County Pushes Hiring of Welfare Recipients

Following President Clinton’s proposal Tuesday to spend $1 billion on new welfare-to-work efforts, Los Angeles County officials are launching their own initiative to increase hiring of aid recipients.

They are targeting small businesses to boost the number of welfare hires, which has held steady at 4,000 a month in the last year. An estimated 135,000 Los Angeles County welfare recipients are expected to enter the work force in the next four years.

Most businesses are unaware that tax credits and financial incentives are available when they hire welfare recipients. Welfare-to-work planners hope to get the word out at the second annual Smart Solutions for Your Workforce Needs conference today at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

“Small businesses are so active in running their own businesses that they don’t reach out to get involved with Chamber of Commerce programs,” said Eileen Kelly, chief of Greater Avenues for Independence, the county’s principal welfare-to-work program. “It’s a matter of talking to them one-on-one. Telling them [that welfare recipients] are not damaged goods; they come to you trained.”

The incentives range from tax credits to customized training programs. To reach small businesses with that message, organizers cut the conference fee from $250 last year to $20 this year.

Nationwide, 10,000 companies have joined the Welfare to Work Partnership, a nonpartisan business group, since it was launched in May 1997. Members, most of them small companies, pledge to hire at least one welfare recipient.

Rena Burns, who runs a small information management company in Santa Monica, said that since hiring one welfare recipient as a secretary--the employee has since been promoted--she has hired two more workers off of welfare.

“I had a good experience, and now that I understand the benefit of free training and tax credits, I want to take advantage of that,” said Burns, president of Automated Data Sciences. “I feel like they are diamonds in the rough, if you will.”

County officials are hoping that Clinton’s proposal, aimed at low-income absentee fathers of children on welfare, will encourage more small businesses to join the effort.

“It affects the businesses indirectly in that it provides more services to employees,” said Mark Tejima, director of intergovernmental relations for the county’s Department of Community and Senior Services.