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Welfare rolls plummet over five years, but former recipients struggle with low-paying jobs and could fall victim to a withering economy.
By CURTIS KRUEGER
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 26, 2001
Lori Baker paid close attention when President Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it."
Her monthly welfare check fed six children in her Clearwater home. Ending welfare sounded like snatching the breakfast, lunch and dinner right out of their mouths.
"That was a little bit rough to me. I was like, people need help," she recalled last week.
Five years ago this month, Clinton signed into law a sweeping, Republican-sponsored package of reforms that drastically changed the American welfare system that supports poor children and their parents.
It meant that for the first time since Roosevelt's New Deal, poor parents would not be "entitled" to receive certain welfare benefits for raising children. Instead, they would be given job training, and told to get off welfare within five years -- or be kicked off. Some critics expected to see hungry children across America, overlooked in a harsh new era.
Five years later, the results have been dramatic and surprising, especially in Florida, which adopted tougher-than-average reforms. The number of families on welfare has been cut in half nationally and has plummeted 70 percent in Florida. By and large, the government has not thrown these people off welfare; they left on their own and found jobs.
Now there is evidence that welfare reform may even be accomplishing one of its social goals -- encouraging marriage -- which to some sounded like so much rhetoric.
But look closer, and the story of welfare reform gets more complicated. Thousands are leaving welfare for jobs, but what kind? Mostly those in the $6- to $7-per hour range, or less. And just a small percentage of welfare recipients seek out job training programs intended to lead to higher-paying jobs.
A 1998 survey of former welfare recipients in Florida showed that 49.5 percent had gotten behind in housing payments, 59.2 percent had fallen behind on utility bills, and 42.6 percent had at some point been unable to buy food. The numbers improved in a 2000 followup survey, but not dramatically.
Shortly after Florida's welfare system changed in 1996, Baker got fed up with the new bureaucracy and its insistence on numerous meetings and paperwork. So she asked a trusted friend to babysit her children, got a job on her own, and now works for a cleaning service, tidying the Pinellas County Courthouse and other buildings.
Baker, 36, is a welfare success story, raising four kids on a $6-an-hour job plus disability income for her son.
But it's not enough. At times, she has fallen behind on rent and utilities. A food pantry operated by Religious Community Services is a regular stop. She and her 12-year-old daughter came in last Wednesday -- five years to the day that Clinton signed the welfare reform law -- and collected a cooked chicken donated by a grocery store, cans of vegetables, fruit and dry goods.
This life is better than welfare, she says. But "I'm still down here struggling, trying to get food."
Wendell Primus resigned in protest the day Clinton signed the welfare bill. The Republican-led Congress had just passed the reforms, saying the existing welfare system encouraged people not to work and not to get married.
Primus, an assistant deputy secretary of the federal Health and Human Services department, was among a small cadre of aides who feared some of the harsher aspects of the law, and quit as a matter of conscience.
In an telephone interview last week, Primus said he would make the same decision again in response to the same legislative package -- part of his objections centered on separate matters affecting benefits for legal immigrants -- but he nonetheless sees some successes in welfare reform.
"I think the real success . . . has been in the increase in the labor force participation, particularly the increase in never-married mothers," said Primus, who now works for a Washington think tank, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
What worries him is data that show "700,000 mothers actually lost ground in these strong economic times," because while they gained a job, they may have lost food stamps or other benefits.
The precarious financial position of many people who have left welfare gets at one of the biggest unanswered questions about the new system: What will happen now that the economy is weakening?
"If a recession hits, these people will be the first ones probably laid off," Primus said.
Plenty of data show most who have left welfare are barely scraping by, even though they may have triumphed personally by leaving the bureaucracy and getting a job. But getting a job has been easy in recent years, because reform began during one of the 20th century's greatest periods of prosperity.
Now the rules of the game have changed. Most Floridians are not allowed to receive any more than 48 months' worth of benefits in their lifetimes -- and no more than two or three years' worth in a row -- unless they can prove a "hardship" that would allow them to continue on the system. So far, only about 300 have used up their lifetime benefits, but more will reach their limits as time goes on.
So picture a recession that crushes the tourist trade and depresses Florida's economy in general. Then, picture mothers and fathers who are out of work and barred by law from receiving monthly welfare checks again.
"The issue about the time limits really hasn't been tested yet because most people have gone to work . . . few people have been forced off because of time limits," said Robert E. Crew Jr., associate dean of Florida State University's College of Social Sciences, who has researched people who leave welfare.
"What happens if the economy really goes in the tank, then what's the story?"
"I think nobody knows."
Curtis Austin says the result might not be as grim as you might think.
Austin is president of Workforce Florida, a new public-private agency overseeing welfare and worker training statewide. He says that monthly welfare benefits -- what used to be called AFDC checks -- are the ones the government cuts off after a specific time. People don't lose food stamps or housing subsidies after 48 months, as long as they still meet the basic qualifications.
If people lose jobs, they can apply for unemployment instead of welfare, he said.
Austin is enthusiastic about the new system, after seeing "people who supposedly could not get jobs who got jobs and did marvelously well." But even he acknowledges the system has not done enough to push job training and education for people receiving welfare.
"That's my biggest regret," he said.
Originally, training was central to welfare reform. The idea was that well-trained people could move off welfare into stable, well-paying jobs.
In reality, less than 10 percent of welfare recipients get training at any given time, said Workforce Vice President Mike Switzer. "To my knowledge, we have never broken single digits."
Like Baker, the woman in the food pantry last week, many people decided after the system changed that they would simply leave and get jobs on their own -- even low-paying ones. In spite of the vast training networks that government officials attempted to set up, only about 10 to 12 percent of the people who left welfare and found jobs said they got those jobs with help from the welfare bureaucracy.
Politicians used to portray welfare recipients as lazy people who never wanted to get off the system. But Austin has found people eager and desperate to get off the system. He cited an Orange County welfare organization that sent cards to several former recipients, asking them to come back for training that might help their job advancement.
Zero cards came back.
Thinking it might be a postal glitch, staffers contacted the former welfare recipients directly and got a strong message: "I am never coming and dealing with you people again."
In response, Austin said, officials have worked hard to make "One Stop Career Centers" around the state customer-friendly. These are offices where people can search for jobs and get worker training.
In the meantime, the bureaucracy has been reorganizing almost constantly -- the old Department of Children and Families welfare program was transformed into something called WAGES, which lately merged with another group and came under the umbrella of Workforce Florida. Companies providing welfare services have come, gone and been sold.
All that turmoil has an effect, said Geni Trauscht, executive director of Career Options, which used to oversee welfare programs in Pinellas County. "There has been disruption, particularly with changing the contracted providers. . . . There are clients who didn't get services when they needed them."
Five years later, analyzing this new system is still a difficult task -- something like trying to grasp the impact of Roosevelt's New Deal in 1940.
"I think we need to look at the long-range effect on families," said Jean Amuso, director of the School of Social Work at the University of South Florida.
But teams of researchers already are mining over data nationwide:
Two Washington-based think tanks, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Urban Institute, recently concluded that the proportion of two-parent families actually had ticked slightly upward. One study showed the percentage of African-American children living with married parents edged upward from 34.8 percent to 38.9 percent between 1995 and 2000, after a 10-year trend downward. Researchers say welfare reform may be part of the cause, because the old system made it more difficult to receive benefits in some cases.
Another study showed that while the nationwide welfare caseload has been halved, the U.S. poverty rate has fallen less than 2 percent. The study was conducted by RESULTS, an international nonprofit organization focused on reducing poverty and hunger.
At the food pantry last week, where Baker reflected on leaving welfare nearly five years ago, 29-year-old Darrell Hansen was pondering whether he will need it. He stopped in for food last week too, and recently applied for welfare benefits because a car accident has left him temporarily unable to work.
He hates the idea of applying for a check. On the other hand, he, his wife and 10-year-old daughter will need the income. For now, he'll deal with the system.
"Pride is one of the seven deadly sins," he said, "and my pride isn't worth my family starving."
-- Information from the New York Times and Cox News Service was used in this report. Curtis Krueger can be reached at krueger@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8232.