Jobs Scarce for Recipients of ‘Workfare’ : Employment: County requires able-bodied welfare recipients to work for their monthly checks. But the program is struggling with a joblessness rate of nearly 60%.

One recent morning before dawn, a long line of bleary-eyed men waited outside a welfare office on Skid Row, primed with coffee and cigarettes to pay their debt to society.

For some, the prospect of cleaning county beaches in exchange for $212 in monthly welfare benefits seemed fair. Others familiar with the system hung back at the end of the line, hoping that there would not be enough room in the county vans to take them to the beach.

For 46 years, Los Angeles County has required single, able-bodied welfare recipients to earn their monthly checks by cleaning restrooms, raking flower beds and performing other tasks for government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

But in a scene repeated throughout the county every weekday because of a shortage of community service jobs, 21 of the 60 men waiting to help clean county beaches on this morning were sent home by the time the sun had crept up over the horizon.

Far from being a success, the county’s General Relief “workfare” program is posting its highest unemployment rate ever--nearly 60%--as it struggles to find public service jobs for thousands of people.

As the county’s experience demonstrates, workfare is not the panacea its most ardent advocates hope it will be. Here and elsewhere, it has failed to significantly reduce welfare costs or to raise people out of poverty, experts say.

The problem is not the people--most of whom bust stereotypes of recipients as ne’er-do-wells by showing up to work. Instead, the county program is bedeviled by employers’ reluctance to use welfare recipients, union opposition, a shortage of supervisors for the new workers and competition from other sources of free labor--including the 74,000 people sentenced annually by the courts to community service in Los Angeles County.

“It’s not an easy sell,” said James Adler, chairman of the county’s welfare commission. “As I look around the county, I think there are hundreds of jobs they could do, but the problem is getting government agencies to sign on.”

Because of the lack of slots, 16,000--or about 40%--of the 41,500 recipients eligible to work end up doing so, down from 70% four years ago. About 25,500 of those who could work get their checks without having to pick up a shred of litter.

Experts disagree about what the impact of the public service jobs shortage would be on President Clinton’s welfare reform proposal, which seeks to impose a two-year limit on cash benefits and requires younger recipients to find work or take a government job.

Direct parallels are difficult to draw because the President’s program would apply primarily to welfare mothers, while the county’s workfare requirement involves mostly males on General Relief. Another significant difference is that Clinton’s plan includes funds for education and training; the county program does not.

But White House policy aide Bruce Reed, co-chairman of the Administration’s welfare reform group, has said that the difficulty of creating jobs, even in the public sector, is one of the reasons the Administration plans to initially impose the two-year limit on young recipients only.

To market the workfare program, the county produced a slick 13-minute video and mailed it to dozens of government agencies and private nonprofit groups last fall. The video, with its catchy synthesizer music and upbeat message, has helped drum up jobs for 500 more recipients in the past six months. But during the same period, the county lost more jobs than it gained, and employs 267 fewer recipients than in September, said Nancy Diaz, the county’s workfare director.

“People think it’s real easy to find jobs, but we just can’t keep up,” Diaz said.

In the past four years, the county has nearly doubled the number of work slots, creating work for 16,000 recipients, as agencies that were unable to hire new workers because of budget cutbacks drew increasingly on the pool of cheap labor.

But the recession has proved to be a double-edged sword.

At the same time that the number of work slots increased, the pool of eligible workfare participants tripled as more people went on welfare. Thus, the percentage of those who pick up a shovel or rake dropped from nearly three-quarters to two-fifths of those eligible.

The county is the biggest employer of welfare recipients, using more than 10,000 a month to clean beaches and parks, answer telephones and guard parking lots. Most recipients receive a monthly grant of $212 and in exchange are supposed to work about six days a month at the minimum wage rate of $4.25 an hour.

Eighteen other cities, school districts and state agencies employ almost 6,000 recipients a month to help repair roads, stock shelves and sweep floors. But only seven private, nonprofit organizations countywide employ them.

“The reason we don’t use them is there’s too much paperwork involved,” said Mary Ann Osness, volunteer coordinator for Pacific Hospital of Long Beach, which recently rejected county overtures to join the program.

Some agencies worry about their ability to screen out workers with problems.

Until a year ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District employed about 4,000 recipients a month, largely as janitors and groundskeepers. The responsibility for screening them fell to the school district because the county, which spends about $270,000 annually to administer the workfare program, lacks the money to fingerprint and check each recipient’s record.

But the district only ran background checks when the behavior of recipients raised suspicion, because the inquiries cost $64.50 apiece, officials said. Last spring, several checks revealed convictions for assault and sexual molestation, they said. Acting on legal advice, the district decided to stop using recipients once those remaining on the job go off the rolls.

Then the worst happened. Earlier this year, a recipient who worked as a janitor at a South Gate elementary school was arrested and charged with murdering an 82-year-old woman who was a longtime volunteer there. Although the man had no criminal record, the incident hardened the district’s resolve not to use welfare recipients.

Competition from other sources of cheap labor is another obstacle facing the workfare program. Countywide, welfare recipients compete with the more than 6,100 criminals sentenced to community service each month.

The California Department of Transportation relies on people sentenced to community service or in early release programs about eight times as often as welfare recipients.

“Some of them (welfare recipients) are real good workers, but their incentives to work aren’t quite as high as someone who could go to jail,” said Larry Ornay, a Caltrans regional manager.

Another reason for the shortage of public service jobs is that agencies lack the personnel to supervise welfare recipients.

“They’re not really free workers,” said Eddy Tanaka, director of the county’s welfare department. “Even with simple things like graffiti removal, you have to have enough equipment and supplies, and people to supervise them.”

Among General Relief recipients left out of the workfare program there is relief and mild regret.

“Who wants to work for peanuts? I want a real job,” said Indris Ahmad, 44. But the county does not have the money to make a systematic effort to match recipients’ skills with their work assignments, officials said.

“They give you garbage jobs,” said Robert Perna, 47, a former welfare recipient and workfare participant whose typing skills led to a job at Glendale Adventist Hospital. “It only led to a job for me because I begged them over and over again to place me at a work site where I could use my intelligence.”

But another man at the Skid Row office who identified himself only as David said he was sorry he did not get a spot on the van. “There’s a lot of boredom down here actually. You need something to do to pass the time away.”

Union opposition may also hinder the creation of public service jobs for welfare recipients. In some cases, unions have added to the cost of using welfare recipients by getting raises for government employees who are assigned to supervise them.

“We’re basically against it,” said Marcel Bell, a business representative with the Service Employees International Union, which represents thousands of Los Angeles county and city workers.

The union’s biggest fear is that its members will be displaced by the cheap labor pool.

In fact, the city of Pico Rivera has saved at least $789,000 by using welfare recipients to help fill the gap left by about 35 municipal workers who have retired or quit in the past 30 months, city officials said. The recipients perform a variety of duties from opening envelopes to cleaning storm drains.