For Many on Welfare, Obstacles to Jobs Abound

Yolanda Scott has eked out a living for herself and three daughters at menial jobs and she has some advice for the government as it reverses six decades of social policy and forces millions of welfare mothers to go to work.

“If they want this to be a successful program, they’re going to have to come in and teach people how to organize themselves,” said Scott, an attendant on the 3-to-11 p.m. shift at a Mid-City group foster home.

These are the life lessons the working poor offer welfare mothers who will eventually be required to punch a clock to maintain their benefits.

Sure, women like Scott say, the hard-core unemployed are going to need job skills, day care and medical coverage to make the transition from welfare to work under the landmark federal legislation that President Clinton promised to sign into law last week.

But the women in Scott’s neighborhood who have never held a job have deficiencies more basic than that, she said.

Many of them don’t know how to get up on time, ready their kids for school or adhere to a bus schedule. They don’t know how to speak grammatically in the workplace, follow directions or control their temper. They have never had to squeeze grocery shopping and housecleaning into odd hours at night or on weekends, or help their youngsters with homework when they are bone-weary from a day at work.

“It’s life training these women need, how to put themselves on a schedule,” said Scott. “It’s hard once you get in the slum of AFDC [Aid to Families With Dependent Children] to motivate yourself because just sitting at home feels good. But once you start working, that’s a must.”

The ability of welfare mothers to grasp the work ethic is crucial to the success of the federal welfare reform legislation, which lets states take over the AFDC program, requires recipients to work within two years and sets a five-year lifetime limit on benefits.

To maintain the size of their new federal welfare “block grants,” states will be required to keep raising the proportion of welfare recipients who work.

However, critics of the legislation doubt that states can provide enough child-care funds and also complain that job training has not been properly emphasized. They predict that many welfare mothers will have to struggle on their own with insufficient preparation to juggle workplace responsibilities.

Estela Valle, who raised five children on a cleaning woman’s wages and now works as a secretary at a continuation school, says Latino women on welfare will have to overcome a traditional deficit of language skills and inadequate schooling.

A woman who cannot speak English and has only a grade school education may find work as a maid or a seamstress in a sweatshop, Valle said, but will likely earn well below the minimum wage in these unregulated, off-the-books occupations. Even low-end jobs in hospitals, day-care centers, hotels or restaurants--jobs like Scott’s that pay about $8 an hour--are beyond the reach of these semiliterate Latino welfare recipients.

A case in point is Martina Hernandez, a mother of six children, five of them grown and working sporadically and one in high school--making her still eligible for AFDC. Hernandez, who had a fourth-grade education in Mexico, cleans houses when she can find work, earning a scant $30 a day, far less than many housekeepers who speak English and can thus command a fair wage.

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Hernandez has never made enough money to be self-supporting and can’t imagine how she will now. What can she realistically do, Hernandez asked, but sew in a garment factory, which would pay even less than scrubbing floors?

Valle, who interpreted for Hernandez, offered a helpless shrug when asked what the government could do to wean such women from welfare to work.

“Good question,” she said.

Job training and language instruction would help, Valle said, as would volunteer opportunities that might evolve into salaried jobs “because our people want to work.”

Here she pointed to Carolina Lopez, who has a disabled husband and a high-school-aged son attending the continuation school where Valle works. Eager to earn money rather than take it--”I’m embarrassed to say I’m on aid when I’m strong enough to work,” Lopez said--the Mexican-born woman enrolled in the state’s GAIN program, which helps prepare welfare recipients for jobs.

Lopez wound up volunteering at a day-care center for the children of teenage parents and parlayed her position into a part-time job. She now earns $7 an hour for an 18-hour workweek--a leg up, for sure, but not a living wage. “I asked for more hours,” she said plaintively. “But they said no.”

Valle displayed no hint of resentment toward Hernandez and Lopez for living off her tax dollar, confident that the two underemployed women would leap at the chance to work long hours if suitable jobs were available.

In sharp contrast, several attendants at the Mid-City group foster home were openly scornful of those on public assistance.

One attendant--a mother of three who rises at 4:30 in the morning, works double-duty at two foster homes and spends her weekends cooking and cleaning--complained: “I’m friends with a lot of people on welfare and all they do is sit around the house.” She spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearful of antagonizing her neighbors.

Another attendant, Evelyn Brown, was less caustic. After all, she said, many of her neighbors on welfare are high school dropouts with limited job prospects.

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“But everybody has something they can do,” she said. “Braiding hair. Watching other people’s kids. Some of them are very lazy about it.”

Some of these women, Brown predicted, will be resourceful enough to find work now that they are threatened with a welfare cutoff, and will be organized enough to juggle employment, housework and child-rearing. But others will balk.

“The gangbanger mothers, they’ll never make it,” Brown said. “They’re not used to being told what to do.”