More Than a Paycheck

Washington will do harm to California’s welfare reform experiment if federal labor officials force the state to pay minimum wage to welfare recipients who take community service jobs after they have exhausted their eligibility for public assistance. The goal of such work is to get recipients off the rolls by making them more attractive to employers. What is given in exchange is still a grant of assistance, not a paycheck.

The national welfare reform law, passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1996, requires most welfare recipients to find work within two years of first receiving benefits. In California, recipients who signed up for welfare after April 1 are required to find work within 18 months. For those who fail to find work, community service participation is in part a safety net, in part a bridge to self-sufficiency.

Community service jobs are not intended to be permanent employment. They teach recipients very basic things: teamwork, being on time, showing up every day, getting along with supervisors. For welfare recipients with few skills and little or no work experience, this is a realistic path to employability.

Consider the case of a single mother who has one child. She receives $456 per month in welfare benefits. When she runs out of welfare eligibility, her child still needs clothing, shelter and food. She can continue to receive her monthly grant if she works 32 hours per week in a community service job. If Washington insists that she be paid the minimum wage, $5.75 in California, she would be required to work only 18.3 hours per week. She would learn more from working more, not fewer, hours, but the state cannot afford to double the amount of her welfare check to put her and hundreds of thousands of similar welfare recipients to work full-time.

This exchange--public work for public benefits--is not new in many states, including California. Los Angeles, San Francisco and other counties have assigned general relief recipients, typically poor adults who are not raising children, to low-skill office jobs and work such as sweeping and raking leaves in exchange for their small monthly grants. Dayton, Ohio, has put welfare workers into jobs previously performed by volunteers and into newly created public service jobs.

Labor union members fear that the so-called workfare programs will eliminate good jobs and depress wages. These fears are legitimate and have been addressed in other cities. In New York, which has the largest workfare program in the nation, the mayor reached an agreement with a local union to avoid displacing permanent city jobs with workfare jobs, to try to move the welfare recipients into permanent jobs and to guarantee health and safety protections for welfare workers. There is no minimum wage requirement.

The goal of welfare reform is to move people into real jobs. Community work programs are a step along the way, not an end in themselves. Congress should eliminate the federal minimum wage requirement.