County Program Pushes Many on Welfare Into Jobs

Sarah Salazar didn’t need Congress or the president to tell her that she had to get off welfare--or else.

The welfare bosses in Los Angeles County told her that in December.

And last month--with three small children at home, no high school degree and not having earned a paycheck in her life--she got her first job.

Salazar, 28, is now making $8.50 an hour, typing patient information into a computer at an Arcadia medical office. “It’s the perfect job for me,” she said with a smile.

Salazar credits her success to GAIN, an innovative welfare-to-work program pioneered in California, and its work requirement is at the heart of the sweeping new welfare reform program recently approved by Congress and to be signed into law today by President Clinton.

Although the GAIN program (for Greater Avenues for Independence) faces reforms of its own under the new law, state officials say Salazar’s success--after six bleary months of futile job searches--testifies to three realities in which to frame any federal welfare makeover.

First: Jobs can be hard to find, especially if the prospective employee has no high school degree and no prior work experience.

Second: Personal perseverance pays off.

Third: Some welfare programs actually work in moving people off public assistance.

In her case, Salazar faced a carrot and a stick--GAIN’s assistance in finding work, and its insistence that she take it or lose her benefits.

“They told me I had to get a job--any job. Then they said I could get a better job and then a career,” Salazar said of her social workers.

“I had always wanted to get a job, and tried so many times,” she said. “But there was always something standing in my way: either no baby sitter, or no prior work experience, or not much education.” She dropped out of high school after her junior year.

In December, after 7 1/2 unchallenged years of receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children, she was ordered to the GAIN office and given her marching orders. The office would help her find a job, and she would be required to take it or lose her benefits. Only her three children would continue to receive financial aid.

This scenario will become commonplace under the new federal law. With Clinton’s signature, Aid to Families With Dependent Children will be wiped off the books after 61 years and replaced by a vast restructuring of the welfare system.

Under the restructuring, states will have new authority to run their own welfare programs with the help of block grants of federal money. Adult recipients will be required to find work within two years and will be allowed to receive aid for no more than five years in a lifetime. Most aid for noncitizens will be cut off.

Salazar admits that the notion that she had to find work--or else--initially upset her.

But it helped that they gave her a bus pass so she could get from one job interview to the next, since she had no vehicle of her own.

Salazar was instructed on how to prepare and dress for an interview, the importance of a work ethic, and heard one motivational talk after another. “They gave me the confidence I didn’t have,” she said.

Meanwhile, she was given aptitude tests and assigned unpaid clerical jobs at the welfare office, where she learned how to file and prepare spreadsheets.

She filled out job applications all over town, but after six months was still unemployed. Finally, one of GAIN’s job guidance counselors steered her to a medical office opening. She was hired July 11.

“I owe it to GAIN,” she said.

As the nation sets out to rework welfare, GAIN stands as proof that large numbers of welfare recipients can be placed in jobs. But certain to emerge in the debates to come is a dilemma faced already in the GAIN program: how much emphasis to put on finding jobs for people versus providing education and training.

But what is not known is whether the new rules and regulations will allow GAIN to continue in its current form. Some policy experts say GAIN, like the rest of the welfare system, may have to be changed dramatically.

“The new law sharply limits a state’s ability to make use of education and training in its program and severely discourages it from making extended use of job search efforts--all key components of GAIN,” said Mark Greenberg, a senior staff attorney for the Washington-based Center for Law and Social Policy.

That GAIN did all it could to push Salazar and tens of thousands of other Los Angeles County residents out of the welfare nest is witness to a relatively new philosophy at the county welfare office, and a sign of things to come.

Welfare recipients are no longer immediately enrolled in vocational classes or sent back to school for a degree as a prerequisite for a job search. The new mantra is: Get a job, any job. Get off welfare as quickly as possible. And then, later, you can go back to school or hone job skills.

That philosophy was adopted two years ago by the county because it had proved wildly successful in Riverside County.

“Riverside was getting glowing reports [for its welfare-to-work] approach and the rest of us were mediocre at best,” said John Martinelli, who heads Los Angeles County’s GAIN program.

“We decided that if we couldn’t do a better job in getting people off welfare and into work, we might as well close our doors. We were more of a liability than an asset.”

That change in focus has paid off.

Under the old regimen--job training, education and then a job--about 26,000 welfare recipients found jobs between 1988 and 1994 through the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.

But in just the last two years--after the county decided to emphasize job placement over training or education--50,000 people have gotten jobs, Martinelli said.

So successful is the program, Martinelli said, he is now convinced that the county is saving more in welfare costs than is spent to operate GAIN.

The role model for Los Angeles’ success continues to be the GAIN program in Riverside County. A benchmark study there two years ago showed that for every dollar spent on GAIN in Riverside, in helping people get jobs, the government ended up saving $2.85 in welfare costs.

“Our philosophy, since we started in 1988, was: Let’s get them a job first, so people can learn what they’re capable of doing,” said Marilyn Kuhlman, who heads the GAIN office in Riverside. “Education and training are lifelong experiences.”

She said that of 4,000 GAIN alumni who were tracked for two years after landing jobs, 64% had stayed off welfare.

Because of its success, Riverside County is one of 21 finalists for 10 Innovations in American Government awards sponsored by the Ford Foundation. One of the judges is Bill Grinker, who headed New York City’s welfare department from 1986-89.

“Everybody bad-mouths the welfare bureaucracy, but these guys showed me that government can function,” Grinker said of Riverside. “The commitment and positive, single-minded dedication of the staff to encourage [welfare recipients] to get a job, and to build their self-esteem so they can function in the labor market, makes GAIN work.”

Judith M. Gueron, president of Manpower Demonstration Research Corp.--whose study two years ago that highlighted the success of the Riverside GAIN program caused other welfare chiefs to reassess their own programs--says the Riverside program is still enjoying remarkable results.

“Other counties that push education and training are doing better and better all the time, but Riverside is still the most successful and, when we compare costs and results, it still has the most dramatic gains,” she said.

But some of the stringent requirements embedded in the new legislation may collide, some welfare experts believe, with the philosophies that have made the Riverside GAIN program so successful.

“It seems to me it [the new legislation] is going to create great pressure for the state to redesign an employment training program that is geared to satisfy the work requirements and that is something quite different than GAIN has been,” said Casey McKeever, directing attorney for the Western Center on Law & Poverty Inc. Sacramento office.

The problem lies in the bill’s requirement that 25% of the welfare households with adults must be in a work activity of at least 20 hours a week by fiscal year 1997. Greenberg, of the center for social policy, said the measure then severely limits how much education, training and job search--the chief elements of the GAIN program--can be considered to fulfill the work activity.

As a result, he said, the states will be compelled to cut back on education and training and to push recipients into unpaid work programs if they can’t find private or public sector jobs quickly. Adding to the pressure, he said, is that states that fail to meet the requirements will be penalized financially.

“As states begin to implement this bill, they will find that there is far less flexibility than has been advertised,” Greenberg said.

Less pessimistic about the future of GAIN is Lawrence Townsend Jr., the former welfare chief of Riverside County and the father of its GAIN program.

He said California, by shifting to a jobs-first focus, has positioned itself to better cope with the federal welfare changes. Even so, he said the program is vastly underfunded and will need an infusion of money if it is to handle the huge expansion that the legislation will require.

In Los Angeles County, there is only enough funding for GAIN to serve about 36,000 out of 255,000 eligible adults on AFDC.

“Clearly California, like every other state, is going to have to re-look at their GAIN program to ensure that it’s consistent with the new legislation and, if not, to make changes,” said John Wallace, vice president and regional manager of MDRC.

State officials are still analyzing the new legislation to determine its impact on GAIN. “Everything is up in the air right now. We haven’t even been able to brief the governor yet,” said Corinne Chee, a deputy director of the Department of Social Services.

GAIN by itself is not a panacea in ending welfare, experts warn. Not everyone who is served by the GAIN program is employable, Grinker noted.

Indeed, some small business owners say they have no use for GAIN participants.

Richard L. Barclay, whose family-owned Riverside business repairs and refurbishes telephone systems, remembers interviewing three GAIN participants for a job, and didn’t hire any of them. The candidates, he said, didn’t possess a positive work ethic.

Charlene Mittel, on the other hand, has hired more than 90 Riverside County GAIN participants over the past three years. Mittel is manager of Family Home Care, a home nursing agency in the southern Riverside County city of Hemet--and was herself a welfare mother in 1993 who turned to GAIN for help.

“It felt like I was on AFDC forever,” Mittel, 35, said. Although previously employed in various management jobs, she fell into welfare after losing a job 10 years ago “and it got to the point where I was afraid to go back to work. I became addicted to the monthly [AFDC] check.”

But when her youngest child turned 3, she joined the GAIN program. Help first came as money “so I could buy clothes--even new underwear--to build my self-esteem. Then they provided me with child care and gave me a phone to look for a job.”

After a week of phone calls, she used previous home-nursing experience to land a job at Family Home Care. Today she manages the 45-employee company.

“I’ve hired GAIN people who only work for me for a day because they find a better job elsewhere, and that’s OK,” she said. “Everybody needs a steppingstone, a ladder to get off welfare.”

Sarah Salazar was ready for that steppingstone when she was told to participate in the Los Angeles County GAIN program in December.

“When I was told to come in, I was barely able to make ends meet,” she said. “So I decided this would be a great opportunity.

“I didn’t see myself as a welfare momma. I was comfortable with it, but I didn’t want to get too comfortable,” Salazar said of her eight years’ of AFDC checks that have ended with her medical office job.

“I knew that somewhere down the line, because of the politics, welfare would have to end. I knew it would happen sooner or later--that Washington would get tired of welfare.”

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GAIN at a Glance (Southland Edition, A18)

* Since embracing a “work first” approach versus further education or job training, job placements through the Los Angeles County GAIN office have increased 400%.

* Between July 1994 and June 1996, about 50,000 GAIN participants in Los Angeles County found employment, saving more than $80 million in first-year Aid to Families With Dependent Children payments.

* When education or training was emphasized, it cost the county about $7,000 to place a welfare recipient into a job; by emphasizing jobs first, those costs were reduced 60%.

* The most popular occupations for people getting off welfare: general office work and retail sales. Other typical jobs are in the construction and manufacturing trades, and medical services.

* During the past fiscal year, the federal and state government contributed about $62 million to pay for GAIN; Los Angeles County contributed $5.3 million.

* Of about 255,000 adults who qualified to participate in GAIN in Los Angeles County during the past fiscal year, only about 36,000 were served because of funding constraints.

Source: Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services