Welfare Caseworkers Face Own Challenge to Reform

During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Steve Mitchell worked in command posts high over Saudi Arabia, routing a hornet’s nest of allied war jets around danger, guiding them into their bombing targets and talking them safely home again.

When the war ended, Mitchell returned here to become one of America’s army of welfare caseworkers. At first that made him something of a tally clerk: adding up the household incomes of his clients, determining their eligibility for federal welfare entitlements and ensuring the timely arrival of their checks.

But today, thanks to welfare reform, Mitchell is back in the command-and-control business without even changing jobs. Only instead of guiding warplanes to their targets, he is trying to steer welfare recipients out of dependency and into the work force.

His new task is probably a lot tougher than his old one--and no less important. The nation’s bold experiment to remake welfare could founder or flourish on the willingness of Mitchell and thousands of other caseworkers to recast their attitudes, rewrite their job descriptions and redefine the very culture in which they operate.

Yesterday’s caseworkers were as notoriously passive as their clients, willing--indeed required--to dole out cash support to anyone who qualified. Today’s must be job counselors, confessors and life-skills teachers to dozens of clients a day, most of whom are in the midst of their own wrenching transitions.

“The hardest part for us is not the recipients themselves. It’s been the welfare workers,” said Republican Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, an early champion of welfare reform. “The only remaining problem has been the small sector of people who just want to continue to give out checks and keep people dependent. They’re still there, deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy. It’s job preservation, a natural human response.”

Although Mitchell staunchly supports welfare reform, he remains uncomfortable in the new environment. Not a day goes by, he says, when he doesn’t feel nostalgic for the relative certainties of military life.

Neutralizing the resistance of Mitchell and his fellow caseworkers is a central priority for virtually all 50 states. Many, including Oklahoma, are retraining caseworkers for their new roles. Some are offering them incentives--ranging from doughnuts to year-end financial bonuses--to get clients off the rolls and into jobs.

Changing the culture of welfare workers could take years. But welfare recipients, facing a lifetime maximum of 50 months on aid, do not have years to wait. Caseworkers must get with the program quickly, experts say, if their clients are to survive in the unforgiving new world of welfare reform.

“At some level we have to make some of the same shifts our clients do,” said Susan Christie, an official of the American Public Welfare Assn. who is crisscrossing the country with seminars to reeducate caseworkers.

Caseworkers who have funneled applicants into the system for all their careers, she says, must now employ creativity and inspiration to help recipients plot a course back out.

It is not only the caseworkers who must change their stripes, Christie says.

Welfare bureaucracies, she says, have fostered passivity on the part of their workers, just as welfare benefits have bred passivity and dependence among recipients. Now they must transform themselves from hierarchical, paternalistic systems into “high-performance workplaces” where employees are given new tools and freedom to get their jobs done and are held accountable for the results.

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But moving from comfy certitude to dynamic ambiguity is not, Christie acknowledges, a transition that everyone can make. She predicts that 10% to 20% of today’s caseworkers will decide--or have it decided for them--that the new system is not for them.

Her reeducation sessions are an odd combination of management seminar, revival meeting and confessional. And there are many sins to repent. Debbie Baldwin, a caseworker from Oklahoma’s Kingfisher County, described how she used to treat welfare applicants:

“For years, we made their appointments for them, picked them up and brought them. We have to give up that power thing, and it’s hard. It’s like, ‘These people have to have me,’ and you make them so dependent. It’s our fault. Because of our maternal instinct, we never made them do anything.”

Baldwin’s confession elicited a chorus of amens from her colleagues.

“Eligibility is easy. You know what to do,” said Karen Gray, a Pontotoc County caseworker. “Creativity is harder.” Responding with evident frustration to Christie’s profile of the ideal caseworker of the future, Gray protested: “We would all like to be more like this. But we are not afforded the time.”

Christie urged Gray to heed the advice she is now to give her clients: Put the doubts aside and master the many practical obstacles one at a time. “You’ve got to chunk it down,” Christie said emphatically. “You’ve got a job now where you’re going to need all the repertoire you’ve got. It’s a much richer, more complex job.”

Mitchell and several other caseworkers fretted aloud to Christie that just when they have learned to operate in the new environment, Congress would probably change the rules again as it realized how many families were left with no means of support.

This, in the new catechism of welfare reform, is heresy. But it is, by all accounts, a widespread heresy among caseworkers, who in recent years have seen countless new rules come and go at the whim of governors, state legislatures and federal regulators.

The problem, says Christie, is that however caseworkers may try to hide their beliefs from their clients, doubts about the finality of welfare reform infect the zeal with which they embrace the new regime. By subtly communicating that doubt, caseworkers give comfort to welfare recipients who are willing to risk all in the reckless hope that they will be rescued from welfare reform in the nick of time.

“They need us to hold steady, to give them assurance that they can handle this,” Christie said.

Like many of his colleagues, Mitchell also feels buried by the workload that welfare reform has imposed. Although Oklahoma’s welfare population has plummeted 40% in the past four years, the welter of new responsibilities imposed by reform has meant that caseworkers must work longer and harder than ever.

“What are we hearing?” Christie asked at the end of one caseworker-retraining session. “We’re overworked. We’re overwhelmed. We’re victims. We just can’t allow that victimization to stay in the room.”

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Deepening the sense of unease among the caseworkers is the threat that public welfare workers may be replaced any day by private contract employees. A few states already have turned to private contractors to carry out reform.

By most accounts, the adjustment is even more difficult for those hardened denizens of the welfare bureaucracy, the middle and senior managers who spent their whole careers administering the federal welfare system as it was before last year’s reform bill.

Throughout Oklahoma--and the country--many middle managers continue to evaluate the performance of welfare caseworkers on the timeliness and accuracy of their paperwork, the size of their caseloads and the absence of complaints from their clients.

In the new world of welfare reform, however, such criteria are either irrelevant or outright contrary to caseworkers’ new role.

The goal now is to coach welfare recipients into work and, in most states at least, to get them out of the system. It is not to catch them earning a few dollars on the side, not to ensure them a cozy sinecure in the system with a sympathetic caseworker and an on-time check. It is not to increase “participation rates” so that the bureaucracy that has sprung up to administer the system can justify its budget.

But tell that to those who have earned the perquisites of seniority playing by the old rules. In a recent training session conducted by Christie for Oklahoma’s county welfare directors and their senior deputies, resistance to the new order surfaced in dramatic form.

Christie suggested that caseworkers could meet with welfare recipients not only to gather information about their readiness to take a job but also to establish new expectations for their behavior. Rather than direct their clients toward a chair with a weary wave, said Christie, caseworkers could set a more businesslike tone by shaking their hands and addressing them as Ms. Whatever.

“Shake their hands?” asked one welfare administrator incredulously. “Why would we do that?”

In Oklahoma, resistance at the management level has meant that in many offices, caseworkers must still plod through a 21-page form with an applicant instead of cutting to the heart of the matter--his or her job-readiness and job-search plans. The state’s application form still calls welfare by its old name--Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

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Most welfare offices still have no motivational posters and no prominent announcement of work requirements. While some have spiffy new work spaces with banks of computers for job-searching clients, most still sport the dented furniture and peeling paint that bespeak misery, victimization and dependence.

“What do you think your office communicates?” Christie asked a group of Oklahoma caseworkers.

“Welfare,” one groaned.

That, said Christie, may be an accurate description. But for welfare caseworkers of the future, it’s the wrong answer.