Workfare Service Jobs Difficult to Find : Welfare: The program designed to lower public relief costs is suffering its highest unemployment rate ever--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 there wouldn’t 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 like these men 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 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.

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The problem isn’t 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.

* 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 themselves 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 the mostly male population on General Relief. Another significant difference is that Clinton’s plan includes funds for education and training, whereas the county program does not.

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

“We don’t want to end up with a situation where a large part of the target population is exempt because there is not enough work to go around like in L.A. County,” Reed said.

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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.

Diaz and the other five county employees assigned to develop workfare slots are used to falling behind.

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 at the same time that the number of work slots increased, the pool of eligible workfare participants tripled as more and more people went on welfare. Thus, the percentage of those who actually work dropped from nearly three-quarters to two-fifths of those eligible.

The county itself is the biggest employer of welfare recipients, using more than 10,000 a month to clean local beaches and parks, answer telephones and even 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 local 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 declined to join the program.

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Yet another nonprofit hospital, Glendale Adventist Medical Center, uses dozens of recipients each month and has hired several of them permanently as orderlies and clerks.

“The thing I like about the program is that I’m not obligated to take anyone I don’t want,” said spokeswoman Sandy Contreras. “I can do my own screening.”

But not everyone is satisfied with the level of screening in the workfare program.

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 the workers 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 welfare recipients raised suspicion, because the inquiries cost $64.50 apiece, officials said. Last spring, several of those checks revealed prior convictions for assault and sexual molestation, they said. Acting on legal advice, the district decided to stop using welfare 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 prior criminal record, the incident hardened the district’s resolve not to use welfare recipients.

“The effect of losing them will be dramatic,” said Walt Greene, LAUSD’s director of employee relations. “But we can’t afford to risk it.”

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

The California Department of Transportation, for instance, 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.”

The county Department of Beaches and Harbors, for instance, tried to accommodate more welfare recipients by promoting county employees who previously cleaned the beaches to supervise them. But a lack of vans to transport the workers is still a problem, resulting in the 21 men being left behind at the Skid Row welfare center recently.

Among those left behind, there was both 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 even 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.”

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Union opposition may also hinder the creation of public service jobs for welfare recipients. In some cases, local unions have added to the cost of using welfare recipients by getting pay 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.

“What workfare does is remove the incentive to hire new workers,” Bell said.

Indeed, 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.

Sometimes, more than one obstacle comes into play.

The Los Angeles Police Department, for instance, credits welfare recipients with turning the West Los Angeles police station on Butler Avenue into a gleaming showpiece. Under the supervision of maintenance man Bill Wisner, about 25 recipients a month wax footlockers, polish wood doors and moldings, and even bleach the sidewalks around the station to rid them of stains.

But the LAPD is wary of rapidly expanding its use of welfare recipients, partly because criminals sentenced to community service already help out at many of the stations, officials said.

Another impediment is transportation, they said. Plans to use welfare recipients at the training academy are on hold while officials figure out how to get them to the site in the absence of bus service there, said Don Teich, a senior personnel analyst for the LAPD.

Welfare officials are making an all-out effort to create more jobs by urging the county’s 43 departments to employ more recipients.

But the county’s top welfare official is pessimistic.

“The Catch-22 is that there is insufficient money to provide support services, like equipment, transportation and supervisors, for the workfare program,” Tanaka said.