Welfare-Job Study Indicates Tough Task for Reform Plan

The first nationwide study of a welfare-to-work program for women sends mixed messages about the likelihood of success for the Clinton Administration plan to place welfare recipients in jobs.

Anthony Carnevale, chairman of the National Commission for Employment Policy, which conducted the study, said that training and job placement programs can move people off the welfare rolls but that only a fraction of current recipients will be able to do so and become stable members of the labor force--a finding that has important implications for the two-year time limit the President wants to put on welfare benefits.

Under the Administration’s plan for welfare reform, which is expected to be introduced to Congress late next month, welfare recipients would be required to go to work after two years on the rolls. People who cannot find work after two years would be offered public service jobs.

The study shows, however, that even a select group of welfare recipients who are motivated enough to volunteer for a job training program have only a 50% chance of staying employed through the first year after training.

“Two years and out is more a bumper sticker than a program,” said Carnevale.

Dan Bloom, an employment and training analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal domestic policy think-tank, agreed that the study shows that many welfare recipients have a very difficult time getting and keeping jobs.

“Even among a highly motivated and well-prepared group of welfare recipients, a lot of them would end up running up against the time limit,” Bloom said. “That means you’re going to have to create a lot of jobs. It’s sobering in terms of what you can accomplish with such training programs.”

The commission’s study tracked 6,467 women on Aid to Families With Dependent Children who enrolled in training and employment services under the federal Job Training and Partnership Act in 1986.

None had worked for at least a year before beginning classroom study or on-the-job training with JTPA. After participating in JTPA for roughly four to six months, three-fourths of the women were placed in a job.

Half of those women were working in every quarter of the year after they completed the program. Of those who went to work, only 16% rose above the poverty level in the first year and 22% in the second year.

But the Administration saw the study results in a favorable light. “These results suggest that our approach to ending welfare works even in the current world, where welfare can be more attractive than work,” said Bruce Reed, a co-chairman of the Administration’s welfare reform working group and an adviser to the President for domestic issues.

The Administration’s plan would expand the job training and placement opportunities and child-care services available to people trying to make the transition from welfare to work. To keep costs down, the plan will be phased in, initially affecting only those welfare recipients who were born after 1971.

Reed said that the Administration’s welfare reform would be more successful than previous job training programs for welfare recipients because it will be implemented as part of a broader initiative aimed at making work attractive. Health care reform and an expanded earned-income tax credit, which would boost one-wage-earner families out of poverty, are other key parts of the Administration’s strategy.

Critics of the Administration’s plan said that the study is just one more piece of evidence demonstrating that no job training program will reduce welfare rolls.

“The JTPA findings--like all other findings--show demonstrable, but in the end really quite modest, results in work and increased earnings,” said Doug Besharov, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a conservative think-tank. “The Administration’s welfare reform will not accomplish what no country has ever done: take poor, uneducated single parents and make them economically self-sufficient.”

The study is the first to evaluate individuals in JTPA programs to determine how many obtained employment and were still working after two years.

It focused on AFDC recipients who started JTPA placement or training programs in 1986 and tracked them through 1989. Other studies that tracked smaller groups showed similar results.