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Enron Mail |
From the 11/26/01 New Dem Daily. Please let the Colorado DLC know what you think. With the U.S. economy in recession and the unemployment rate up above 5 percent, there is naturally some speculation that the millions of former welfare recipients who began working since the 1996 national welfare reform legislation was enacted may now be at special risk of falling back onto public assistance. Indeed, within the last week, columnists E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Bob Herbert of The New York Times have suggested that the successful welfare reform experiment of the 1990s might soon fall apart in the wake of recession. But the facts suggest otherwise. In an article for the forthcoming January/February 2002 edition of Blueprint magazine, which will focus on the next steps in welfare reform, Blueprint Executive Editor Tom Mirga takes a look at the record and finds abundant evidence that welfare reform's success story remains stubbornly intact so far despite the new pressures of a slowing economy (http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=3961&kaid=114&subid=143). Exhibit A of Mirga's case is a mid-October survey by the Welfare to Work Partnership, a voluntary association of more than 20,000 companies who have agreed to hire welfare recipients. According to Rodney Carroll, the president and CEO of the Partnership, 57 percent of the firms he surveyed said they were still hiring entry-level workers, and another 18 percent predicted they would be hiring such workers by the end of the year. Eighty-seven percent of the firms reported that they had not laid off any former welfare recipients during the previous two months - which included the period immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks when the travel and entertainment industries took a huge hit. Mirga also looked at the official numbers in the five states with the largest welfare caseloads: California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. In all but Michigan, caseload levels remained stable at historically low levels since last fall, when the 1990s boom first stalled nationally. Michigan experienced a 3 percent increase in caseloads between September 2000 and March of 2001, but the level of public assistance is still only about a third of what it was at its peak in the 1980s. In Texas and Pennsylvania, Mirga discovered that some of the upward pressure on caseload levels is attributable to deliberate policy changes that allowed welfare recipients to retain some public assistance while working in private sector jobs. While expressing considerable concern about the effects of a sustained period of rising unemployment, state officials remain very optimistic about the long-term job prospects of their former and current clients. What they understand - and many persistent critics of work-based welfare reform don't - is that the welfare system has undergone a profound cultural change since 1996. Michigan welfare director Doug Howard, who is also president of the American Public Human Services Association, says work requirements have permanently and dramatically changed the attitudes of both recipients and welfare administrators. "New entrants now come in with the expectation that welfare is temporary and transitional and that they need to move into employment and help their family," Howard says. "There's been a cultural change for our staff as well, a new attitude about moving families quicker." New York welfare agency spokesman Jack Madden echoes this belief that a more work-oriented system will help recipients weather hard economic times: "[They] now have a work history, they understand the importance of work in their personal lives and they will be able to jump back into employment when the economy picks up steam again. You have to compare that with the old welfare system, which kept people in poverty regardless of the economy." The debate over the economy and welfare reform is of particular importance because the 1996 law is up for reauthorization in Congress next year. Many of the original critics of work-based welfare reform, having grudgingly admitted its success, are now calling for a significant scaling back of work requirements and time limits on grounds that they can only work in a red-hot economy with plentiful jobs. No one is arguing we shouldn't be worried about the impact of the economic slowdown on welfare recipients, many of whom do not yet qualify for unemployment insurance if they do lose their jobs. Today's relatively positive picture could clearly get worse. But the answer is to intensify, not retreat from, the new system of job placement, support services, and assistance to "make work pay" through health insurance and supplemental income support, that was at the heart of the 1996 reforms. The stubborn good news about welfare reform, even in relatively tough economic times, provides ample evidence that it's no time to turn back from the most successful social policy innovation of the 1990s.
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