Recipients of Welfare Get Job Reprieve

October was supposed to be the month of reckoning for a large group of Los Angeles County welfare recipients who are under a deadline to find jobs.

Get a full-time job on your own, they were told, or you will be forced to do community service work such as answering phones in a county office or sweeping hospital floors. If not, you will lose your benefits.

However, the tough realities of welfare reform have led officials to offer a six-month reprieve in most cases.

The delays point up the problems of transforming a massive social welfare system and the difficulties that welfare recipients face in finding jobs that pay them enough to support themselves.

“Many people are making progress, but they need that one extra lift, whether it’s improving typing skills, getting some computer instruction or taking an English class,” said Eileen Kelly, manager of GAIN services for the county Department of Public Social Services. GAIN, or Greater Avenues for Independence, is the county’s main welfare-to-work program.

Without the six-month reprieve, about 2,600 welfare recipients in Los Angeles County might have been forced into community service work or cut off from benefits.

For welfare families, the extra time offers some promise but also exposes new, uncertain terrain.

Patricia Turner, a mother of two, said she desperately wants to work. But after several years in the GAIN program she still lacks a high school diploma and has been told she might have to go into community service or be cut off.

“It’s so hard filling out applications and not getting the job,” said Turner, 51. “And if I’m not working or going to school, I’ll have to do community service, something that’s dead-end, and I want more than that.”

The county has not determined how community service will operate. Under one proposal, people such as Turner would work in low-level public or private sector jobs to earn their benefits. Under another plan, the cash benefits might be given to employers who would pay it as a wage. The number of hours worked would depend on the level of benefits.

In Los Angeles County, a mother of two receives, in most cases, $626 in monthly welfare benefits for her household, plus food stamps and Medi-Cal health coverage.

The work requirement is a key component of welfare reform, intended to compel large numbers of mothers to move from dependency to self-sufficiency. Under a state law that took effect in April 1998, most new recipients had 18 months to find a job, meaning the deadlines would start coming due this month.

But counties were allowed to extend the deadline for six months if aid recipients were making a good faith effort to find work. Los Angeles and many other counties in the state are using that option.

The county has a total welfare-to-work caseload of more than 100,800. Recipients already on the rolls as of April 1998 had 24 months to find work. But about 2,600 recipients signed up after April and faced the initial deadline this month. Of those, none will be subject to community service in October, one will be in November and seven could enter the program by year’s end, officials said.

Similar experiences are reported by other counties throughout the state. In San Diego County, with a welfare-to-work caseload of 24,000, about 100 recipients might be affected initially but the number probably will be far less, officials said.

Although the number of those in community service jobs is expected to increase next year statewide, officials say that there are reasons for the slow start-up. Welfare rolls in Los Angeles County, as in other large metropolitan areas, have plummeted in recent years. As a result, far fewer people could be affected.

And officials have made strides in finding entry-level jobs for recipients. From April 1998 through July 1999, more than 60,000 recipients in Los Angeles found full- or part-time employment.

But the promising numbers mask serious shortcomings in the attempt to remake welfare. Most counties have yet to finalize community service programs and are not eager to steer large numbers of recipients into them.

And the gains in employment are not clear-cut. Most welfare recipients’ jobs do not last long and do not pay enough to lift them out of poverty. Thus, many of those with jobs remain dependent on government assistance. And there is still a hard-core segment of recipients who cannot find any work, even in an economy performing better than it has in decades.

Additionally, thousands of Los Angeles County families--12,800 as of July--are being penalized for failing to cooperate in finding a job. In those cases, the adult recipients, but not the children, are denied cash benefits.

These harsh realities have led welfare officials in Los Angeles County to rethink things.

The policy had been to get people into jobs, usually at a low wage, as soon as possible. Officials now realize that those first jobs rarely lead to better paying ones. The goal now is to place people in training and education programs either before that first job or concurrently with a part-time job.

“Most jobs that pay sustaining wages take a year’s training or so. It’s not a casual effort or a quick fix,” said Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group that is studying welfare outcomes locally.

Welfare recipients who are eager to work say that they still face formidable obstacles.

Jenifer Rhodes, a 31-year-old mother of three, was given the six-month extension but also told to go for any job instead of holding out for construction work in which she was trained.

Rhodes was close to landing a plum: a $9-an-hour painting job on a construction crew that might have led to full-time union work. She had completed an apprenticeship program in painting and drywalling and was assured that the county would pay for the tools and other work equipment she would need.

But when she got the call to go out on a job, she says, she was told there were no funds to purchase tools and to try to scrounge up equipment on her own. That would take days and the prospective employer could not wait.

Her job search since then has been stymied by unstable child-care arrangements.

All GAIN participants qualify for subsidized or free child care and new rules were supposed to make that system run more smoothly. But there are still too few after-hours programs and care is scarce for older children.

One job on an assembly line required Rhodes to work from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m. Another asked her to start at 6 a.m. All three of her children--11, 7 and 5--are in school but have different schedules. Her oldest girl will soon be disqualified from receiving subsidized child care.

Rhodes wants to go back to school to get more training in the construction field, but she is still anguished over the one that got away.

“They said I would get a raise every month and a chance to get into the local,” she remembers. “I was crying my eyes out cause I had to pass up a job like that.”