Pay for Working Welfare Recipients

Your May 27 editorial, “More Than a Paycheck,” demonstrates a lack of understanding of the nature of community service work and the goals of welfare reform.

People who work should enjoy the full dignity of holding a job. Under the welfare law, we not only want welfare recipients to work--we require it. In return for living up to their responsibilities, working welfare recipients are entitled to expect that we will live up to our part of the bargain of assuring that they are treated like other workers. Welfare recipients in community service are often assigned to the same types of jobs as other workers. Your argument that welfare recipients should not be paid the minimum wage for their work treats them as second-class citizens.

Living up to our social contract will not destroy workfare. To the contrary, by making work pay and assuring basic protections to welfare recipients, we make the transition from welfare to work more attractive and, therefore, more likely. I have spent large portions of my career helping welfare recipients and others enter and remain in the work force. There is a deeply embedded culture of work even in the most destitute and despairing communities in our country. Our challenge is to tap into that culture and provide welfare recipients with the skills and opportunities they want and need to move permanently into the work force. We cannot start that journey by segregating working welfare recipients into a stigmatized pseudo-worker status.

ALEXIS M. HERMAN

Secretary of Labor

Washington