Welfare Workers a Model for Making It

If the so-called welfare reform revolution works, much of the credit will belong to people like Pamela Collins, Lorrie Denning and Kathy Marx.

These county welfare workers have survived the current system at its worst, in grimy offices packed with recipients, many of whom have spent their entire lives on the dole.

Contrary to popular belief, most of the recipients aren’t happy with the old system. Some are uncontrollably angry. That explains why welfare workers are protected by bulletproof glass and ever-present security guards.

Now these three veterans of the welfare wars, and their colleagues, face the difficult task of turning around a Los Angeles County welfare system in which the dole has become a dreary, hopeless way of life, both to those who receive it and those who hand it out.

Collins, Denning and Marx are among those who must implement welfare reform, now that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has voted to implement the revolutionary program enacted by the federal and state governments.

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On Wednesday morning, the day after the vote, I met Collins, Denning and Marx in their Panorama City office, which serves welfare recipients in the San Fernando Valley.

It’s the Valley headquarters of GAIN, the government’s Greater Avenues for Independence program. GAIN is a prototype for the carrot-and-stick, no-work/no-pay philosophy that guides welfare reform.

Collins, a GAIN program regional administrator, is the boss. Twenty-seven years ago, she started in the social services department behind the counter as an eligibility worker. Denning and Marx also began that way. Since then, they’ve earned college degrees while working. Collins has an advanced degree. Marx and Denning are going for theirs.

GAIN was created several years ago as a sort of pilot program designed to move people off welfare. Its single mission: Find work for welfare recipients.

That’s the heart of welfare reform. The new law says most welfare recipients can receive aid for no more than five years over a lifetime. The head of each welfare family must find work within two years or the family loses benefits. And those still receiving cash grants from government must work 32 hours a week or lose the aid.

Work was secondary in the old system.

Welfare was conceived in the Great Depression as something temporary, to tide over the poor until they found work. But in the liberal 1960s, welfare was vastly expanded and came to be considered a right.

Even Republican Richard Nixon bought the theory. When he tried to reform welfare as president, he proposed paying the poor a minimum income--a way of buying them off so they wouldn’t make trouble. Welfare had become a way of life, accepted by Democratic and Republican politicians, as well as by the recipients.

“Under the old welfare system, we took away their sense of self-worth,” said GAIN worker Denning. “We took away their motivation and desire.”

The GAIN office, in a shopping center, bears no resemblance to the usual welfare center. Downstairs, recipients--born in the United States, Mexico, Armenia and Asia--wait for their first interviews in a quiet, modern, businesslike room.

Interviewers work in partitioned offices, decorated with pictures of their children, their awards and college degrees. They dress for success, the men in ties, the women in businesslike suits or dresses.

The message is clear: success. It’s a contrast to the sense of failure that rises from the usual welfare office. “The staff makes a wonderful example of themselves,” said Collins.

Recipients learn how to look for a job, conduct themselves in interviews and fill out forms. If they don’t have the proper clothes, GAIN has a stock of secondhand attire.

Marx runs job fairs where employers seek workers, needed in a rebounding economy. It’s getting much easier, she said, to find people jobs.

But most important is the message I heard a GAIN worker give a class of recipients on their first day in the office: “Welfare is no longer a right in California.”

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This program and philosophy have a lot of critics. Organizations representing the poor protest about the absence of child care. They accuse GAIN of shunting recipients into low-paying jobs with no future.

They’re right about child care. Providing decent child care for working families is one of the nation’s great failures, right up there with our inadequate health care.

But they’re wrong about starting at the bottom.

As Kathy Marx, Pamela Collins and Lorrie Denning agreed, you begin with a low-paying job and work your way up.

They really believe you can rise from the counter to assistant manager of a Taco Bell, from deliveryman to foreman in a manufacturing company. And, while doing it, you can become a role model for your kids.

Skeptics will dismiss this as a meaningless cliche.

But it’s a great cliche--and it’s true.