Resentment Rising Among Working Poor

Call it the gathering cold war between the welfare poor and the working poor.

So far, it is no more than a faint rumble heard in working class neighborhoods across the country: an offhanded complaint over the chain-link fence. A whispered epithet on the job site. An exchange of suspicious glances between job seekers applying at the front desk.

But in places such as Cleveland, where welfare reform has taken hold more quickly than in other locales, the clash is growing ever louder as low-wage workers and welfare recipients find themselves in stiff competition for government benefits, official attention and employers’ favor.

To people like Tracy Earnhart, an unemployed mother of three who has helped hold her family beyond destitution’s reach with a string of low-paid jobs, it looks like the welfare crowd is winning.

“They go and get a job, and everything is handed to them on a silver platter!” said Earnhart, who figures that she and her husband will support their family on a little more than $23,000 this year. “I’m working hard. I’m trying to benefit myself and my family. Why am I not entitled to the kind of help these people get?”

As welfare reform picks up steam in states across the land, many of the nation’s working poor find that when Washington overhauled public assistance, they were unexpectedly affected--and in unexpected ways.

In many states, the intensive effort to wean welfare recipients from dependency has cut into funds that traditionally had been used to help the working poor stay off the dole. In Ohio and a few other states, for instance, welfare recipients have been given first dibs on child-care subsidies, leaving many working poor out in the cold.

Beyond that, those who have struggled to stay off welfare by toiling long hours in unskilled jobs at low pay have begun to encounter a new source of stress: On hiring lines, in waiting rooms and at front desks, they compete for jobs against welfare recipients armed with everything from government-provided bus passes to vouchers for day care to tax breaks for the companies that hire them.

Unless states like Ohio move quickly to defuse the competition between welfare poor and working poor, experts warn that welfare reform could add poison to a long-simmering brew of resentment among the nation’s poor. At its worst, it could set off a class war on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.

“We have people out there who have worked their butts off to stay off welfare, and they’re saying, ‘Damn it, look at the sweet package these people are getting!’ ” said Linda Wolf, deputy director of the American Public Welfare Assn.

Wolf likened the potential backlash to that which many poor Americans felt when the initial waves of Southeast Asian immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1970s. As these newcomers were taken in, housed, clothed and mentored by churches and community organizations, many of the nation’s entrenched poor asked bitterly why the same kindnesses were never lavished on them.

In Ohio, welfare reform has been underway for more than two years, propelling tens of thousands of aid recipients into the labor market even as states like California were still laying their plans. Beyond that, Ohio is one of several states that have decided to give welfare recipients precedence over the working poor in providing some child-care subsidies. The result is that tens of thousands of working-poor families that once could rely on state aid to help with child-care costs have been cut off.

Suzanne Lairson of Vandalia, Ohio, is one of those parents. For her, the state’s action has stoked a powerful resentment of the people who now command the benefits she once got.

“I guess you could say they’ve added another class to affirmative action,” said Lairson, a 30-year-old mother of four who was told recently that her family’s $28,000 income was too high to qualify her for any help with child-care expenses.

“You know, in this country, the rich people get all the tax breaks. These [welfare recipients] people--now they’re getting all sorts of special breaks too. And the people in the middle, we get nothing!”

The competition does not end with child-care subsidies.

As thousands of welfare recipients have begun applying for jobs at Cleveland’s small factories, stores and health care centers, they are encountering a population of low-wage workers whose only advantage, it seems, is that they were there first.

But that advantage, fear the low-wage employees, can pale in comparison to the arsenal of benefits and services that welfare recipients are armed with as they vie for entry-level jobs.

Consider the very different circumstances of Earnhart and another Cleveland resident, Eleanor Clark.

Clark, 23, is a single mother of two who has collected a welfare check since her first child was born seven years ago. Her aid receipt has entitled her to a spot in one of the nation’s most innovative and successful welfare-to-work programs, Cleveland Works, which is readying Clark for employment with everything from life-skills classes and legal advice to reading and math tutoring and vocational skills training.

When she is deemed ready to succeed in the workplace, Cleveland Works will send her to interview for job openings with any one of the 700 area employers that compete enthusiastically for graduates of the program.

Employment specialists with Cleveland Works will see to it that Clark gets a shot at jobs with health care benefits, at no less than $7 per hour and on a bus line she can get to easily. After she’s hired, Clark will continue to have access to counselors to ensure that a string of tardy arrivals, a harsh word from the boss or a day care snafu does not result in the loss of her job.

What Cleveland Works does not do to try to ensure Clark’s transition to employment, the state of Ohio or the federal government will. Until she makes almost $20,000 a year, the state will cover virtually all day care expenses for Clark’s children, including daily pickups and drop-offs. It also will pay for her and her children’s health care coverage for a year after her welfare check stops.

In addition, the firm that hires Clark off the welfare rolls will be eligible for a $2,100 tax break from the federal government. If an employer wanted to train Clark in a special skill, the firm could join with similar companies and get the county welfare office to sponsor the training, or hire Clark provisionally for several months, paying her nothing while she is trained and still receiving a welfare check.

Earnhart’s package of government-funded assistance is considerably more modest. It barely exists, save for a few monthly food vouchers she receives through the federal Women, Infants and Children program.

Earnhart is not eligible for Cleveland Works because she is neither a current welfare recipient nor a former criminal offender. In principle, she could get some employment training under the federal Job Training Partnership Act. But there too, she would be competing with welfare recipients for a limited number of slots.

The difference between the two women’s support systems--and their job prospects--is not lost on Earnhart. She has a sister who receives a welfare check, and many of her neighbors in the frayed Slavic Village section of Cleveland are recipients. She has heard them complaining about their checks, and about the new requirements of welfare reform.

She’s not very sympathetic.

“Why should they get all the breaks, when we were ahead of them?” asked Earnhart. “You know, you live your life and you do certain things because you feel you should. And then the government steps in and says, ‘We have to do for these people first.’ It’s aggravating.”

It is still a matter of debate whether welfare recipients--even those armed with generous benefits and employer inducements--look like better prospects to those doing the hiring. But in Cleveland, welfare reform and urban revitalization have galvanized the employer community as much as they have the county’s social service organizations.

As a result, there is growing evidence that welfare recipients are gaining considerable ground--and in some cases, a clear edge--in the employment sweepstakes.

Employers such as Michael Shaughnessy, president of Colormatrix, a Cleveland business that makes colorants for plastics, are becoming more typical. Asked how he would choose if faced with two job applicants--one a welfare recipient who has graduated from Cleveland Works and the other a low-skilled working person who walks in off the street--he makes an easy call: “To me, the one from Cleveland Works looks better.”

For low-skilled job seekers looking to the public for employment, prospects appear bleak. Across the country, officials at all levels of government are eager to demonstrate their commitment to welfare reform and have vowed to hire off the rolls. That has given welfare recipients a virtual lock on many entry-level job openings in city, county, state and federal governments.

Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is located, is no exception. At a time when officials have sought to shrink the county’s work force, 87 welfare recipients have been hired. Carolyn Milter, a spokeswoman for the county employment department, said the county requires its officials to “look at” welfare recipients first.

But even as such signs mount, complaints among Cleveland’s working poor remain somewhat muted, often delivered in hushed tones edged with guilt. For many, there is a sense of “I could be there too.” Some say that with welfare’s new work requirements, an even greater injustice has been corrected: At least recipients won’t be supported interminably for spending their days on the couch watching television.

In the end, however, many of the most charitable working poor find welfare’s new perks a strain on their sense of kindness.

“These people are going to need some help,” said Cynthia Perry, who makes $5.60 an hour stocking the shelves of a new discount outlet on a run-down corridor in East Cleveland. “But we were here first. You knock us out for people who had babies and were on welfare? That’s not fair.”

While Ohio and some other states have made decisions that pit welfare poor against working poor, a handful have plotted a very different route. Oregon, Illinois and Wisconsin are trying to craft “seamless” systems of public aid that condition program eligibility on applicants’ income level, not on their welfare status.

That approach doesn’t come cheap. To create a system of child-care subsidies that would serve anyone making less than $25,975 per year (for a family of four), Illinois last year had to increase its state spending on child care almost 80%. By making the working poor eligible for many of their programs, Wisconsin and Oregon have almost doubled their spending on public assistance even as welfare rolls have plummeted.

In the end, experts said, state officials everywhere will have to face one of welfare reform’s most fundamental questions: After you have pushed most of your welfare population off the rolls, what then? When most of your former welfare recipients have become your working poor, will you help this newly expanded class of workers to sustain themselves?

The quandary is not unlike the biblical story of the prodigal son, said Wolf of the American Public Welfare Assn. The working poor have the role of the good son, the one who stayed home and played by the rules, only to be shoved aside when the prodigal son returned.

In the end, the father in the biblical parable quelled the rivalry between the two sons. In the kingdom of heaven, there were plenty of resources for both.

“But this is not the kingdom of heaven,” added Wolf, and “decisions must be made.” Like a wise father, she said, the smart states will find ways to keep both sons under their roofs, supporting each equitably.

That, she said, will be a heavenly trick.