Beyond Welfare-to-Work

For a long time, Danita Hobson feared she would be stuck in the role of typical welfare mother.

She had a $6.50-an-hour job as a file clerk that was slated to end after three months and felt the anxiety of looking for yet another employer. She faced constant worries about whether she could pay weekly bills and get her two young children to and from child care.

Her path to something better was strewn with roadblocks that have proved insurmountable for other mothers in welfare-to-work programs eager to gain self-sufficiency but unable to break free of a cycle of low-wage jobs. “It’s so discouraging at times,” Hobson, 28, said recently, sitting in the office of a community group called People on Welfare, which tries to assist mothers and for which she volunteers. “The most frustrating thing is people telling you ‘no,’ that you’re a good candidate ‘but we’re looking for someone with more schooling or experience.’ ”

According to a recent study of 100,000 Los Angeles County welfare recipients by the nonprofit Economic Roundtable, many remain mired in poverty because they work in jobs that do not offer enough pay or hours to sustain their families. Or they end up in a succession of short-term or part-time jobs.

How best to help them is something that has consumed lawmakers and social scientists across the nation, especially now that federal law places a five-year limit on receiving public benefits.

Almost nowhere else is the sense of urgency greater than in Los Angeles County, which has more welfare recipients--572,814 parents and children receiving cash aid--than all the states except California and New York. Although the local welfare rolls have decreased by 28% over the last three years, many women in the county’s welfare-to-work program--called GAIN or Greater Avenues to Independence--have not managed to transition from welfare to self-sustaining work.

They also remain dependent on government assistance like food stamps, Medi-Cal, subsidized child care and cash grants. The title of the Roundtable study, “The Cage of Poverty,” vividly describes their predicament. The money they earn at work, combined with the federal Earned Income Tax Credit and welfare benefits, barely lifts them above the poverty threshold. Most of these women say they receive little or no money from the fathers of their children.

Hobson still has the career assessment form she got from the welfare office a few years ago. It determined that she was capable of being a general clerk, making $5 to $8 an hour. And for a while that’s what she did. Nothing else seemed to offer much better. She remembers a call from the Social Security Administration offering a five-month temp job for $6 an hour and medical care, but no other benefits.

She persuaded her welfare caseworker that she would do better by attending Los Angeles City College. She wanted to get into accounting but ended up with a certificate as a clerk/typist. On campus, she saw a job listing for Federal Express; she began working an hour a night sorting mail. In the last year, she has moved up to customer service and now earns $11 an hour.

But her position is precarious. She works 17 to 20 hours a week while still in training, short of the federal requirement of 32 hours of work a week. She could lose a portion of benefits if that minimum of hours is not met.

“My caseworker says that I’m not working enough hours and that I should take another assessment to see if I made the right choice,” said Hobson. “But I feel like I need to get my foot in the door. I’m not going to leave a job that’s paying me over the minimum wage and giving me benefits. I’m totally confused.”

Hobson receives a $220 monthly cash grant and $30 in food stamps. Her 6-year-old son Daniel suffers from seizures, the cause of which doctors can’t pinpoint, and receives Supplemental Security Income. She gets a Section 8 housing voucher and so only pays $241 in monthly rent. Yet she says she can barely fend off the bill collectors. Daniel and her 8-year-old daughter Dachelle are in a good day-care center, but it requires tremendous juggling.

She is still low on the totem pole at work and floats to various Federal Express centers throughout the city at different hours. On one recent 2:30 to 6 p.m. shift, her day-care provider picked up her children from school and kept them until 6 p.m., and then Hobson’s mother took over until she got home, about 8 p.m.

‘I’m Gonna Make It’

On some nights, she stays up until 11:30 p.m. doing homework with her children. On Saturdays they spend all day housecleaning. One recent morning after a late shift, she overslept and the children were late for school.

“I’m scared my kids are gonna be taken away, I’m scared I’m not gonna be able to feed them or pay the bills, I’m scared my kids are thinking I’m not there for them,” said Hobson, recounting the fears of many mothers on welfare. “But if I can get more hours at work, I think I can be off welfare by the end of the year. When I think about my kids, I know I’m gonna make it. I have to make it.” According to the Roundtable study, the experiences of these women undermine the thesis of welfare reform that by simply putting them in the labor force they will achieve self-sufficiency.

According to the study’s calculations, when adding in such costs as transportation, child care, wardrobe and dry-cleaning bills, some jobs turn out to be less gainful than a welfare check.

“We are asking welfare parents to do more with less than anyone else in our society,” said Economic Roundtable President Dan Flaming.

Others dispute that.

“What is working is that we have been remarkably successful in helping people to find jobs,” said county Department of Public Social Services Director Lynn W. Bayer. “Our real struggle is in job retention and advancement, and our big challenge is to put support systems in place that keep them in jobs.”

Those support systems include programs like targeting initial job searches to higher paying positions in fields with growth potential, part-time work tied to education and training, and wage subsidies to motivate employers to give workers experience.

“What also comes along with getting a job is improved self-esteem and self-confidence,” Bayer said. “We really believe it does break a cycle.”

But it is a cycle that for some women is difficult to shatter.

They are people like La Wanda Dorty who, with six children and a grandchild to care for, doesn’t believe she’ll ever get ahead by making $5.75 an hour in her part-time maintenance job. She has been at it since April but probably not for much longer. And yet she has neither the experience nor education for anything better. “There’s no way in the world I’m going to become self-sufficient doing what I’m doing,” said Dorty, 38. “I’ll stick with it for now, but if I were to find something better I’d go for it. But nobody can just go out there and find good employment like that.”

Dorty began working in April for a company that contracts to clean the Los Angeles Convention Center. She works two or three days a week, depending on how many conventions and shows are in town. Sometimes she meets the county’s minimum 32-hour work requirement, sometimes she doesn’t.

She also receives $460 in food stamps each month and a basic monthly cash grant of $916 that fluctuates depending on how much she earns. Keeping her family provisioned, including lunches for her four school-age children, is a major chore.

Child Care a Necessity

Finding child care is a continuing worry. Dorty said she distrusts day-care centers and prefers to have a family member or friend care for her children, the youngest of whom is 23 months. But she hasn’t found anyone yet. Her mother was ineligible to be reimbursed for child-care duties because she already is taking care of her sister’s children, Dorty said.

“My mother needs to earn a living too,” said Dorty, adding that she is reluctant to ask her to take on the chore full time without compensation.

Because her work schedule changes, Dorty’s 18-year-old daughter, a senior in high school, sometimes has to juggle classes or miss them to stay home and baby-sit.

Still, after weeks of hearing prospective employers say they wanted someone with two or three years’ experience, Dorty said she is happy to be working at all.