N.Y. ‘Workfare’ Not So Fair After All, Some Say

There is an unmistakable dignity in 45-year-old Geneva Moore. But there is little dignity, she thinks, in the work she does for 20 hours a week to assure the receipt of a $109 welfare check every two weeks and $151 in food stamps once a month.

Moore, a mother of three and a welfare recipient since 1991, presides with broom and dustpan over the shabby back lot of the Murphy Consolidated Public Housing complex in the Bronx, New York City’s poorest borough. Across the street, refuse clings to the grates of the liquor store and the grocery at the corner of East Tremont Avenue and Boston Road. But Moore’s territory is spotless, as she and the five “workfare” participants she leads complete another day in New York City’s Work Experience Program, or WEP.

In the eyes of most state governors and Republican lawmakers, Moore is not an employee. She is a “WEP worker”--viewed as a trainee learning how to work at the state’s expense.

And Moore says she is reminded of her second-class status daily.

As Congress and the Clinton administration square off over the status of “workfare” participants like Moore, most discussions have focused on whether they should receive the minimum wage. The balanced-budget bill passed last week by the House of Representatives would require states to pay workfare participants the minimum wage. In most states, including New York and California, workers like Moore could have counted on that anyway.

But there is much more at stake in the debate over workfare, including whether such workers can join unions and whether they are protected by federal health and safety regulations and civil rights laws barring discrimination.

For Moore, the debate gets pretty basic pretty fast: Does she deserve to get a brace for her back when she lifts heavy trash cans, or boots and heavy gloves to protect her feet and hands from broken glass, crack vials and junkies’ needles? Can she talk to a union organizer without fear of retribution from her supervisors? How about enjoying the dignity of a paycheck in return for showing up on time and completing her tasks so conscientiously that she often stays well beyond her required four hours a day?

Sure she can, say Republican lawmakers--when she gets a real job in the private sector. Community service jobs, after all, are supposed to be a last resort. And they are not supposed to be so comfortable that a worker would want to make a career of them.

Extending employee status to workfare workers would not only create “a program that sucks people onto welfare,” said Rep. James M. Talent (R-Mo.), a leading architect of welfare reform, it also would be unfair to those working poor who have stayed off welfare and yet would not get the health benefits and transportation assistance accorded to workfare “employees.”

Finally, it would be so costly to maintain the necessary records and to ensure strict compliance with all federal labor laws that states, counties and nonprofit entities would not want to devise such programs, Talent said in House debate.

“The work provisions are designed to create a bridge from welfare to work, and by making it unaffordable, we would knock down that bridge . . . ,” Talent said.

But Moore and many others say that as long as she is doing work other people are hired and paid to do, she should not need to wait to be treated like a worker. Showing up promptly on the job each morning, Moore says she does exactly the things that any city maintenance worker, who in New York would earn roughly $9 per hour, would do. And while she does it, she says, some of those workers drink coffee and remind her that they pay for her welfare check, so she should get to work.

“I don’t mind doing the work,” says Moore. “But we are just like a piece of waste material the way [the state program] treats us. They feel like we’re slaves or something, having to work off our check.”

Across New York, which has one of the nation’s most well-established workfare programs, workers like Moore--and the unions and community organizers who have taken up their cause--frequently use such terms as “slavery” and “indentured servitude” to describe the WEP program. First devised to put to work the state’s childless, unemployed recipients of general assistance, New York’s WEP program now is being expanded to accommodate recipients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

In New York City, which has been shrinking its rolls of city-paid employees through attrition, the WEP work force is due for a vast expansion as AFDC recipients come into the program to satisfy the federal welfare reform legislation’s strict new work requirements, which will require 25% of each state’s welfare caseload to be working at least 20 hours a week by the end of this year.

The program’s current work force of 35,000 is expected to balloon to as many as 100,000 by the end of next year. And even that number could double.

In Los Angeles, where 20,000 general-relief recipients now participate in the county’s workfare program, the county is already adding childless recipients of food stamps, who must work as a condition of continued benefits. But county officials have not yet said whether the program would expand to provide work for AFDC recipients.

At both the state and county levels, there is vigorous debate over what status welfare recipients will have if they enter community jobs programs to satisfy new work requirements. Gov. Pete Wilson adamantly opposes extending to them full employee rights--including the controversial right to organize. But a Democrat controlled legislative committee has backed the extension of such rights.

While California contemplates its next step, New York’s workfare experiment is well underway.

WEP workers now account for 75% of the New York City Parks Department work force, and almost a third of those working in the Sanitation Department. In city hospitals, housing projects and administrative offices, they are cleaning, cooking, painting, making repairs and emptying bedpans, even as the ranks of paid employees are being cut through attrition, buyouts and early retirements.

The file cabinets of union locals and advocate groups bulge with the names of people who once were employed--with union pay and benefits--for the same organizations they now work for in the WEP program.

One of them is Hattie Hargrove, a 50-year-old custodial worker in the Mineola (Long Island) County Department of Social Services Building. One of 25 county workers laid off in 1992, she hunted unsuccessfully for a job until her unemployment benefits ran out. By late 1993, Hargrove--who by then had taken custody of a baby cousin--went on AFDC.

In short order, Hargrove was back at her old desk, performing her old duties for her old supervisor. But this time, under the WEP, she had no idea whether she would be covered by workers compensation if she hurt herself on the job. As long as New York argues that she is not an employee--as it has in several court cases--her supervisors are not required to give her protective gear for hazardous duty (although they do so). And at the end of a month’s work, all she has is a $53.50 welfare check and $263 in food stamps.

“I’d be making more money, and I’d have benefits instead of Medicaid,” Hargrove said when asked the difference between her old situation and her new one. “I know I would feel better because I’d be getting a paycheck and people wouldn’t look down at me like I was crazy anymore.”

In dozens of other cases, WEP workers allege they have been sexually harassed, that there is “racial steering” in which supervisors favor one group over another for better jobs, that workers have been arbitrarily terminated--and their benefits cut off--for complaining of hazardous or unfair work conditions. In affidavits and interviews, WEP workers say they are using drills, jigsaws and other power tools without adequate protection or training and that they are ordered to pick up dead animals and dirty needles without protective gloves.

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City officials contend that WEP workers are told not to subject themselves to dangers. But advocates of the poor maintain that WEP supervisors ask anyway, and few WEP workers feel powerful enough to say no. That, they say, is why a union is so crucial.

Outside the New York Sanitation Department’s Bronx Facility recently, 38-year-old Antonia Santana described her fear of wading into a thigh-deep pool of water, black with garbage and animal droppings, wearing just a pair of high boots for protection. A supervisor had ordered her and other WEP workers to drain the pool.

“Yo no queria, pero si no. . . .”--”I didn’t want to, but if I didn’t . . . ,” said Santana, a welfare recipient and mother of three. She paused and drew her finger across her neck, suggesting what might become of her benefits if her supervisor branded her uncooperative.

“Anyone who works with these people--anyone--will tell you that when your case gets closed, you lose everything,” said Peter Cicchino, an attorney with the Urban Justice Center, a public-interest organization that helps New York’s poor. “They’re vulnerable and they’re afraid to complain to supervisors.”

Cases like these have begun also to energize labor unions, whose members feel increasingly threatened by the expansion of a low-skilled work force that can be made to toil for no formal wages and few formal benefits or protections.

The 1996 welfare measure prohibited the displacement of paid workers by workfare participants. But it does not bar “partial displacement”--that is, cutting back a worker’s hours so a workfare participant can do the remainder of the job. And it does not bar the replacement of a retired or departing worker with a workfare participant.

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Union members assert that workfare participants are not only shutting them out of potential jobs but also holding down wage increases and job concessions.

At work sites throughout New York City, there is, consequently, rising tension between WEP workers and unionized low-skilled employees. “Any time your bread and butter is being threatened,” explained one city-paid parks employee, “we’re all at each other’s necks.”

One of the first groups to organize WEP workers is not a union at all, but the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now. To date, ACORN has collected signatures from almost a third of New York City’s WEP workers and has staged often-militant “actions” by workfare participants in cities across the country to protest work conditions and seek worker protections.

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New York’s chapters of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees also have gotten into the act. Stanley Hill, executive director of AFSCME’s New York district council, said the union has begun collecting signatures from WEP workers authorizing AFSCME to begin union-building efforts on their behalf.

The debate about the status of workfare workers resumes next week when a House-Senate conference convenes on the budget bill. Senate conferees are expected to go along with House provisions that direct states to establish health, safety and discrimination protections on a par with federal requirements for employees. But legal experts expect that courts will interpret the new law to mean that workfare workers are not employees and thus would be barred from appealing to the federal agencies that enforce the regulations.

Instead, they would have to bring their complaints to a state-run grievance board. And because states will run welfare programs--with powerful incentives to usher people off the rolls--many fear such procedures will be stacked against complaining workfare participants.

Many congressional Democrats will likely urge a presidential veto of the budget bill over the workfare issue. But President Clinton will be hard-pressed to hold up such a comprehensive bill, especially over an issue on which the Republicans reluctantly have made some concessions.

“What the Republicans have done is make them one-and-a-half-class citizens, which still makes them second-class citizens as far as I’m concerned,” said Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.). “They’ve moved, but they still are trying to not treat people who work like workers.”

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In the end, says David Riemer, director of administration for the city of Milwaukee and a key Democratic thinker on welfare issues, to deny welfare workers like Moore employee status is not only degrading, it’s counterproductive.

“The more we make workfare distant from the customs, the benefits, the rhythms of the private sector, the less likely it is that they’re going to move successfully into that private sector,” Riemer

said. “Anyone who has had children and knows the difference between an allowance and a job knows the difference between treating these people like adults capable of work and treating them like children.”