In New York, Workfare Record Evokes Caution

NEW YORK -- Three mornings a week, like thousands of others who pour into the buildings clustered around City Hall, Francella Daniel reports to work. She lifts bags out of trash cans, dusts offices and cleans glass doors.

But unlike most others who toil inside the aging municipal building, Daniel, 52, is not a public employee. She is a welfare recipient. The city of New York has ordered her to get “work experience,” and it pays her with a welfare check and food stamps.

“I don’t mind doing it,” said Daniel, dressed neatly in blue jeans and a red button-down shirt, during a recent work break inside a locker room. “I’m doing a good job.”

Then she repeated the question that continues to confound welfare recipients in a place once noted for its generous public assistance: “What I don’t understand is, if you’re doing a good job at the mandatory job, why can’t you get hired? Why can’t you get paid for doing it?”

When it comes to demanding community service in exchange for welfare, no city has been tougher than New York. The idea is that “simulated work experience” can provide a vital grounding in the world of work: the values of being on time, dressing properly, following orders and getting along with colleagues. The approach, known as workfare, is also supposed to benefit the city in the form of cleaner streets and better public service.

Now, as Congress conducts its first major debate of welfare policy in six years, New York is Exhibit A for those who would emphasize work and for those who would stress education as the best way to help poor people move up in the world.

Required community labor may become more common throughout the country under plans being pushed by the Bush administration and congressional Republicans. In a major welfare bill that could pass the House as early as this week, mandatory community service would be among the few ways in which welfare recipients could satisfy stiffer work requirements, short of getting a paid job.

Some experts say the nation cannot realistically steer a much higher share of welfare cases into work, as the White House wants, unless states can rely on such unpaid service to help fill the need.

“Managing a large-scale welfare-to-work program is both practical and necessary to achieving true welfare reform,” said Jason A. Turner, who has run the New York effort and ran Wisconsin’s pioneering program before that.

At the same time, conversations with participants in the program and a range of experts who have studied it might provide caution for those who would emulate New York’s approach.

City officials offer little evidence that mandatory community service leads to lasting economic progress for those who provide it. Critics have long complained that it can get in the way of more valuable activities, such as education. Thousands of students on welfare have left college in the last few years, for example, unable to balance school and work demands.

Critics are quick to note that, outside of Wisconsin and New York, few places have set up large programs of mandatory work experience. Washington state recently shut down its effort. In California, participation is estimated at 4% of welfare recipients.

New York has been gradually modifying its approach, increasingly combining mandatory work experience with some other activity, such as job search efforts or basic education. About 10% of adults are engaged in mandatory service.

“I see a light at the end of the tunnel for us,” said Nancy Biberman, president of Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit group that offers an array of support services for low-income families in the South Bronx. “But it’s depressing to hear that the policies that have been so discredited in New York are being promoted in Washington as a success.”

It was just a few years ago that New York embarked on the nation’s most ambitious effort to steer adult welfare recipients into work. Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor, recruited Turner from Wisconsin, where he had engineered a similar strategy for Tommy G. Thompson, then the governor and now secretary of Health and Human Services.

Turner and other conservatives viewed a genuine private-sector job as the ultimate goal for a person on aid. For those who were not taking that step, the city created “work experience” slots and began assigning aid recipients to city agencies and nonprofit groups.

By the end of 1999, more than 35,500 New York City welfare recipients were performing such tasks as peeling stickers off street signs and picking up debris in Central Park.

“Armies of welfare recipients were dispatched to sanitation and parks department crews,” recalled LynNell Hancock in “Hands to Work,” her recent book about the New York experience. “[Welfare] workers were required to follow work rules or risk losing their benefits. The city would be cleaner. The poor would not necessarily be learning marketable work skills. But they would be learning essential work ethic values....

“No other city in America had launched such an industrial-sized workfare program so quickly.”

For the low-income people who made up the statistics, the initials WEP--Work Experience Program--took on enormous significance, although the intention of the required labor was not always clear.

“We didn’t understand why we had to work for our benefits at the time,” recalled Deborah Primus, 49, a single mother who lives in public housing in Harlem with five of her children. “As time went on, we came to understand a little more.”

“You work hard,” Primus continued. “You have to be on time like in a regular job. The only thing I don’t like about it is that they don’t hire you.”

Primus, who quit school after the 11th grade, has held a range of low-skill jobs, most recently for the subway system, where she swept steps, cleaned fare card machines and wiped turnstiles.

But they have not led to paying jobs. Recently, she exhausted her five-year lifetime limit on federal welfare benefits, which Congress imposed in the 1996 welfare reform law. New York is still providing aid while Primus ponders an uncertain future.

The jobs are there, she maintained, “but there aren’t jobs out there for people like me who don’t have a high school diploma.”

For Bush administration officials, mandatory work experience is part of a strategy of helping engage much higher numbers of welfare recipients in work-related activities. Even now, six years after Congress agreed to toughen up the welfare system, 58% of adult recipients nationally do not work.

That little-known fact explains why the administration, which seeks to have 7 out of 10 adult welfare recipients in some form of work, is advocating much stiffer work rules.

Before welfare reform, many people “expected you could sit and do nothing and get benefits for the rest of your life,” said Wade F. Horn, assistant HHS secretary for children and families.

But now, he said, the administration wants to push toward “universal engagement,” in which welfare recipients are involved in efforts that can lead to as much self-sufficiency as possible. Work experience, he said, can be part of that strategy.

“When you talk to employers,” Horn said, “they will tell you they are not looking for people with ready-made skills specific to the job. What they need are people that have the ‘soft’ skills--who know it’s important to get up every day and go to work on time. They know how to dress and comport themselves. They know how to react to a supervisor’s suggestion to go on to another task.”

But when applied to the real world, the theory often leads to conflict. Many welfare recipients refuse to perform the mandatory work, instead accepting penalties that can lead to the loss of benefits.

Welfare rights activists argue that a meaningful policy to help poor people would address the deeper problems that disadvantaged households often face, including illiteracy, poor health, domestic violence, substance abuse and mental illness.

Imagine how you would advise a desperately poor, unskilled and unemployed person, Biberman said. “Would you say, ‘Go sweep the street three days a week’?”

Young welfare recipients, she contended, “don’t have families that are really there for them if they’re at the precipice and in danger of falling off.”

Does work experience help reduce the danger? Every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Yvonne Clement reports for duty at a Brooklyn nursing home, where she helps out the elderly residents, some with Alzheimer’s disease. She reads them the newspaper. She asks whether they know what day it is. She gets them ice. She helps them move to music. She runs a weekly bingo game.

“I give everyone a hug and a kiss,” recalled Clement, 41, whose eyes betray a lingering sadness behind a ready smile. “Everyone needs it. It doesn’t matter how old you are or who you are.”

Clement’s formal education ended at 14, when her family left London and returned to the West Indies. She got married a few years later and moved with her husband to New York. They had two children. The household struggled but survived. She worked at a series of factory jobs: packing boxes, making sure the number of envelopes matched the number of greeting cards, folding underwear and putting it in plastic bags.

Then in 1994, her marriage ended in divorce. About the same time, she was laid off. One of her children had chronic health problems, making it difficult for her to hold a steady job. She landed in welfare and was initially excused from mandatory work because she needed to tend to her son. His death last summer led to her current assignment.

Clement offers little complaint: “It’s like therapy for me,” she said of the nursing home. “If I was home, I’d would still be thinking about the death of my son.”

On Mondays and Tuesdays, she reports to a program of basic education, in which welfare recipients are instructed in reading, mathematics and other skills, including the use of business software.

“As soon as I get back on my feet I’ll be getting off public assistance,” she said. “It’s not something that I’m proud of. It’s not something that I ever saw happening to me.”

Not that the path is clear. Deborah Cain, an assistant director at the nursing home, said Clement’s work experience could be a steppingstone toward jobs such as nurse assistant, which pays more than $12 an hour at the facility, higher still for the night shift.

But to become a nurse assistant, a job seeker must obtain a license. And courses to pass the state licensing examination may cost more than $600. Clement, however, has exhausted her savings.

“Right now, she’s doing her hours for her public assistance,” Cain said. “She can’t go to [nursing] school and fulfill her duty here.”

Unlike Clement, many others have chosen to avoid the demands of “simulated” work. City statistics show that in March, 26% of adults deemed “engagable” for work were formally at odds with the city, threatened with penalties for not following welfare rules.

Is there a lesson for the nation? For all its determination to push recipients into work, New York counts 41% of adults deemed “engagable” to be working; the figure comes to about 59% with a broader definition of activities that include education and substance abuse rehabilitation.

That remains lower than the 70% target of the White House. Nonetheless, proponents of large-scale work experience efforts insist that New York has shown that cities can steer a much larger share of their welfare population into work than doubters ever expected.

Francella Daniel, meanwhile, is thinking more about the view from her municipal building than the big policy picture. Recent job applications have come up empty. In particular, she is hoping for good news from the city’s transportation department, where she had done clerical tasks as a welfare recipient.

“I’m just waiting for them to call me,” she said.