reading the report and concentrating on the sections that emphasize the need to tailor projects to local conditions and to increase investment in job training and development.