Welfare-to-Work’s Goal Is Ambitious, but Pace Glacial
Five months ago, businessman Robert Shapiro became a powerful recruit in the campaign to transform welfare.
Shapiro was listening in August when President Clinton challenged every boss who had ever grumbled about public assistance to “try to hire someone off welfare, and try hard.” He called in his company’s personnel planners and directed them to find jobs--careers even--for welfare recipients. While they were at it, Shapiro said, they should lean on the firms that supplied his company with goods and services to do the same.
Clinton could hardly have asked for a better welfare-to-work disciple. As chief executive officer of Monsanto Co., the nation’s fourth-largest chemical maker, Shapiro presides over 20 U.S. plants, a domestic work force of about 15,000 and a vast network of suppliers. In his State of the Union address, Clinton singled out Monsanto and four other companies for their commitment to put welfare recipients to work.
So what, beside presidential plaudits, has Shapiro’s crusade wrought? So far, Monsanto has hired five welfare recipients, and its contractors and suppliers have found jobs for roughly 20 more. Until it completes an assessment of its fledgling program, the company is not sure how many more of the nation’s dependent poor it will be able to take on. But the number, in any event, will remain limited.
Monsanto’s accomplishment may seem modest, even disappointing. But in the view of the Clinton administration and independent analysts, the company deserves credit for making a careful, deliberate commitment to the lives and career prospects of a handful of welfare recipients. Monsanto and other companies like it, they say, are likely to measure their ability to rescue welfare recipients from dependence in twos and threes, not in dozens or hundreds.
In fact, those on the front lines of this national movement say there is a growing disconnect between the slow track on which welfare-to-work efforts are proceeding and the fast track dictated by the welfare reform law that Clinton signed last year.
Experts say Monsanto’s experience underscores one of the difficult truths of welfare reform: Putting millions of recipients to work will require more than financial incentives, more than presidential exhortations, more than extensive training and placement programs. It will require considerable patience because progress will be measured in tiny steps, not great leaps.
“It’s like eating an elephant one bite at a time,” said Blair Forlaw, whose nonprofit organization tries to match jobs and companies in St. Louis with the prospective workers who seek them. “That’s very different than throwing up your hands and saying, ‘We need 17,000 jobs right away.’ You have to have a place to start.”
Under the terms of the welfare reform law, most able-bodied adults will be required to find work within two years of receiving benefits. States have some flexibility in administering the work requirements, but the upshot is pretty clear: According to Gary Burtless, a welfare reform analyst at the Brookings Institution think tank, implementation will require work to be found for more than 2 million aid recipients during the next five years.
Besides waging a relentless bully-pulpit campaign aimed at employers, Clinton is pushing Congress to chip in with federal funds. As part of his 1998 budget proposal, Clinton unveiled a plan to send $3 billion to states and cities to help them develop job training, readiness and placement programs; offer employers wage supplements, and create transportation networks aimed at moving welfare recipients to their new jobs. The administration also proposed a $600-million five-year program to sweeten and expand existing tax breaks for employers who hire beneficiaries.
According to Burtless, such programs have had limited success in the past, often stigmatizing the very workers they are meant to help. But the administration is counting on employers to view aid recipients in a new light in response to the president’s admonishments and the past year’s unprecedented public debate on welfare and social responsibility.
For now, at least, there is little reason to believe that business as a whole has softened its resistance. In January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a pointed message that no amount of preaching could induce businesses to bail state and federal governments and community groups out of their primary responsibility to prepare welfare recipients for work. “It is a foregone conclusion,” said Jeffrey H. Joseph, the chamber’s vice president for domestic policy, “that the private sector will have a hard time absorbing these people into the work force.”
On the same day the chamber issued its warning, Clinton was hosting Shapiro and 10 other corporate executives at the White House to showcase their welfare-to-work efforts. A few companies, such as United Parcel Service Inc. and Sprint Corp., already have well-established programs with substantial accomplishments to tout. Marriott Corp., the undisputed leader in the field, has for years hired thousands of low-skill workers from the welfare rolls, and its training program, “pathways to independence,” is considered a national model.
But most of those called to the White House last month, including Burger King Corp., the job placement agency Manpower Inc. and retail giant TJX Co., find themselves at about the same point as Monsanto. They are committed to the task of hiring welfare recipients, but their programs are either on the drawing board or in their infancy. Even those with plenty of potential entry-level jobs acknowledge limits to their ability to absorb the thousands of welfare recipients who will be looking for work in their communities.
As communities go, Monsanto’s home town of St. Louis is the kind of place that provides a relatively favorable economic climate in which to make welfare reform--and recipients--work. The metropolitan area is home to about 61,400 businesses and 145,000 welfare recipients, with an unemployment rate of 4.7%, slightly below the national average. Unlike many cities, its economy is growing, although modestly.
But there is more to the picture. Like the rest of the country, St. Louis’ economy is shifting from an industrial base dominated by employers like aerospace giant McDonnell-Douglas Corp. to a greater service orientation. Jobs requiring mere brawn are dwindling, replaced by lower-paid jobs requiring skill, education and a high degree of interpersonal polish.
In many ways, Monsanto embodies that shift. Its work force is dominated by scientists, engineers and skilled laborers, undergirded by a support staff that is expected not only to file correspondence and answer the phones, but also to produce computer-generated spreadsheets and graphics.
By 2005, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 14% of jobs in the U.S. economy will be positions that can be filled by workers without high school diplomas and functional reading skills.
For the nation’s population of welfare recipients, that is bad news. In 1992, the latest period for which statistics are available, 46% of aid recipients had not completed high school or earned a General Equivalency Diploma. Studies show as many as 30% read at the sixth-grade level or below, and between 25% and 40% are estimated to have learning disabilities.
Monsanto officials caution that the company’s ability to absorb more welfare recipients is limited by the high-technology nature of its work in chemical, agricultural, fiber and pharmaceutical development and manufacturing. In that kind of cutting-edge environment, there is only so much work to go around for a pool of workers with limited skills and education, spotty--and often little--work history and a litany of personal problems ranging from transportation and day-care difficulties to a higher-than-average incidence of health complaints, depression and substance abuse.
“We don’t have thousands and thousands of jobs here because of the nature of the work we do,” said Cindy Rosenbloom, Monsanto’s director of human resources.
Monsanto is highly protective of the privacy of its special new hires. The company is intent upon shielding them from the prying eyes of reporters. Most of the new employees--hired to fill a variety of clerical and light general-labor positions--will not even be identified to their direct supervisors as part of the company’s welfare-to-work initiative.
Those who are hired, Rosenbloom says, will find themselves in a corporate culture that demands high performance but offers a fair chance of advancement in return. “These are going to be real jobs with real expectations of those who come through the door,” she said. “I know it may not sound that empathetic, but don’t expect a separate standard for welfare recipients.”
For some welfare recipients, the tough-but-fair approach will work, experts say. But the Urban Institute’s LaDonna Pavetti, who has extensively studied the welfare population’s readiness to work, says recipients who can enter the work force without extra training or special accommodations probably account for no more than 20% of those currently on the rolls.
The remainder will need training, services and hand-holding ranging from extensive to nearly prohibitive, she says. A typical candidate is unlikely to have many identifiable work skills, to have little or no recent work experience, and may have a limited record of being someplace on time for any consistent period. She will likely have young children at home and no reliable source of day care. And there is a strong chance, adds Pavetti, that either she or one or more of her children will have medical problems.
Beyond that, according to research done by Pavetti and others, homelessness or “housing instability” plagues anywhere from 10% to 50% of welfare recipients. Estimates of substance abuse among the population range from 5% to 37%. Domestic violence, considered another “obstacle to employment,” may touch the lives of as many as four out of five welfare recipients.
The difficulty of matching welfare recipients with jobs available in today’s brave new business world became clear when Adecco, the placement firm that supplies Monsanto’s administrative support staff under contract, had its first brush with its new pool of applicants. In a group of a dozen women referred by a state social services agency, Adecco found just one applicant whose reading, writing and clerical skills met its standards, even after all the applicants had been through a training program.
Monsanto has a slightly starchier approach. Its new hires are expected to come to the job prepared to work, and they must turn to external community-service organizations to resolve problems. Inside Monsanto’s headquarters, Rosenbloom says, the new employees will be required to sink or swim.
“If this is going to work in the long run, as painful as it is, we are going to hold people accountable,” she said.
In Pavetti’s view, at least Monsanto is being honest about its expectations.
“We’re in a very unclear area as to how much employers are going to give, and how much welfare departments have to do,” Pavetti said. “If welfare departments believe employers are just going to hire anybody, they’re setting them up for failure. So this is a discussion that needs to take place now.”
