Activists Call for End to Welfare Limits

Throwing down fistfuls of wristwatches and stomping until some cracked, more than 100 welfare recipients and activists rallied Wednesday in Los Angeles to “stop the clock” ticking away for millions of poor people in America facing federally mandated expiration dates for such financial aid.

“We’re all here this morning to send a message to our U.S. senators in Congress to impose a moratorium on time limits for welfare,” Nancy Berlin, a board member of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness said outside the federal courthouse downtown.

Across the nation this week, groups in 25 states are staging similar protests, said Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the coalition and the national chairman for the “Stop the Clock” campaign.

Federal law, enacted three years ago this Sunday, restricts most adults to five years of welfare payments over a lifetime. The time limits begin taking effect in 2003.

In addition to a moratorium, rally organizers said they also wanted members of Congress to do more to help families on welfare now.

On Wednesday, Erlenbusch presented about 2,000 watches, along with a pile of protest letters, to a Los Angeles-based staff member for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Organizers chose to lobby Boxer’s office because the senator had voted against the final bill that imposed welfare time limits. Boxer will carry the protesters’ message to Congress, said Matthew Kagan, her director for Southern California.

Kagan read a message from Boxer, which stated: “I share your concerns about recent studies showing that while welfare rolls are down, many families have trouble finding good jobs and making ends meet.”

Recent studies suggest that many families face difficulties in leaving welfare. A study in Wisconsin, for example, showed that one-third of families leaving welfare did not earn enough to buy food at some point in their first few months of independence. Studies in other states showed that a substantial percentage of families who left welfare fed their children less and had trouble obtaining medical care.

In the Southland, where the cost of living is high, cutting off welfare without higher wages or better transitional programs would be catastrophic, organizers said.

“Half the families in our [homeless] shelters work. The work they do is not giving them enough money to allow them to live on their own,” said Jeffrey Farber, a coalition board member and assistant director of Los Angeles Family Housing Corp. “How well can you survive on $6 an hour and feed two children?”

With her three children, ages 3 to 11 accompanying her at the rally, single mother Concepcion Amaya said she is worried. “If [welfare] stops,” she said in Spanish, “I won’t be able to pay rent or take care of my kids.”