Welfare Recipients Take Steps to Mobilize

Four hundred welfare recipients gathered under one roof in Los Angeles on Saturday to express mounting fears that welfare reforms will force them out of their homes and condemn them to roam the streets.

Current efforts to cut off benefits for able-bodied mothers of minor children, aimed at forcing them to get jobs, would be fine--if there were enough jobs that enabled them to afford child care, said one speaker after another.

“I don’t mind welfare reform, but I do mind welfare reform that’s dishonest,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), whose family received welfare when she was a child.

She told a cheering throng at the county-owned Patriotic Hall, just south of downtown: “Most people I know on welfare would rather not be on welfare. If they had the ability to do so, they would tell them to take the check and shove it.”

Efforts to strip supplemental Social Security benefits from elderly and disabled legal immigrants are a cruel betrayal of this country’s promise to offer the needy a safety net, speakers said.

“They’re going to put blind people, disabled people and mothers with children out on the street,” said Assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles).

Intended by its organizers as a first step in a political mobilization, the rally split into 10 workshops so that welfare recipients could come up with their own reform ideas and, next month at a rally in Sacramento, present them to the Legislature.

Themes the recipients developed Saturday centered around needs for affordable child care and better job training; ways to expunge criminal records to make some prospective workers more attractive to employers; and suggestions that the government function as an employer of last resort.

Wanda Solomon--a dynamic mother of three who receives Aid to Families With Dependent Children, attends community college and carries a typewritten resume but has been on welfare for more than a decade--spoke of the frustration of looking for work. “You cannot go in and say, ‘I’m on welfare,’ ” she said. Prospective employers look askance.

An’tneal Goffney, 17, said she is a high school graduate who would work a minimum-wage job if it would enable her to support herself and provide care for her 1-year-old son. But she said the least expensive child care she has been able to find costs $80 per week. She figures that would consume half of her take-home pay. Her conclusion: “You can’t work and pay child care.”

Maria Ayala, 62, is not sure what government program her monthly check comes from. But from her description, it sounds like supplemental Social Security. She is a legal immigrant from Mexico who said she worked for 10 years taking care of the disabled before she became too ill to work. “My concern is whether I will be able to continue getting a check,” she said through an interpreter.

Eddy Yao, representing an association of legal immigrants from Shanghai, said through an interpreter that “Asian seniors are feeling so stressed, they need a guarantee from the state so that they will not become homeless and suffer from starvation.”

LeVerne Peters, 45, said he was laid off as a printer and tried to start his own janitorial company, which went belly up. For the last year, he said, he has been on $212 per month general relief--a county aid program of last resort that requires the able-bodied to work--in places like parks. “They’ve got you raking leaves,” he said. “You can’t go anywhere else and get a job raking leaves.” He called for better job training.

The event was organized by an arm of the Liberty Hill Foundation and the Los Angeles County Welfare Reform Coalition, which lists 111 participating groups committed to “humane welfare reform policies.”

The sweeping new welfare law signed by President Clinton in August abolishes Aid to Families With Dependent Children, replacing it with annual lump sum payments to states, which can then administer their own programs. Federal law requires adults to get a job within two years. Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed making it one year in California.

Under the federal law, most legal immigrants will lose benefits and food stamps later this year.