Some Single Moms See Welfare as Bane

Like a lot of people, Lucretia Bailey thinks the nation’s welfare system has failed and she is glad that Congress and President Clinton are junking it in favor of a program that emphasizes jobs and limits welfare benefits to five years.

“Welfare makes you lazy. You get accustomed to it,” she said. “It kind of makes you not want to achieve more.” Welfare reform “makes you really get up and try to help yourself.”

What makes Bailey’s views particularly interesting is that she is a welfare mother herself, a 23-year-old unmarried mother of one child with another on the way.

In fact, many beneficiaries of Aid to Families With Dependent Children apparently share Bailey’s sentiments. On the whole, welfare recipients seem to share other Americans’ disdain for today’s welfare system, which will disappear within about a year as a result of legislation that Congress passed this week and Clinton has announced his intention to sign.

According to a June 5 poll for the Associated Press, 70% of the American public favors lifetime limits of five years on welfare payments to those able to work. The same poll found that almost as many Americans--66%--believe that the government should cut off single mothers’ welfare payments after two years if they refuse to take jobs.

Such provisions are in the legislation awaiting Clinton’s signature. Many of those who will be most directly affected--welfare mothers such as Bailey--stand to lose considerable income in the immediate future but say that they hope they will be better off in the long run.

Many speak hopefully about the prospect of job training and placement programs, help with child care and a safety net in the event that nothing else pans out.

All of these are expected to figure into most states’ welfare plans. But many critics charge that the money and guidelines Congress will give the states will by no means assure that such services will be available to all who need them.

In this view, it is clear that many welfare recipients are hoping for help that lawmakers are not promising but that Americans, on the whole, believe should be provided. In the Associated Press poll, 76% of respondents said that government should provide job training to help low-income parents find and keep jobs. Asked whether they would favor an increase in their taxes to pay for job programs for welfare recipients, Americans were almost evenly split, with 48% favoring the idea and 49% opposing it.

Margo Dade and her friend Pam Pulliam both have relied on federal assistance. Dade, a 39-year-old mother of four, got payments for 15 years. Pulliam, at 38 a mother of two, received aid for three years. Both cheered passage of a welfare reform bill that would remove most families from welfare after five years and require recipients to hold jobs after two years of aid.

Both insisted that any welfare reform should help equip women to reenter the work force, provide some safety net for those incapable of helping themselves and hold fathers responsible for their offspring. And both made statements that could have been heard on the House or Senate floors by the most fervent proponents of the bill.

While Dade has reservations, Pulliam applauded both bills’ proposals to cut off additional aid to women who get pregnant while on welfare.

“I don’t think that’s so harsh,” said Pulliam, who said that such a policy might have made her think twice about having a second child. “It’d teach a child to get it on your own. There’s nothing like getting it on your own.”

*

Alyssa Walker, a 27-year-old mother of two who has received federal assistance for 2 1/2 years, added, “Having kids is a privilege. If you have more, you need to plan for it, instead of counting on welfare to take care of them.”

Comments like those do not surprise Toby Herr, a job training and placement specialist at Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing projects. “Believe me,” said Herr, “they know [welfare] is not fair. And they know it’s not good for them.”

But Herr cautioned that, while those on federal aid appear to back sweeping change, the government should not conclude that the changes would aid those who rely on the welfare system now.

Bailey and Pulliam “reflect on the one hand a sense of fairness and optimism. It’s sort of a dignified thing for them to say,” Herr said.

But, like many of middle-class Americans’ New Year’s resolutions, aspirations of many welfare recipients are not always matched by their ability to organize their lives accordingly, Herr said.

“They say that because they can’t translate what you can accomplish in five years,” added Herr, whose organization--the Erickson Institute’s Project Match--is one of the nation’s most comprehensive job placement and retention programs for federal aid recipients.

*

“We would like to think we’re all going to accomplish more in five years than we often do. . . . But if you look at the reports, the factual story is that people [on welfare] cycle through jobs and go on and off welfare and it’s very difficult to know in advance which ones are going to make it and which won’t.”

Project Match has tracked the success rate of welfare recipients who have received the organization’s ongoing and intensive counseling services. Even after five years, with constant help from Project Match, only 54% of participants were working full time, year-round, Herr said.

“Wishing you could do it is not the same thing as being able to do it,” Herr declared. “And conversely, hoping that someone else can do it, and putting that into law, is not the same thing as ensuring that they can do it.”

Martha Smith, 51, stayed home with her five children until the youngest was 18 and said she is proud she did so on AFDC.

Welfare reform would have families thrown into the streets, children abandoned to substandard day care and mothers scrambling to make ends meet, she said.

But one of her children--33-year-old Nancy Smith, who has been dependent on AFDC for 10 years--is not so sure that her mother’s grim predictions hit the mark. Lifetime limits, work requirements, restrictions on aid to women who have more children while on welfare sound like needed changes to her.