It’s No Simple Shift From Welfare to the Workplace : Reform: As assisted mothers try employment, trouble looms. Without proper attitude, many will quit or be fired.

When America talks about putting welfare mothers to work, it is talking about Luz Rodriguez. She knows how to get a job. More mysterious to her is how to keep one.

Rodriguez grew up in nearby Camden, N.J., moving from foster home to foster home while her parents moved in and out of prison. A ninth-grade dropout and teen-age mother, she managed to land a job as a waitress. She got in trouble when she frequently ducked out of work; she got fired when she was caught giving a friend a free hamburger.

Never mind training welfare mothers like Rodriguez for the high-tech jobs. Inadequate training is not the first reason that welfare recipients find it so hard to leave the dole for gainful employment. The first reason has to do with all the little things: getting to work on time, dressing appropriately, staying on the job until quitting time, treating the boss with respect.

In short, holding down a job is first a matter of having the right attitude--and a lot of people in the welfare population don’t.

“We are talking about some individuals who look around and see very few role models that are successful in the world of work,” said Thomas Corbett, associate director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. “They may have no clue as to what it takes to work.”

America is talking a lot these days about putting welfare mothers to work. Many states are already trying, and it is a central goal of the many proposals in Washington to overhaul the nation’s “welfare mess.”

But the reformers are running smack into a cultural gap of startling dimensions. Employers are fuming over what they see as insolence and laziness on the part of their welfare workers; the workers themselves are giving up and going home over perceived rudeness or racism or out of a sense of hopelessness.

Even before many of the tough new work reforms begin around the country, the evidence of failure is raising warning flags: Well over half of all welfare recipients who are placed in jobs quickly fall back onto the dole.

Janet Miles has seen more than her share of such people. As the manager of her family’s Exxon gas station and convenience store in the low-income Washington suburb of Forestville, Md., she is frequently in the market for attendants and cashiers.

Working for Miles is not easy. The hours are long, the work is often boring and the customers can be, to put it mildly, demanding. Miles herself shot and killed a knife-wielding holdup man in 1991. But her list of prerequisites for the job does not sound very difficult.

“You have to be on time,” she said. “That’s the No. 1 thing.”

And you have to be dependable.

“I’ve had people--I’ve trained them, set up a schedule for them, and they don’t show up the first day,” she said. “When I called them, they said they didn’t realize how much work it would be.

“Then there are those who have trouble getting a ride to work. They never have trouble getting away from work. Then I had a girl who always called in sick at the last minute. I fired her.”

This lesson is not lost on those who are trying to shape welfare’s new look. For long-term welfare recipients, said Bruce Reed, President Clinton’s chief domestic policy adviser, “one of the biggest problems is that they have grown up totally outside the world of work.”

Reed said the programs most likely to succeed are those that “provide the welfare recipient with a better idea of what it takes to succeed in the workplace--what to say, how to act, what to wear, what to expect. If you can’t hold a job, investing huge amounts of money on training just doesn’t make any sense.”

That has been exactly the case for Luz Rodriguez.

Since dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, pregnant with the first of her two children, Rodriguez has been on her own--if not totally outside the world of work, then just barely hanging on.

As a teen-age mother, she relied on Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the federal safety net for single mothers and their children. Over the years, she said, she “signed up for a lot of programs,” but none produced a steady job.

The program in which she is now enrolled may be different. In a low-slung building here in the poverty-ridden suburb of Pennsauken, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, two nonprofit organizations, using government funds, are teaching attitudes. The Work Group aims at high school dropouts; Future Works focuses on older welfare recipients.

“Basically, we’re trying to create a middle-class value system, and middle-class folks value work,” said Maryann Amore, director of program development at The Work Group.

It is here that Rodriguez spent the autumn and winter learning the ways of the workplace. Each morning she walked past a series of printed signs:

“Hats off in this building.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“No loud talking.”

“No cursing.”

“No gossiping.”

“Take pride in yourself.”

In The Work Group, Rodriguez says, she picked up such basics as how to write a resume and fill out a job application. She learned that she cannot call in sick whenever she doesn’t feel like working or walk off a job before a shift ends. More generally, she has developed a degree of self-esteem that is considered crucial in breaking loose from welfare dependency.

“She’s a loser--I heard that a lot,” she said. But now, “I pretty much know where I want to go and how I’m going to get there.”

To earn money for Christmas, Rodriguez took a job late last year pumping gas in Camden. She stuck with it after the holiday despite teasing from her friends about such an “undignified” job.

Programs such as The Work Group’s have produced some encouraging results. A 1994 study of six countywide programs in California conducted by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. of New York found that they produced a 22% increase in single parents’ three-year earnings while cutting welfare payments by 6%. The most successful one, in Riverside County, returned $2.84 to taxpayers for every $1 invested.

But it is unproven whether such projects can be duplicated. Some experts question whether any amount of time in a classroom can overcome values and attitudes developed over generations.

” . . . I don’t see much evidence that it works,” said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington public-policy research organization.

“It could be that a lot of the fights you get into with a supervisor are not the things that will disappear if you have a class saying: ‘You shouldn’t fight,’ ” Burtless said. “These could be people who have been fighting in their families for 18 years. It may be that even a few years in a classroom isn’t going to do very much.”

Perhaps such programs are more likely to work for those who are not themselves the children and grandchildren of welfare dependents: those such as Michelle Ehlert, the daughter of a general contractor in Kenosha, Wis.

Ehlert used drugs and dropped out of high school in the 11th grade, pregnant with the second of her three children. For brief periods she worked as a waitress, cleaned houses, drove a forklift at a warehouse and did “the things people can do without too many qualifications.”

Now 22, estranged from her parents and single, she says she gets by on $440 a month from Aid to Families With Dependent Children, plus whatever she can scrape together singing at night with a band playing roadside joints. Her parents take care of her two oldest children and she cares for her youngest, a 2-year-old daughter.

At 9 o’clock one recent morning, after a late-night gig with her band, Ehlert dragged herself into a windowless classroom at the Kenosha County Job Center, a one-stop welfare and job-placement office.

The center, which operates on $2.7 million provided annually by the state and federal governments, served about 2,700 people in 1994. All local applicants for welfare payments must attend its courses in job-seeking skills, nutrition, budgeting and building self-esteem--in short, the life skills that many lack.

On one recent morning, the topic was keeping a job.

“Getting that job is a big thing. But your difficulties don’t end there,” Rosann Schlenker, the class instructor, told her students as she led a discussion on balancing the demands of home and job. She elicited from her students a list of what a reasonable employer might expect from employees: dependability, honesty, competence, cooperation.

On the outskirts of Kenosha, the manager of a sprawling factory that turns out breakfast sausage for an international fast-food chain could hardly agree more. Speaking on the condition that neither he nor his company would be identified, he angrily recounted what happened when he tried to hire workers from welfare rolls.

“I’ve been here three years and we don’t have a stable work force yet,” he said.

Some of the people recommended to him by the local jobs program “don’t even show up,” he complained. Others showed up but promptly quit.

Why? His answer was blunt and bitter: “They don’t want to work.”

Douglas Ross, assistant labor secretary for employment and training in Washington, sees it differently.

“At the entry level, there tends to be a big turnover in jobs. That’s the place where Americans frequently learn how to work,” he said in an interview. “Dress, behavior, dealing with authority, conflict resolution--this is what the mainstream American society demands for success in the job market. If you’ve had none of these cues and at age 28 you’re trying to learn them, the chances of getting it right the first time are not great.”

What is not clear is whether the chances of getting it right increase with age and experience.

Numerous academic assessments are finding that proper behavior in the workplace is at least as important as skills required to perform a specific job.

“Private-sector employers, while they do a lot of talking about the need for skills, are much more interested in the work ethic, and what I’d call a submissive attitude, someone who will give them no problems and do what they are told,” said Susan Schurman, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. “It’s what the industrial work force does so well, and people who do it are successful.”