Group Pushes to Limit Workfare Benefits

Putting the White House in a difficult political bind, a coalition of state and local human services agencies on Wednesday urged the Clinton administration to waive provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act--including the minimum wage--for welfare recipients placed in community service jobs.

A resolution passed Wednesday by the American Public Welfare Assn. marks a significant escalation of pressure on the administration to rule on a central question of welfare reform. Requiring states to pay “workfare” participants the minimum wage of $5.15 per hour (beginning Sept. 1, 1997) and comply with other provisions of the labor act, such as overtime pay, could undermine their ability to administer welfare programs more efficiently than the federal government, the agencies contend.

Labor groups and advocates for the poor, however, are pressing Clinton equally hard to ensure that the labor act applies to welfare recipients required to work in community service jobs as a condition of receiving public aid.

The position the White House ultimately takes is expected to have enormous financial implications, since hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients who cannot be placed in private-sector jobs are likely to wind up on the rolls of state workfare programs.

State administrators fear that branding welfare recipients who are fulfilling work requirements as workers could have far-reaching consequences. It could possibly make them eligible for a wide range of costly employee benefits, including unemployment insurance, workers compensation and paid vacation and sick days.

Labor officials have declared that most workfare participants should be entitled to health and safety coverage under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the right to organize and join unions under the National Labor Relations Act and protection against discrimination under civil rights laws.

The state officials fear that if they are required to provide such a range of benefits and protections, costs will soar. And if the same requirements are applied to the nonprofit organizations who often provide workfare opportunities, they added, the complexity and cost of the new requirements likely would drive away many such groups--and the work experience they provide welfare recipients.

“The impact of this is potentially monumental,” said Clarence Carter, commissioner of Virginia’s Department of Social Services. “It may be a slippery slope argument but, if indeed you say the [labor act] applies, and that begins to define these people as workers as we currently know it, then who’s to say that every other work requirement wouldn’t apply. . . ? It’s a whole host of problems. And they could very well be bogeymen. But the possibilities are frightening.”

At a recent rally organized here by a welfare rights organization, White House special assistant Gene Sperling told demonstrating workfare participants that the issue was under review at the White House. Faced with hooting activists carrying placards reading “A day’s work for a day’s pay” and “Welfare Workers Union, Yes!” Sperling said that the administration’s “overall orientation” is to see the laws applied broadly.

Among state welfare agency administrators, such hints touched off a flurry of angst and activity, which culminated in Wednesday’s resolution. The staff of the American Public Welfare group polled its state agency chiefs, asking whether application of the labor laws to welfare recipients would pose a hardship. Within 48 hours--a lightning pace for such a disparate coalition--31 state administrators fired back with their concerns.

“This is a complicated enough bill and a very, very difficult bill that’s going to strain everyone to get it done,” said Cornelius Hogan, secretary of Vermont’s Human Services Agency. “We just don’t need another complication.”

One of the most prominent workfare programs that predated welfare reform--the federal JOBS program--required states to pay minimum wage for hours spent in job-related activity by welfare recipients transitioning to work. And many states’ programs, including New York’s and Wisconsin’s strict workfare programs, are designed to assure that minimum wage requirements are met.

“This is real work, so people should be compensated as such,” said Steven Kest, executive director of the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which organized the rally and meeting with Sperling in mid-March. “You can’t have it both ways. Either this is training or it’s work and it’s clearly not training,” he said of New York’s workfare program.