CWA 1180 - HRA Watch

HRA Watch

1180 members talk about the real deal on welfare reform
More work and stress for staff,
more poverty for clients
July 2002

In 1992 Bill Clinton, famously, campaigned on a promise to "end welfare as we know it." In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, abolishing the 60-year old federal guarantee of government aid to the poor and enshrining the principle of work requirements in federal law. The 1996 law is up for renewal this year. It has been widely praised as a "remarkable success," as one typical newspaper editorial put it. The Communique asked Local 1180 shop stewards in the Human Resources Administration (HRA), the city agency that administers welfare policy, what their experience with welfare reform has been. Unlike politicians and pundits, Local 1180 members work in the trenches where policy meets reality. Here's what welfare reform has meant from their perspective.

"The front-line staff has been reduced because they say cases are reduced, but clients are coming back through the door," said Michael Pricoli, from Income Support Center #38. "There is an invisible caseload because clients are coming back. What it means for us is we have less staff. Staffing has been decreased dramatically."

"It's much more stressful," Deborah Owens from the East End Job Center said simply.

"It's affected the members through cut backs, cuts in staff. Our members are suffering. The point is, there's no staff here," explained Helena Crump, also from East End, echoing Pricoli and Owens and every other steward the Communique talked to. "People are getting off welfare, but they're back in three, four months, so I don't see where the reform is," she added.

"The work has gotten much, much, much harder," according to Venus Williams, from the Bergen Job Center. "The caseloads have not gone down. They've gotten bigger. The workload has gotten bigger, and there are more forms. Cases get closed and then re-opened. It's a revolving door, so how does welfare reform 'work?'"

Indeed, this is a very good question. It turns out that the "success" of welfare reform has been measured entirely by the reduced number of people receiving welfare, and not by reductions in poverty or an increase in people's independence or ability to get or keep decent jobs. Since the law was designed to push people off welfare, the fact that it has done just that seems hardly remarkable. But this "success"—welfare rolls are down 50% since the law was passed—is now being used to argue for even harsher provisions in the legislation to renew Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the program created by the 1996 law. Left unexamined is the question of what has happened to the people who have been kicked off the rolls.

There are disturbing signs that the answer is rather grim. For one thing, while overall poverty rates declined during the economic boom of the 1990s, poverty rates for families headed by working single mothers rose. Women and children now make up 40% of the national homeless population, up from 33% before the 1996 law. Requests for food and shelter increased, 18% and 12%, respectively, according to one 1999 study. Another study looked at welfare reform successes and found that one in six were using soup kitchens or food pantries, and one in five reported cutting the size of their children's meals since leaving welfare. And those are the successes. Perhaps most disturbingly, a study of infant and toddler hunger revealed a 45% increase from 1999 to 2001 in the ranks of hungry children in two cities (Boston and Minneapolis).

A numbers game

"I think what this is all about is a numbers game," said Owens about the alleged "success" of welfare reform. "At any given point, if you look at the statistics, the rolls are down about 50%. They make it look good, but they're dumping people off and there's no real reason why these cases should be closed. At the beginning of the month, the statistics show that they've closed x number of cases, but they don't show that by the middle of the month, 75% of them are back re-applying."

Pricoli elaborated on this point. "New York City they uses the rules of getting people work-engaged against the clients," he explained. "The city is the only county in America that loses fair hearings," over half of them, according to Pricoli (these are hearings that give clients a chance to argue and demonstrate that they were wrongly thrown off the rolls). "And it's not the front line's fault. There's something wrong with the policy of the city. It's the way the agency goes about welfare reform. For example, there's no communication between the vendors and the city workers responsible for cases. So a person may end up with an EVR [eligibility verification review] appointment and a home visit on the same day, a duplicate appointment where the can't be in two places as once." (The vendors are the privatized contractors that HRA has engaged to place people in jobs.)

These problems certainly are not, as Pricoli noted, HRA workers' fault, but the workers, along with the clients, suffer the consequences. "Lapses by vendors cause more work," Pricoli reported. "Just about all my MDRs [mandatory dispute resolutions] are re-openers because something happened with the vendors.

"With this welfare reform, when you're making them go back and forth, back and forth, and some of them have drug problems, mental problems, it just creates frustration. Welfare reform has aggravated all this. I think the agency likes this because it cuts their welfare rolls," Pricoli added.

So the net effect is that while there are less people receiving welfare, there are just as many applying or re-applying for it. For 1180 members this has meant increased workloads and stress because the official reduction in the number of cases has been used to reduce staff even as there is no reduction in the amount of actual work.

Putting lives in jeopardy

The driving idea of the 1996 law was that welfare recipients should be forced to work in exchange for their benefits. Proponents argued then that work experience would help people move off welfare permanently. New York City, under Mayor Giuliani, was an early proponent of this "work first" principle, setting up the Work Experience Program (WEP) even before the federal reform bill. Now, as the law is up for renewal, politicians are pointing to its "success" to argue for even stricter work requirements. The House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would, among other things, increase the work requirements to 40 hours a week from 30, and increase the number of recipients that would have to meet these requirements, from 50% to 70%. The Senate is expected to act on legislation later this year.

This emphasis on the virtues of work ignores several things. First, as the statistics noted above indicate, work has not alleviated poverty, and anyone not out of a Dickens novel would have to admit that this is a problem. Second, the main problem for welfare recipients is not getting jobs, it's keeping them. Local 1180 stewards at HRA all attested to this fact; indeed, it's part of what drives the revolving door phenomenon. "People get jobs, or at least before the recession, but it was all crappy jobs. And crappy jobs end," said Pricoli. "With this work-first policy and making them do WEP, you're hampering people from getting real jobs. People get jobs. It's finding out what happened to the job, or why they lost the job" that's important.

"The vendors hire them and get the money from the city for them, and then they terminate them," said Williams. "People are not staying in jobs."

Even HRA admits that the work-first philosophy has not resulted in people becoming successfully employed and independent—though they don't admit it in that way. But the agency testified recently at City Council hearings that its job training and placement services had found jobs lasting more than 90 days for only 10% of the people who went through processing.

There are many reasons for this. Part of it is the insecurity of the low-wage job market ("crappy jobs end"), and part of it is that it takes more than a principle of "work first" to enable people to keep jobs. "I think they need to advocate for more education instead of work," said Allison Bryan from the Melrose Job Center. "Because a lot of them can't keep the jobs they get.

"But I don't think it's right for them to come in and say, 'I don't want to work, I just want welfare,'" she added, in a sentiment that is widely shared among 1180 members at HRA. "There has to be some kind of medium. I get up every day and go to work, so should you." The problem, as Bryan and others at HRA see it, is that the "work first" principle is not enough. "You feel good when you work with someone and can send them to school and they end up with a good-paying job. A lot of them aren't ready for work, they need education."

Education also works in keeping people off welfare: 87% of students who graduate college move permanently off welfare. That's a whole lot better than 10% keeping jobs for 90 days. But this kind of information has not informed the welfare law renewal discussions in Washington, where self-congratulations on the "success" of the 1996 law reigns without any connection to the reality 1180 members experience every day. Indeed, even as it calls for more work hours, the Republican House bill allocates no more money, including not one additional dime for child care. The bill also includes provisions for "super waivers" that would allow states to seek exemption from food stamps and other programs—despite the evidence of increasing hunger among poor people.

If the Senate passes a similar bill, all this is likely to result in more people being kicked off the rolls, more desperation, and more frustration in the Job Centers. Increasing tensions and more violent incidents are already part of the welfare reform experience for 1180 members. "I think welfare reform has put a lot of people's lives in jeopardy, "said Owens, "because the clients are becoming more violent. Because they are not getting what they think they're entitled to. The time limits come in here. They are angry."

"The morale is so down it's ridiculous. It's killing people," said Crump, commenting on the stress and the constant tension. "Workers are going home and having problems at home because of it. At work, they're barking at each other."

Owens summed up the experience of welfare reform for 1180 members concisely when she said, "in actuality what they do is dump the folks off and then they come in here and take it out on us."

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