Job From Virginia's Welfare Reform Program example essay topic

Has Our Welfare Reform Failed Us? Welfare is a means of financial assistant for poverty stricken individuals. Year after year presidents have attempted to reconstruct the welfare system so it does not act as a backbone for those who do not want to work, and year after year success seemed out of reach. That is, until President Bill Clinton thought he had the answer.

He signed the new welfare reform act in August of 1996, vowing to "end welfare as we know it". Terminating a 62 year-old federal entitlement, President Clinton put a limit on how long one can receive federal welfare assistance (Casse 36). Yet, this so called reform is not that at all. The government doesn't see what happens to ex-welfare recipients after they are released from the program, and the youth of our country is catching the wrath of the reform. There are so many questions left unanswered about the reform. The new welfare reform act put limit on how long one can receive federal assistance.

Receivers of welfare were ordered to seek and find employment or go to school within two years or lose assistance. If a job or education were not obtained within this period of time assistance would be terminated after five years. The law also demanded that each state had to determine eligibility. It is a federal problem no longer.

The law gives a block grant to each of the 50 states, distributing cash assistance when deemed necessary. As Casse points out, the law required each state to construct work requirements as a part of its welfare program. By the year 2002, states will need to show that at least 50% of those receiving welfare are involved in some form of work or training in exchange for benefits. These changes to the welfare system all come with exemptions, qualifications, alternative requirements, and rules and regulations that vary from state to state (Casse 36). At first glance the rules for welfare recipients look like a sufficient way to stop welfare leeches, but if legislatures put heart-felt thought into this new plan they would have realized all of the flaws it carried. President Clinton was too busy boasting and bragging about the declining caseloads to notice the real effect it was having on everyone.

A few huge problems drown out the welfare reformers' chorus. According to Telly, "The first and most obvious is that it was too soon to make any meaningful evaluation". Telly also notes that, "The law Clinton signed in August of 1996 left eligibility standards and rules largely up to each states government, which were just starting to create new rules" (Telly 8). The state that was furthest along in its welfare plan and which has received the most attention for cutting the welfare roles was Wisconsin, but this welfare-form program just went into effect on September 1, 1997 (Telly 8).

"We " ve just implanted a program and we don't have any results yet", Nan Brien of Wisconsin Council on Children and Families points out (8). "Usually you can celebrate results, not beginnings". So the declining caseloads that President Clinton spoke of so highly of are not impressive and whatever they mean, they don't tell us much, if anything, about the impact of the 1996 reform (Heim 1147). The second problem that drowns out the welfare reformers' chorus is the fact that the government does not know what happens to people after their assistance is cut off. Some people get "penalized" if they can't find a job, and their benefits get cut back because they are not working or enrolled in the work program that the state offers.

This sometimes hurts people when they are expecting X amount of money to feed their family for the month and receive significantly less than what they normally would. It's very hard to make your food stamps last for the whole month or until you find a job, enroll into school, or some kind of training program. For example, the government uses a line item veto, which eliminates any method for tracking people after they are kicked off welfare (Telly 8.) The government would like us to believe that more than 1.4 million people who have gotten off welfare since the reform was signed have landed jobs (Heim 1147). The reason they have not is because the jobs are not there. These are not enough for every welfare recipient.

According to Jobs With Justice, the odds are 96 to 1 that a welfare worker will find a job that pays a living wage (Murphy 13). But in most places there is either no work available, no training for the jobs that do exist, or no funds to fit trainees to appropriate work (Wills 380). According to Telly, if ex-welfare workers beat the odds and achieve employment, the wages they earn still put them below the poverty line. Full-time work at minimum wage gives a family $824.00 a month before taxes. Infant care runs $500 to $600 a month leaving a fatherless family of 3 with $324 to $224 to pay all of their bills. This leaves no funds for emergencies.

If infant care is needed because a child gets ill, that family has to go back on welfare to pay for hospital fees. Most welfare systems will deny former recipients the chance to receive assistance right away. This, and other reasons, is why there is a 30 percent increase in the population of homeless shelters in Milwaukee since welfare rules were tightened (Telly 8). Plenty of U.S. citizens have lost access to food stamps, too. The problem: Before welfare reform, the coupons were handed out in the welfare office.

But the two programs were de linked under the 1996 law, leading to massive confusion among families who wrongly figured they were ineligible for food aid unless they were also on welfare. Since 1996, the number of people collecting food stamps has sunk by one-third, to 17 million. It's not just a stronger economy, either: Fewer than half of the eligible working families get them, studies show (Bernstein 38). The government has failed to acknowledge statistics like those, and those plainly show that pushing these people into jobs that pay them little to nothing ruins other employee's jobs such as 46-year old Cynthia Smith. Cynthia has worked for 5 years as a school bus monitor for Baltimore's public schools. Over the course of those 5 years Cynthia's paycheck went from $5 an hour to $7 an hour.

But now she may loose her job because of the eight welfare recipients that were assigned to her private-sector work site to receive work experience or training. These trainees are not getting wages. They are simply receiving $350 a month welfare grant for 30 hours of work. Just $2 an hour. Cynthia says, "Now they want me to train the workfare workers. I'm supposed to train them so that when I come back to work I September they give away my job to someone they don't have to pay for?

No way!" (Cooper 11). Cynthia might be correct. Cooper points out, "Already in Baltimore, Maryland an estimated 1,000 low wageworker's have been displaced by workfare trainees working off their welfare grant at less time than minimum-wage equivalents" (11). "In the public schools alone, 208 welfare recipients have been deployed as "custodial trainees" (11). "At Thurgood Marshall School, fifteen workfare trainees took the jobs of an equal number of former contract workers whose wages would have gone up because of the living wage stipulation" (11). According to Cooper, "The trainees make about $1.50 an hour.

Between 6,000 to 17,000 Baltimore welfare recipients will be forced into the job market over the next 2 years, in an area that anticipates no new job growth" (11). Now those who had some form of income are looking for federal assistance, and those who were receiving federal assistance have income. Gerald M cEnter says, "It's like a revolving door" (11). Where do people go after workfare?

They go to the jobs of those who don't receive assistance. According to another Jobs With Justice publication, "Welfare Reform As We Know It", the number of public access recipients able to attend school is dropping rapidly. At Milwaukee Area Technical College, the nations largest technical school, the number of students on Welfare has dropped from 1,600 to 244. At the City University of New York, the number of students on welfare has dropped from 27, 00 to 14,500 (Murphy 13). The final flaw with welfare is the effect it has on children. Welfare reform is pushing parents of small children into work.

Therefore some daycare centers are taking on more children than they are authorized to handle. One daycare center was certified by the state to care for six infants and toddlers, but instead they took in 34 (Telly 8). The only provisions that are taken to make sure these children are safe is a brief criminal background check. That minimal requirement hasn't even been stringently enforced (8). Permits were recently revoked from some childcare providers because they turned out to be convicted criminals, but that was after parents had entrusted them with their children. This was state subsidized care (8).

The Republicans Personal Responsibility Act denied cash aid to teen mothers, to children born to mothers already on welfare, to children whose paternity can not be established, and to legal immigrants (Polakow 3). This act will remove what little safety net currently exists for poor children. A study called "Ready, Willing and Able? What the Record Shows About State Investments in Children", concludes that states have not made children a top funding priority and, in some cases, have not taken advantage of federal matching dollars to assist families to move off welfare (Jacobson 17). What the reform is basically saying is only wealthy people can have babies. Poor women have a right to have babies too.

Poor women are being encouraged to give their children up for adoption, and the women receive $6,000 a year to live on and orphanages ask for $39,000 a year per child (Polakow 4). The Department of Health and human Resources produced a study calculating that the welfare bill will push 1.2 million more children into poverty (Pollitt 777). For one mother it seems as if she doesn't have a chance because of the welfare reform. Her preschooler came home with a note in his pocket saying she owed $900 in childcare. Her son was not to come back to school until that amount was paid. The mother also had a daughter whose after school cost was $65 a week.

She could not afford both, so she tried to get back on Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) (Polakow 2). According to Polakow, AFDC stated that it would be a 2-month wait. The bills could not get paid. This left the mother and her two children homeless. Later, all three were left throwing up with the stomach flu at a hospital emergency room. This example shows that without a realistic understanding of what poor families need to be successful, the lives of children will not be improved (Polakow 2).

Of course there is an opposing side to this that says the welfare reform legislation that went into effect on July 1, 1996 is the most far-reaching policy move of the Clinton presidency- and also, to date, the most successful (Casse 7). The supporters of the reform favor declaration and the new rules declare that welfare reform deemed it then as being already a success (Casse 7). Heim notes, in 1997, just one year after the reform was started, "More than 1.4 million people nation wide had gotten off welfare since Clinton signed the bill", declared the Detroit Free Press in August (Heim 1147). Supporters were saying this before the new welfare rules were implemented. Heim points out that the number of people on welfare has decreased in these years. Welfare rolls in 1997 were down 25%, and some state's welfare was decreased significantly since the beginning of the reform.

According to Heim, "The number of United States households receiving AFDC dropped by 23.3% from 4.6 million households to 3.5 million households between March 1994 and May 1997" (1147). If welfare was already declining in 1994, before the 1996 welfare bill was even voted upon, let alone implemented, then the change can hardly be attributed to the reform (1147). One of Heims's our ces points out that, "The welfare caseloads rose dramatically from 1989 to 1994" (Heim 1147). According to Heim, "Even with the impressive three-year decline from 1994 to 1997, the number of AFDC households in May of 1997 was still higher than that in July of 1989" (1147). So, once again the declining welfare numbers proved nothing. Welfare supporters also declare that new jobs are being found from welfare recipients.

Tonya Rollins, a 29-year old single mother, who received a job from Virginia's Welfare Reform program, worked for UPS. They were one of the first businesses to partner with Governor George Allen to hire welfare recipient's state wide (1147). This sounds like a very positive side of the reform, but when workers went on strike at UPS, former welfare recipients were among the first to get laid off to make up for lost profits (1147). That is how most jobs will operate. Welfare recipients will have the least seniority in the workplace, so they will always take a pay cut, get laid off, or let go from the job first. The jobs are being supplied with are not secure.

Most positive aspects of the reform, as you can see, really are not positive at all. Common sense would tell you that it is crazy to let the welfare recipients go first because they will be back in line waiting for more handouts, you would think that they would keep them there instead of laying them off. The effects of the law have been very dramatic. Now that five years have passed, one of Peter Edelman's colleagues in resignation, Wendell Primus, has a different view. 'In many ways welfare reform is working better than I thought it would.

The sky isn't falling anymore. Whatever we have been doing over the last five years, we ought to keep going,' he told the Times in August (Ponnuru 18). At the beginning of September, the unemployment rate was 4.9 percent of the labor force. That rate is low compared with earlier recessions. But the jobless rate is what economists call a 'lagging indicator. ' (Frances 228).

It rises for a time even after the economy has started to expand once more. Many economists see the rate hitting 6 percent - and some predict as high as 8 percent - in 2002. The challenge comes at a critical time for the welfare program. Many who left welfare when jobs were plentiful now face layoffs and the prospect of going back on welfare. Moreover, the five-year limit is nearing for many people with physical or mental disabilities who never found work (228). My solution to the whole problem is that in 1996 the system was ineffective.

But overtime the system has changed. They should have based the reform of welfare they should base it on how many people are collecting assistance at any given time, base it on how many jobs are available that will support families, how many children will receive the best of care, how many people are having regular meals and reliable shelter (Telly 9). Trying to end welfare is not enough; something must be done about poverty.

Bibliography

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