THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 28, 1995 TAG: 9508280025
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 159 lines
Sometimes the embarrassment was too much. He just couldn't do it.
So Malachi L. Hargrave - former Army supply sergeant, auto-service manager, car salesman and shipyard worker - would hand his food stamps to his mother and ask her to buy groceries for him. He couldn't bear standing in line, feeling the eyes of the shoppers behind him.
Suffolk native Hargrave had never thought highly of able-bodied people who relied on public assistance. And he certainly never figured on being one of them.
But things changed when his wife of 13 years left him about three years ago, taking the youngest two of their four children and leaving him to raise two sons alone. He was, and is, above all a family man. He earlier had left a lucrative car-selling job because its many hours kept him from his young children.
After the separation, he left his shipyard job when he couldn't work out a schedule that would allow him to spend more time with his sons. A few months later he had to sell his house under threat of foreclosure, losing $17,500 in remodeling work and leaving him broke. He and the boys moved in with his mother.
For four months he tried a minimum-wage job tossing 75-pound fertilizer bags onto pallets. But it forced him to leave the house before his boys woke up and left him too tired at night to help them with their homework. He worried about their walking alone across downtown Suffolk to and from their school-bus stop.
A few B's crept onto their report cards, replacing the usual A's. He blamed himself. He quit the job - and found himself out of money.
Someone suggested he might be eligible for payments under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, plus food stamps and Medicaid coverage for his boys. He balked at the idea. His own brother railed against it. But his boys wondered why he wasn't working - and why they didn't have any money.
Last year, he swallowed hard and applied for the state's help.
``I had to weigh things,'' Hargrave says. ``When I weighed them, everything leaned toward my sons.
``Before this, I did not believe in it. . . . I believed in it for elderly people, handicapped people. But that was it. But for people who work, I thought it was taking tax dollars.''
He didn't know it at the time, but the system he disliked so much had just begun a little-known program that holds promise of doing what the system is supposed to do - get people off welfare and onto someone's payroll.
A welfare program that seems to work.
In the war against poverty - a war that now has turned against what many agree is a failed welfare system - there are many minor skirmishes. Michael C. Barkley fights some of them from beneath pictures of old-time blues singers in a tiny windowless office in the Suffolk Department of Social Services.
He's a ``job developer,'' trying to prepare welfare recipients for work and helping them find jobs.
His main roadblock is that often people can't afford to take low-paying jobs that don't have benefits, or that force workers to endure waiting periods before benefits start.
Although they would get paychecks, they would lose the benefits - medical coverage and help with transportation and child-care - that they're eligible for on welfare. Sometimes, the difference outweighs the income.
A year ago, Barkley received notice from his state headquarters about a new wrinkle with the state's Employment Services Program, its overall effort to get people off public assistance and into jobs.
Called Project Trade, it allows welfare recipients to receive paychecks while retaining their welfare benefits for up to nine months. That's enough time for the new workers to become eligible for regular company benefits and possibly leave the welfare system for good.
Under Project Trade, Social Services ensures that job candidates have completed a two-week, 40-hour job-readiness program at a community college. The program focuses on resumes, job interviews, filling out applications, and work ethics and attitudes. The agency screens applicants to make sure they have transportation and child care and anything else they need to ensure that they get to work each day, and to match their skills with specific job openings.
A partner company agrees to interview the applicants and consider them as it would any others. If the company hires them, it agrees to guarantee at least 25 hours of work a week, and keep them on the payroll as long as their performance is satisfactory.
The workers' usual AFDC payments go into a pool, out of which the employer is paid a monthly incentive of $150 or $200 per worker, depending on the workers' pay levels. The company gets a screened, job-ready worker plus some cash; the worker gets a foot in the door of the work world without losing needed benefits.
Barkley learned that the program had been tried and found successful elsewhere in the state. He was interested. He sees Social Services increasingly becoming a job-referral service, working with the private sector to match people with jobs.
``It's certainly a good program,'' Barkley says. ``I mean, it really helps the employer, and it can really benefit the individual. But then again, it's not going to work if we just haphazardly put people in who aren't ready yet to go to work.''
Barkley almost immediately thought of Gwaltney of Smithfield, the pork-processing plant. He knew William R. Dyer, a former Suffolk Social Services and Southeastern Virginia Job Training Commission worker now in Gwaltney's personnel office. Dyer coordinates several government job programs involving 120 workers, which comprise 8 percent of the work force of the pork plant's around-the-clock operation.
Dyer already had heard of Project Trade. He, too, was interested.
``People need the opportunity to get out there,'' he says. ``They may have had a tough time up until now. . . . Provided the opportunity to get out there and prove themselves, they work out.''
Early this year, Barkley referred two women to Dyer, and they were hired. Then a father of two young boys volunteered for the agency's jobs program, of which Project Trade was part.
His name was Hargrave. He wanted a job, and he wanted off public assistance.
``We hadn't called him yet - he came of his own volition,'' Barkley says.
``I knew eventually I was going back to work,'' Hargrave says. He had no intention of being on the dole any longer than he had to.
A first wave of job applications netted nothing. He took the job-readiness course, but he already knew about resumes and job interviews and was sent home a day and a half early. He battled a bit with Barkley about what kind of jobs he would accept - his first concern still was for his sons.
He had applied for a grant to train to be a corrections officer when his social worker recommended that he be screened for the Project Trade program. He passed a tough interview with Gwaltney's Dyer.
Last month, the pork company hired Hargrave as a shipping supervisor based on his experience. He works the midnight shift, leaving him time to see his sons off to school, pick them up and help them with their studies.
``All the time, I felt I was doing the right thing, for my kids,'' Hargrave says. ``The program does work, but you have to apply yourself. . . . You can't ride the program like you rode those checks.''
``It's working,'' Barkley says. ``It's not a program handout. It's not a gimme.''
It's also not a program for those not ready for work - the undereducated, the untrained and probably those without prior work experience. But there are enough prospects that Barkley hopes to expand it - he's already negotiating with another business in Suffolk.
Still, even welfare recipients who qualify, particularly those in rural areas, will face additional hurdles: transportation and child care.
People live far from each other and potential jobs in the country, and there's little or no public transportation to get them to work regularly. Being spread out also means it's harder to get to family or friends or professional day-care providers.
``It's been one of the areas not addressed very strongly with the new welfare reform,'' Barkley says.
Still, Dyer sees the welfare-reform future in rural or urban areas in joint ventures like Project Trade.
``We've managed, by establishing a liaison between government and the private sector, to bridge a gap that's existed for a long time,'' Dyer says.
``The only way this is going to work is if it's a team effort.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by STEVE EARLEY
Malachi L. Hargrave had quit a job to care for his sons. Now, he's a
shipping supervisor at the Gwaltney plant in Smithfield.
Hargrave's new job leaves him time to help his sons with their
schoolwork.
KEYWORDS: WORK PROGRAM WELFARE PROJECT TRADE by CNB