[1343] in peace2
As Welfare Comes to an End, So Do the Jobs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Felix AuYeung)
Tue Dec 18 09:09:30 2001
Message-ID: <B0DAC1CD7DB7D511B98C00105ACC5A2B056CD4@BDCFB>
From: Felix AuYeung <FAuYeung@pittsburghfoodbank.org>
To: "'peace-list@mit.edu'" <peace-list@mit.edu>
Cc: "'hungerfellows2002@yahoogroups.com'"
<hungerfellows2002@yahoogroups.com>,
"'jkelly@hungercenter.org'"
<jkelly@hungercenter.org>,
"'kanderson@hungercenter.org'"
<kanderson@hungercenter.org>,
"'acarr@hungercenter.org'"
<acarr@hungercenter.org>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 09:10:01 -0500
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"Make an Effort, Not an Excuse."
"Winners Make the Grade; Whiners Make Excuses."
from our friendly welfare offices...
N.Y. REGION
As Welfare Comes to an End, So Do the Jobs
By NINA BERNSTEIN
December 17, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/17/nyregion/17WELF.html?pagewanted=print
The subway cars on the W line snake from Queens through the heart of
Manhattan and on to Brooklyn, collecting dirt and debris from thousands of
riders. At the end of the line, on an elevated platform in sight of Coney
Island's Ferris wheel, a dozen people in green vests sweep, scrape and swab
the grime away.
Transit-system employees doing the same tasks on a neighboring platform earn
from $11 to $19 an hour, with union benefits. But the "green vests" are not
working for pay. Like 300 other people cleaning subway cars and stations for
the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, they are recruits from New York
City's workfare program - by far the largest in the nation - laboring in
exchange for a welfare grant and the hope of being hired.
Daisy Torres, a 34-year-old mother of three who was raised on welfare, gets
a subway car's floor so clean that her supervisor swears you could eat off
it. James Howard, 42, a 10th grade dropout who did odd jobs off the books to
supplement his family's public assistance grant in years past, had almost
perfect attendance.
They were striving to join the 122 subway car cleaners who had gone on to
permanent jobs with the authority, out of hundreds who began the program.
But after many assurances that they were on a list to be hired, Ms. Torres
and Mr. Howard were among dozens who got a double dose of bad news last
month. Because of the deepening recession, the authority had imposed a
hiring freeze. And, under federal law, the city's Human Resources
Administration informed them, their welfare benefits were at an end.
They and the other "green vests," recruited over the past 18 months, are
only a few among the thousands who have participated in the Work Experience
Program that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani made the centerpiece of his welfare
overhaul. But their circumstances illustrate both Mr. Giuliani's
extraordinary success in reshaping the city's safety net around work, and
the new pitfalls, even for those who have followed the rules, as time limits
and bad times converge.
In states from New Hampshire to Hawaii, the first welfare families are
reaching the five-year federal limit just as the economy slumps. But New
York City has by far the largest number of people working for their
benefits, and nowhere else are so many of them reaching the cutoff at the
same time.
Although state law has spread a safety net of sorts for those losing federal
benefits, some may already be falling through it.
In a welfare office in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where signs declare "Your Clock
is Ticking," and "Make an Effort, Not an Excuse," Mr. Howard veered between
fatalism and anger. "I made lots of efforts," he said. "Working out there,
freezing, wearing three pairs of socks and two coats, just to get the job.
And now they won't even give me a chance."
Ms. Torres, fingering a stack of "outstanding" job evaluations and scary
welfare notices in the family's one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, clung to
hope. "My struggle and my goal is all about my kids," she said, eyeing
Guillermo, 12, Elisa, 8, and Giovanni, 6, as Christmas lights twinkled from
the fire escape.
Its champions say that workfare, which evolved under the commissioner of the
Human Resources Administration, Jason A. Turner, into an elaborate mix of
work assignments, job training and job searches, has been a way for welfare
recipients to give back to the city and a path to real jobs for many.
Its critics contend that it has been a dead end for many poor people in need
of education and training, a way to cut and divert people from public
benefits and create a tide of cheap labor that has swept thousands of paying
jobs from city payrolls.
The authority's program provides evidence for both arguments. Hailed as a
national model when it was announced in 1996, it started two years ago in a
more modest version. Of 9,509 people sent to the subways on workfare since
December 1999, the authority said, 4,400 showed up, and 301 have been hired,
122 of them as subway car cleaners. The authority's director of labor
relations, Gary Dellaverson, said that hiring record compared favorably with
those of other workfare sites in the city.
"I'm proud of the project," said Mr. Dellaverson, who negotiated it in
collective bargaining with the transit workers' union six years ago.
Gabriella Bello, a single mother of four with little knowledge of English
and less education, is an example of how well the authority's workfare
program turned out for some. After many years on welfare and four months of
cleaning subway cars at the 179th Street terminal in Queens in exchange for
her family's grant - at a cost to the city of about $1.80 an hour - Ms.
Bello was hired in October of last year. Her hourly union wage rose to $13
this month, and she also receives the full $200 in monthly child-support
paid by the younger children's father, rather than the $50 that the city
passes through to mothers on welfare whose grants average $594 a month.
"I feel free," said Ms. Bello, who left school in the Dominican Republic at
9 to work as a housekeeper for her mother. "I feel happy because I work to
get my money."
But many of those assigned to the subways by the city had the worst of work
and welfare. New leadership of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union
Local 100 faults its predecessors for agreeing to a workfare program that a
local vice president, Neil Persaud, said leaves welfare recipients without a
paycheck and under constant threat that their benefits will be cut off - "at
the mercy of the boss," Mr. Persaud said. In his zeal to be hired, Mr.
Howard, for example, became the Coney Island terminal's designated cleaner.
He was called to dispose of bodily waste in subway cars, to heave garbage
from the dank station below the tracks, to scour an employee bathroom that
he was not allowed to use.
"This job would do wonders for my family," he explained the day after
Thanksgiving, when he still hoped he might be hired.
Exactly what workfare recruits were told about the chance of being hired is
a matter of dispute. City officials say that no promises were made, and that
hiring is dependent on vacancies - which dwindled this year as turnover
slowed in a souring economy.
But in spring 2000, a Human Resources Administration memo to contract
agencies called the subway program "an excellent opportunity" for recipients
being prepared to move from welfare to work, and stated that after 90 days
of successfully performing the work, "candidates who express an interest and
have demonstrated initiative and a readiness to work (i.e. good attendance,
punctuality, ability to follow directions, enthusiasm, etc.) will then be
processed for hire" - that is, after routine paperwork and medical exams
they would be moved into union jobs starting at $30,000 a year.
Teachers at the contract agencies, where the cleaners spend two days of the
work week in a supervised job search or in classes, said that as 90 days
stretched into a year, vacancies were so scarce that some mothers broke
down, torn by the needs of sick children, pressure for perfect attendance
and looming time limits.
Mr. Dellaverson called the memo "misleading." As for five-year welfare time
limits, he said, they have nothing to do with the authority.
Time limits had everything to do with the anxiety of veteran workfare
cleaners at the end of the W line.
"My time is almost up," Mr. Howard said in late November, gripping a broom
with calloused hands. He looked back at the utility closet where he had
eaten a bag lunch amid bottles of bleach, after cleaning the employees-only
lunchroom upstairs. "I really thought I had the job," he said. "Now I don't
know what's going to happen next month - I don't want to lose my home."
During a prosperous decade, welfare policy focused so strongly on personal
responsibility that the role of large economic forces and simple calamity
almost disappeared from view - until Sept. 11. Now, those seeking to make
the transition face a badly weakened economy.
But hard times never really stopped for Mr. Howard. In the 1980's, he worked
in factories that relocated to places where labor was cheaper. By the early
1990's, he said, he was doing whatever day jobs he found to help his
disabled wife, Gaynell, raise their three children on public assistance.
When she grew too ill to keep up with the new welfare demands, he became the
official head of household and was responsible for fulfilling the workfare
requirement. Eventually Mrs. Howard - diabetic, blind in one eye, and with a
history of psychiatric hospitalization - qualified for a monthly $545
Supplemental Security Income check.
"If I lose my benefits, S.S.I. is the only thing that's going to cover the
rent," Mr. Howard said, holding the notice that said his family had been
denied transition to Safety Net, the state-financed aid for which it was
still eligible when welfare benefits ended, because Mr. Howard had failed to
apply in October. But at the time, his documents from the authority
corroborated, he was finally being "processed for hire."
Ms. Torres, usually a beaming presence over her sudsy mop, said she had
cried in the Safety Net office, begging to be allowed to keep the subway
post, since the station manager was sure she would be hired in the next
round. Caseworkers told her there was nothing they could do. Instead, like
several thousand of 30,000 recipients who reached the limit of welfare
benefits on Dec. 2, she was offered a temporary, subsidized position as a
Parks Department laborer and told that if she refused, her family would lose
all aid.
To an extraordinary degree, Mr. Turner, the welfare commissioner, has
succeeded in reorganizing a notoriously unmanageable bureaucracy around his
work-first philosophy. City and state welfare officials point to recent
studies finding that over all, the economic circumstances of poor New
Yorkers improved substantially in the late 1990's, while the welfare rolls
shrank to about 387,000 cases, half the 1995 peak. They insist that the
transition to Safety Net went smoothly .
But on Nov. 26, when Mr. Howard went to the welfare labyrinth for help in
keeping his family housed and fed, a different reality awaited.
At the Manhattan address listed on the Safety Net letter, he was sent back
to his local welfare office, the Bay Ridge Job Center. As toddlers cried and
tugged at parents, the line inched forward near a poster that declared,
"Winners Make the Grade; Whiners Make Excuses." One woman was in a
wheelchair, another on crutches. Some clutched threats of eviction, medical
bills, printouts of bureaucratic error. When his turn came, Mr. Howard was
sent upstairs, to wait for his caseworker - who could not help and sent him
down to the line again .
His wife joined him there, sent from her Supplemental Security Income
office, she said, when she asked for help keeping food stamps.
"It's too late," another caseworker told them later, directing Mrs. Howard
to an office in downtown Brooklyn, and giving Mr. Howard a number to call to
appeal; it was constantly busy.
Later that week, on one of his last days working in the subway, Mr. Howard
cleared 25 loads of trash from the station parking lot. When he paused to
rest, a supervisor brusquely ordered him back to his mop.
"I'm not a slave," Mr. Howard shouted. "I'm a human being."
Ms. Torres is hanging on. A new notice postponed her Parks Department
orientation, scheduled for Nov. 29, without explanation. She does not know
what Safety Net benefits, if any, will arrive this week; when she reads her
daughter's Christmas list, she said, "it breaks my heart."
But she is still cleaning subway cars under the Coney Island sea gulls,
praying that the work she does can become her job.
