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Searching for a new safety net
By BRENDA ORTEGA
Sondra Jackson sums up the job prospects of unskilled workers in her town of Wheeling, West Virginia, simply. “It’s fast food, or Wal-Mart.”
For the 40-year-old single mother of three, paying the bills is a struggle with or without a full-time job. She has tried to play by the rules laid out in the sweeping overhaul of the nation’s welfare system in 1996: She has worked.
However, like many in her situation, Jackson bounced from one low-paying position to another, cycling back to public assistance as a stopgap in between.
With the clock ticking on the federal five-year time limit on her benefits, Jackson said she has had to fight officials in her state to be allowed to attend community college while receiving assistance. It’s the only way, she says, to stop trading one form of poverty for another.
“They [state workers] actually discourage education,” she said. “They would rather you be working at McDonald’s, I suppose.”
Jackson’s experience illustrates the findings of researchers who have studied the first decade of welfare reform.
Caseloads sharply declined as many former recipients of public benefits entered the work force. But most qualify only for bottom-rung jobs offering low pay and few benefits. Without opportunities for training and advancement, these families still find themselves mired in poverty, and large numbers do not have access to the public benefits -- food stamps and public health insurance -- designed to support them.
Now, another major shift is occurring as states juggle even tougher federal welfare-to-work mandates. The stricter requirements passed by Congress in 2006 place more pressure on states to reduce welfare caseloads, while allowing fewer types of training and education to be defined as work activity.
“Most states haven’t figured out what they’re doing yet,” said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, senior policy analyst for workforce development at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) in Washington, D.C. “It’s very much in flux.”
The nation’s traditional safety net is frayed to the point of breaking, yet nothing comprehensive has replaced it, according to researchers and advocates. The result is that millions of Americans walk precarious economic tightropes, with little to break their fall. This includes not only low-wage workers, but also adults with serious barriers to employment and even middle-class families left vulnerable to poverty by global and technological economic changes.
Experts in the field say the lessons learned so far from welfare reform can point the way for states grappling with the future. As research has exposed gaps in the current patchwork of programs and services targeting society’s most vulnerable, they say, it also reveals possibilities for crafting a new safety net woven with adequate supports and opportunities for training and advancement.
Rather than a simplistic focus on welfare versus work, “The interest now is in engaging in discussions of poverty writ large, or low-income families writ large,” said Dr. Ajay Chaudry, director of the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.
That big picture view encapsulates the Mott Foundation’s grantmaking, which aims to improve income security for low-income Americans by funding projects that identify, assess and promote promising safety net reforms. These include initiatives to expand and strengthen work supports -- and access to those supports -- for low- and moderate-income families.
Among the highlights of current Mott-funded activities in this arena are separate initiatives by the Urban Institute and CLASP. Both organizations are taking a more holistic view of complex, inter-related, welfare and poverty issues than the scattershot approach existing in most states.
“Families are being impacted by lots of categorical programs that deal with specific aspects of their lives, and not necessarily in consistent ways,” said Evelyn Ganzglass, director of the workforce development team at CLASP.
“It’s really about looking across programs and looking at the interaction of programs. If the goal is to help move people out of poverty, it’s much better if one looks at the overall situation in a family.”
In this way, the Urban Institute and CLASP hope to bridge U.S. workforce and welfare policies in ways that connect more low-income families with more services and opportunities. Their view spans the spectrum from raising worker skill levels to helping hard-to-employ parents overcome challenges; from extending more supports that promote work and help families weather employment gaps to improving job quality and creating career ladders.
The tightening of welfare rules in last year’s reauthorization poses both risks and opportunities for those who wish to widen the discussion.
“It’s taken a lot of the focus off of low-income families and what they need to be successful and shifted the focus to what states need to do in order to meet work participation requirements,” Lower-Basch said. “It’s taken the energy in the wrong direction.”
At the same time, Ganzglass says, state and local officials hunger for effective methods to help their communities achieve greater economic success despite adverse federal policies.
“States are struggling mightily with this,” she said, “and they want to find cost-effective solutions.”
CLASP, a nonpartisan national research and public policy organization, recently received a two-year, $400,000 Mott grant for its ongoing Leading Edge States Project.
As state policymakers begin to decide how to implement the new welfare regulations, the project’s goal is to encourage them to broaden -- rather than narrow -- their vision. The idea is to help states in the complicated task of shaping systems that help people lift themselves out of poverty permanently, instead of keeping poor families always shuffling from one form of it to another.
Based on its long history in this area, CLASP will advocate for progressive employment policies and practices at the federal, state and local levels that:
- help low-income adults gain the skills and connections needed to enter the labor market and advance in the changing economy;
- improve job quality in the low-wage labor market in ways that benefit families as well as contribute to economic and productivity growth; and
- connect low-income families with supports that help them overcome barriers to employment, reduce their poverty, and enhance their ability to retain jobs and advance in the labor force.
The project identifies domestic and international policy innovations that fall under the framework’s three goals. These best practices are analyzed, along with implementation options and constraints under current federal legislation. State policymakers are then offered technical assistance in choosing next directions.
In addition, the grant allows CLASP to continue efforts at engaging in larger policy discussions and convening advocates and policymakers on setting new directions for national workforce policy.
“It’s a two-pronged approach: to try to get rules changed at the federal level where that might be necessary and to help states figure out how to deal with things as they are,” Lower-Basch said.
Examples of promising strategies being studied within the CLASP framework include reducing state and federal barriers to adult and higher education, developing subsidized employment opportunities known as transitional jobs, expanding access to income supports by streamlining systems and widening eligibility, improving screening and services for hard-to-employ adults with mental and physical problems, and strengthening the federal Workforce Investment Act of 1998.
“We will keep bringing forth the evidence that there really is a payoff to all of this, but it does take an investment and a restructuring of programs to be able to move people into higher-paying jobs,” Ganzglass said.
Helping policymakers see the larger potential of individual strategies is also a goal of Urban Institute efforts, said Sheila Zedlewski, director of its Center on Income and Benefits Policy.
The nonpartisan research organization is using two Mott grants totaling $485,000 to develop a policy agenda to strengthen the nation’s safety net.
“The solutions are inter-connected,” Zedlewski said.
“For example, if you can achieve policies that enable parents to combine work with parenting and have some paid family leave, that in turn is positive for child development.”
Building upon years of prior research, the Urban Institute has put forth six broad goals underpinning a more comprehensive approach to helping poor families:
- making work pay;
- enabling families to weather gaps in employment;
- supporting parents’ advancement;
- helping parents to combine work and child rearing;
- improving prospects for children in low-income working families; and
- moving the hard to employ into work and improving their economic security.
That framework, issued this year, summarizes existing programs and policies in the U.S. -- a dizzying array from the Earned Income Tax Credit to housing and child-care subsidies, public health insurance, minimum wage laws, paid parental leave, unemployment insurance, and more.
Next, a team of researchers will be assembled to dig more deeply into the nuts and bolts of those programs.
“Within each goal, we will look at the innovations that are being suggested, and then look at the implications for the nation as a whole and the cost implications,” Zedlewski said.
In 2008, the Urban Institute plans to release its volume on Capitol Hill with a briefing for Congress.
For her part, Sondra Jackson of West Virginia agrees that policymakers must be reminded of the big picture. If she could bend their ears, she said, she would say that without education and training, without safe child care and decent housing, without money for food and health care and transportation, low-income families cast into the world of work are doomed to failure.
“I’d basically tell Congress that in order for people to become self-sufficient, you have to fund the supports that are needed,” she said.
This article appears in the August 2007 issue of
Mott Mosaic. Click
here to view a complete table of contents.