Real Jobs Are the Answer to Welfare Woes

To understand the practical difficulties of Gov. Pete Wilson’s plan for welfare reform, consider what it would take to set up a preschool in East Los Angeles.

I use that example because child care was cited by Cassy Perry, associate secretary for public affairs of the state Health and Welfare Agency, when she was explaining the plan to me Wednesday morning.

The governor’s idea is to push people off welfare by reducing their grants and giving them incentives to go to work.

“Tough love?” I asked.

“How else do you do it?” Perry replied.

OK. But where are people going to find jobs in L.A.?, I wondered. Even before the recent recession, it’s been a long time since there were many jobs in L.A. County’s old southeast industrial belt. The tire plants disappeared years ago, as did the auto factories.

That’s when Perry brought up child care. There’s a tremendous need for child care, she said. Welfare recipients could start child care businesses, and hire other recipients.

At first, the idea had a certain self-help logic to it. Then I started thinking about the difficulties involved in opening a child care center.

Although state and federal child care aid is available to parents and entrepreneurs, you’ll still have to hustle up enough customers to pay your ex-welfare recipients who work for you. You’ll need a license and insurance. And, if the neighbors object, you might have to run down to City Hall for a zoning variance.

Since nobody gets their zoning changed without clout, you’d have to hire a high-paid lobbyist like former Councilman Art Snyder to fix things up.

The governor dealt with none of these practicalities when he discussed his plan in his State of the State speech Wednesday night or at a budget briefing Thursday.

Nor did he explain how L.A. County’s overwhelmed welfare department, which would administer such a program here, would cope with a complicated new work-incentive system. Wilson didn’t sound as if he’d ever been exposed to the bewildering crowds and confusion of a county welfare office, the packed waiting rooms and the lines outside on cold winter mornings.

Rather, Wilson kept it simple.

Unfortunately for him, the governor doesn’t have the talent Ronald Reagan had for reducing an issue like welfare to classic simplicity. With Reagan, you may remember, it was the welfare queen and her Cadillac.

Wilson, as he plodded through his long speech, sounded more like a poly-sci professor teaching state and local government. His slight frame, pale complexion and flat, nasal delivery will never incite the middle class to riot against the poor.

The beef in the Wilson message was in a summary distributed to reporters after his speech: “Welfare was designed as temporary assistance--a path back to self-sufficiency. But far too often, for far too many, welfare has become a way of life. . . . California can no longer afford to pay people not to work.”

Among the provisions: Grants will be cut by 10%--from $663 to $597 a month for a family of three, still well above the median national monthly payment of $382. After six months, the grant would drop to $507 if there was an able-bodied adult in the house not working. A $50 monthly cash incentive would go to teen-age mothers who remain in school--and $50 a month will be taken from families whose teens drop out.

This all has a familiar sound, especially to those of us in L.A. County, where there are a million or so people on public assistance.

One of my first assignments as a reporter in Sacramento was to cover the L.A. County supervisors as they traveled to the Capitol to complain about welfare.

You could fill the county morgue with dead welfare work-incentive programs, each one labeled with catchy acronyms. In 1967, it was WIN, Work Incentives. WIN faded into Workfare in 1971, but with welfare roles growing, only 8,000 ever took part in the program.

Finally, there was Gov. George Deukmejian’s GAIN, Greater Avenues for Independence. Only 9,000 Los Angeles County recipients enrolled.

There were a couple of reasons why these reforms failed. One was the intricate structure of the current welfare system, erected in the early ‘60s by a true legislative genius, the late Phil Burton. When the law was passed, he bragged that nobody understood it--and no one could ever repeal it.

The second, and more important, reason is the change in California’s economy. When Burton created the welfare system, there were plenty of jobs, especially in manufacturing. Today, manufacturing in the county is dying.

That’s why jobs are the real answer. Real jobs. And real education, in decent public schools. Quick fixes won’t work. Jobs from the closed Pico Rivera Ford plant, the shuttered tire plants, the soon-to-expire GM plant in Van Nuys can’t be replaced by low-paid work in child care centers.