How Fair Is Workfare?

One man heads for the rose bed with a hoe. Another starts emptying trash cans. A woman pushes a broom across the sidewalk. It is 7 a.m. and the crew that keeps this corner of Griffith Park neat and tidy is at work.

But they aren’t city workers. They are among the poorest of the region, come to labor in the morning chill in exchange for their $212 monthly General Relief check from Los Angeles County.

This bargain of toil for welfare benefit is an old one in general assistance programs, stretching back nearly five decades locally and involving a small army that sweeps parks, files government forms and plucks litter from the beaches.

As workfare ranks threaten to explode beyond these traditional boundaries under the spark of federal welfare reform, labor unions and community organizations are snapping to attention.

Already in Los Angeles, a national low-income advocacy group is attempting to rouse General Relief workers, orchestrating small protests and circulating petitions.

Worried that expanding welfare-to-work programs may depress wages and cost public employees their jobs, big labor is laying the groundwork for national organizing drives and raising another set of questions in the welfare debate.

Will it not be irresistibly tempting, the unions suggest, for cash-strapped governments to use this “free labor” to perform menial tasks instead of full-time workers paid $9 an hour plus benefits?

Is this a subclass in the making, a group of people required to work but not accorded the rights of workers?

For those eagerly greeting the new welfare era, such concerns are premature and ill-founded. “I think it’s a new excuse for advocates who would prefer the current system of entitlement,” said Bakersfield Republican Assemblyman Roy Ashburn, the author of Gov. Pete Wilson’s welfare reform bill.

“We expect the best, that new opportunities will come out of this, rather than the displacement of a finite number of jobs,” he added.

For labor, the equation is a simple one.

“A worker is a worker is a worker,” Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, declared last month during a Los Angeles conference at which he and other national labor leaders announced their intention to recruit workfare participants into unions and to demand they be granted wage and workplace protections.

“It is quite clear that those who represent public employees see this as a threat,” said Peter Rider of the AFL-CIO’s national organizing department. “It’s essentially setting up a two-tier work force and borders on being a form of slavery--in the sense that they’re told to do work and have no rights and are paid less.”

In an era of slashed budgets and hiring freezes, others say workfare is not eliminating public jobs. Rather, welfare workers are performing tasks that government can no longer afford, and in the process, getting useful experience.

“We’re providing services to the community that otherwise wouldn’t have been provided or if they had been, would have forced a trade-off for other valuable services,” said Frank Mecca, executive director of the County Welfare Directors Assn., a statewide group in California.

“If there’s work valuable to the community and society at large and you can have people do it in exchange for the receipt of aid, I think it makes sense to do that,” he added. Turn workfare participants into full-fledged employees, Mecca reasons, and the cost becomes prohibitive, curtailing an arrangement worthwhile for both sides.

Moreover, the notion of a union for those on welfare strikes some as inherently absurd.

“To me it seems an effort in futility,” observed Vera Davis, executive director of a Los Angeles social service agency that uses county General Relief workers. “How would it help them in any way when they’re dependent on the county to give them the General Relief. . . . I believe in unions and strikes. But you gotta have a base. Can you tell me what the base is here?”

There are, in any event, legal questions of whether workfare participants can qualify for collective bargaining, not to mention major hurdles in organizing people who may be homeless or frequently move, may not possess either telephone or car, have erratic work histories and no spare money for union dues.

That is doubtless one reason why the idea of unionizing General Relief workers just now seems to be seriously surfacing locally, nearly half a century after the work requirement was imposed in the county.

Also known as General Assistance, General Relief operates under a long-standing state requirement that counties provide welfare benefits to the indigent not eligible for other forms of government aid--mostly single adults. The grants vary from county to county, and the majority of counties make employable recipients “repay” the benefit by working for public or nonprofit agencies at the minimum wage rate. In Los Angeles County, where about 60% of the state’s General Assistance recipients live, the monthly benefit has been cut several times to the current $212--and with it, the work requirement, to five days a month.

Of the roughly 89,000 people on the county General Relief rolls last November, 61% were deemed employable. But only about 25% were actually working. Thousands had been exempted because of illness or because they had enrolled in some sort of training program on their own. Thousands more were being suspended or discontinued, including about 2,500 for work-related reasons.

Still, that left more than 22,000 men and women reporting to county, city--and to a lesser extent, private nonprofit--agencies. They clean up animal shelters, parks and schools, file forms in welfare and county assessor offices, and pull weeds in the national cemetery in Westwood.

Departments contracting with the county to use General Relief workers agree that they will not displace regular employees with workfare. Nor, argues county General Relief program deputy Margaret Quinn, is workfare suited to replacing permanent positions.

“I don’t think that kind of temporary help, which is not as reliable as employees showing up every day, or consistently trained, is going to replace the work force,” she said.

After years of budget crises and staff reductions, it is nonetheless clear that public agencies have come to rely more and more on General Relief ranks to carry out unskilled tasks.

There is only one full-time city gardener assigned to the section of Griffith Park where Mark Taylor and a handful of others reported one recent morning. That means most of the watering, weeding, planting and general cleanup next to the pony ride and miniature train depot is performed by General Relief workers.

“Two days without us--this place would be knee-deep in litter,” Taylor said, a note of pride in his voice.

Julie Butcher, acting general manager of Local 347 of the Service Employees International Union, estimates that about 1,500 General Relief workers are helping maintain city parks, “doing work that otherwise would be done by our members--by gardeners who earn $10 an hour plus health, dental benefits and a modest retirement.”

At the union’s Local 660, which represents county workers, Bart Diener says there hasn’t been “a real erosion of the permanent work force” because of workfare. “But certainly it has allowed the county departments to avoid additional hiring.”

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On a recent morning, Taylor, 28, voiced no objections to his assignment. “I think it’s a real nice deal,” he said, glancing around at the park’s rich winter green.

With his headphones supplying a background of rock ‘n’ roll, he quickly slipped into his routine after arriving on a public bus from nearby Hollywood. He pulled a cart from a work shed and made the rounds of the parking lot trash cans, changing the plastic bags. Then he moved onto the lawns, picking up scattered pieces of trash.

“A union?” he wondered, cocking his head in response to a question, unsure of how one would operate in General Relief. “I think unions are kind of a thing of the past.”

Up the park road, near the ranger station on Crystal Springs Drive, Dianne Bolton, 47, was scooping up small broken tree limbs, her fingers tipped in pink nail polish. She too did not mind the work requirement. But she liked the idea of a union to push for a higher benefit and permanent jobs.

“We want real jobs,” emphasized Bolton, who for 16 years had one at Hughes Aircraft Co. She was an electronics technician earning nearly $16 an hour when she was laid off in 1992. “I looked for a job for three years after that. Nothing.”

Now she spends most of her county check on a Skid Row hotel room, relying on food stamps and church charity to eat.

Bolton’s job lament reflects the tenor of complaints about the county’s workfare program--not so much that people have to work, but that the work leads nowhere and teaches few marketable skills.

“I never knew anyone on General Relief who objected to it in principal,” said UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, a former Legal Aid lawyer who represented General Relief recipients. “They objected to it in practice. . . . They knew it was work but they also knew it was completely dead-end.”

The program contains no formal training component. “It’s an area we’re working on. But the cost is always the issue,” Quinn said.

General Relief workers who’ve impressed their supervisors are sometimes hired full-time, but those success stories are comparatively few.

As Blasi sees it, the General Relief work requirement was never intended as a jobs program. It was a deterrent. “It was just something we made people do and institutionally we made people do it in the hope that they would fail,” and thus stay off the welfare rolls, he said.

The work demand--made in many General Assistance programs around the country--has pretty much been taken for granted until now, as welfare reform popularizes workfare on a scale heretofore unknown.

Included in the massive overhaul of federal welfare is a stipulation that adult recipients find work within two years of signing up for benefits. The details have yet to be settled by the states, which are assuming control of the anti-poverty programs. But those who don’t get regular private sector jobs could well wind up in some form of work-for-welfare situation, whether it be community service, or subsidized public or private employment.

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Under the welfare reform law passed last year, agencies can’t lay off employees to replace them with workfare participants. But vacant positions can be filled with workfare slots.

The law is silent on other issues, such as whether welfare workers can organize into unions, or whether they are protected by minimum wage and other labor laws. Those questions will have to be resolved by a variety of quarters: the Clinton Administration, collective bargaining boards and state government.

In New York City, where a long-standing local workfare program has rapidly expanded under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a board ruled in the 1980s that welfare workers were not city employees for collective bargaining purposes.

Likewise, Los Angeles County does not consider General Relief workers to be employees, a view that Mecca said is shared by other California counties. “This is not employment,” said assistant Los Angeles County counsel Donovan Main. “This is a condition of a program in our view.”

That has not stopped informal organizing in either location.

In New York, where about 35,000 city welfare recipients do cleaning and clerical work for municipal agencies and nonprofit groups, labor leaders are pressuring management to move workfare participants onto the city payroll. Various low-income advocacy groups are also attempting to galvanize workfare ranks, including ACORN, the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the organization that has launched similar efforts in Los Angeles.

So far, more than 700 local General Relief workers have signed up with ACORN, agreeing to let the group represent them.

“We believe people should get a living wage if they are performing work that is vital to society,” organizer Amy Schur explained.

Leonard Schneiderman, professor emeritus of the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, sees such arguments as the logical extension of the nation’s decision that all should work, including those on welfare.

“The public has to face the consequences of the public policy it’s demanding,” he said. “You can’t say, ‘I insist people work,’ and then not call it work.”