L.A.’s Giant Stride in Welfare

The dramatic success of Los Angeles County’s welfare-to-work program is proving that cities with large, hard-to-employ welfare populations can find solutions by emphasizing jobs over basic education. It’s a matter of insisting that recipients find work.

The county program, known as GAIN, for Greater Avenues for Independence, is putting more welfare recipients to work at higher wages than welfare’s traditional caseworker systems. The goal is clear: keep people employed and boost their wages to the point where they can cope without assistance in the working world.

The county program achieved an 11% employment increase, 7% in welfare savings and an 8% decline in food stamp dependence compared with a control group. In accounting for the improvement, federal evaluators credit GAIN, which emphasizes simple, direct job skills over basic education, and discount the role of the robust local economy. But jobs remain the engine. No welfare reform program can be very effective if jobs dry up.

The new findings, documented by the nonprofit Manpower Development Research Corp., give evidence that a large urban welfare bureaucracy can radically reform itself. In this case, Los Angeles County learned from more successful neighbors like Riverside County, which pioneered the productive work-oriented emphasis in its GAIN program. In Orange County, early results also appear promising.

In Los Angeles County, welfare department officials worked with the state Department of Education, which provides services on how to find and keep jobs. The GAIN program also partnered with job training agencies. The success rate is impressive, but this is an effort that has only just begun.

The county’s welfare rolls still exceed the welfare population of 48 of the 50 states; only New York state and California count more people on welfare than Los Angeles County. Few first jobs, because of the typically low pay, raise recipients fully off the dole. When pay does not exceed the poverty standard, new employees continue to get partial benefits. But there’s a catch: Recipients can no longer stay on aid indefinitely, and any partial welfare payment counts toward the five-year lifetime maximum on assistance. That policy seems needlessly punitive, and legislators should revise it.

Washington is watching Los Angeles, where the challenge is complicated by geography, language and the sheer volume of recipients who have never been employed. The county is a good test. If GAIN’s success continues here, the approach should work elsewhere.