Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506260006
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
As Virginians embark next month on a revolutionary plan to put welfare recipients to work, the key to success or failure is in an unanswered question.
Are there enough jobs to go around?
State officials point to estimates that the Virginia economy created some 87,000 new jobs last year. That is evidence that the thousands of welfare recipients expected to begin working in staggered groups over the next four years can be absorbed into the economy, they say.
But critics argue, and officials acknowledge, that the problem is more complex than the simple comparison suggests.
The challenge is to match thousands of people - many with few skills and little training - with job vacancies, many of which require both training and skills. About two-thirds of the state's 74,000 recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children are expected to qualify for the plan, in which clients will have to work for their checks and most benefits will be cut off after two years.
If the program succeeds, it could lower the state tax burden and improve thousands of lives. If it fails, it could prompt a variety of catastrophes, including a major boost in the rolls of the medically uninsured, and an epidemic of children living in families without income.
Available information leaves unanswered the question of which path welfare reform will take.
The state's most extensive experience to date in putting welfare recipients to work - the federally mandated JOBS program - is not especially encouraging. About 23,000 individuals participate in that job-seeking program each year. But only about 27 percent of them find jobs, and about one-third of those have lost the job within 90 days, according to federal reports.
State officials caution that the people who have found work through JOBS may be undercounted. And, they add, incentives to find and keep work will be far greater under the envisioned welfare reform than in JOBS.
On another front, the Virginia Employment Commission reports that it advertises an average of 4,500 job openings per month in the four areas where the welfare-to-work program will be launched Saturday.
But the VEC cannot say precisely how many of those jobs might realistically fit the qualifications of the 10,000 or so people who would be eligible for the program in those cities and counties in a typical month.
The program will start in five counties in the Culpeper area of central Virginia. Bedford and Bedford County are among the localities that will start Oct. 1, followed by eight Southwest Virginia counties in January and seven Northern Virginia localities next April. Other localities will be phased in over the next three years.
Those masterminding the reform have faith that the result, whatever it may be, will be an improvement.
``When you plug in the entire infrastructure, the churches, businesses, I don't think anyone knows what that gets us to, but it gets us further than we are now,'' said Clarence Carter, executive director of the Governor's Employment and Training Council and the overseer of the jobs portion of welfare reform.
``Much of this we're making up as we go along,'' acknowledged the 37-year-old Pittsburgh native and former deputy director of African-American affairs for the Republican National Committee. But his drive comes from the belief that the current system ``hasn't worked. This is bad for people.''
The dangers of experimentation are highlighted by two former state secretaries of Health and Human Resources, Eva Teig and Howard Cullum, both Democrats.
While the former Cabinet officers support the premise that welfare should be a way station, not a permanent destination, Teig said she believes it is inevitable that some recipients will not be self-sufficient within the two-year limit.
Without income, it is likely that their children will have to be placed in extended foster care or cared for through other arrangements, she said. Yet there has been little public discussion of that prospect. ``We should be talking about this now,'' she said.
Another likelihood, argued Cullum, is that many of the welfare recipients who do go to work will find low-paying jobs without health benefits. The average wage of the JOBS participants who found work in fiscal 1994, for instance, was $4.93 an hour.
AFDC recipients and their children are eligible for Medicaid, and their medical bills far surpass monthly support checks as the state's primary welfare cost.
Even though the welfare reform plan allows medical benefits to continue for up to three years, ``the poor are going to wind up getting messed up on the health care side,'' Cullum said. A major omission in the welfare debate, he said, has been its failure to focus on the impact of adding thousands of individuals to the ranks of Virginia's medically uninsured.
For Carter, such caveats are merely incentives to dream more boldly.
In the spring, Carter began meeting privately with a 20-member task force whose mission is to imagine a way to put welfare recipients to work and keep them working after the two-year time limit on AFDC benefits has expired.
The group of business people, church activists, politicians and bureaucrats envisions a system that brings together several dozen state programs currently preparing people for work. With duplication eliminated, a range of clients - from the disabled to the unemployed to welfare recipients - could be served more effectively, Carter said.
Dubbed the ``comprehensive work force preparedness system,'' the concept can become reality if the federal government, as anticipated, starts distributing money to the states through block grants, Carter said.
``None of the existing services go away. Many of the administrative structures go away,'' he said.
What the group also seeks is a holistic approach to job hunting, in which churches, businesses, civic groups and individuals help welfare clients through the transition to work.
Many of those already involved in helping the poor are skeptical that churches and other groups can stretch their charitable activities far enough to encompass an extended welfare population.
``The church can't reshape the economy,'' said Stephen Colecchi, assistant to Bishop Walter Sullivan of the Catholic diocese that serves southern Virginia. ``Of course, we want to do our part. I just think we're going to be overwhelmed.''
Terry Rosvall, who works with job placement for the disabled and is a member of Carter's task force, is more optimistic.
A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Rosvall is his congregation's ``church employment specialist.'' Since the Great Depression in the 1930s, each local Morman church has designated a member to help both members and nonmembers with employment problems, he said.
Rosvall believes that his experience in privately counseling 18 or so individuals each year could be duplicated in churches, synagogues and mosques across Virginia. ``What I would love to do is to go around and visit with the other church leaders and encourage them to form an interfaith network for job seeking,'' he said.
Such private involvement may be critical in light of a 90-to-1 ratio allowed by the jobs program between welfare recipients and the social workers assisting them, Rosvall observes. ``Frankly, based on my experience, expecting a state employment caseworker to handle 90 cases is unrealistic,'' he said.
What is clear is that those designing welfare reform expect welfare clients to assume primary responsibility for their futures.
``We are not promising people careers,'' said Secretary of Health and Human Resources Kay Coles James on a recent radio broadcast. ``That's not the obligation of the commonwealth of Virginia to provide you a dream job.''
by CNB