Workfare

By 2000, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani hopes to wean virtually everyone--including drug addicts, young mothers and the disabled--from city welfare rolls. Giuliani said workfare initiatives already have cut the number of welfare recipients by 400,000 since March 1995. He said the nearly 800,000 still receiving benefits can expect further scrutiny. In June, the city began evaluating the job qualifications of disabled welfare beneficiaries.

Under a new federal program to help those on welfare make the transition to work, Anaheim will receive more than $4 million in housing subsidy vouchers, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo announced. The new welfare-to-workfare vouchers were among $280 million in added rental assistance for 35 states. The program, which will assist about 700 low-income families in Anaheim, was designed to help needy people live closer to jobs, day care and public transportation.

Bowing to President Reagan's veto pressure, chief Democratic sponsors of a welfare bill began bargaining with conservative foes Monday on a compromise package that would strengthen requirements that welfare recipients seek work. "We're making progress," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.) told reporters after an hourlong discussion with a group of Republican senators. Another session is scheduled for today.

The idea of asking people to work in return for federal aid goes back more than 50 years to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Work Projects Administration, which created jobs for able-bodied men. Widows and their children were not required to work and received temporary help under Aid for Dependent Children, the precursor to Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Cash assistance was later included for poor children and their guardians, usually their mothers.

Prescod and Jones-Schellenberg are right in their statement that homemaking is work. Women have always known that and any man who has found himself having to fill that role as well as that of "breadwinner" has learned that. But I think their position that workfare ignores economic realities also overlooks an important reality. As a mother who was once a "full-time mother and homemaker" and later that plus being first a part-time, then a full-time worker outside the home, I learned the best benefit from adding outside employment was a monumental gain of self-confidence and self-esteem.

The Senate Thursday overwhelmingly approved a landmark welfare bill that would put heavy emphasis on training unwed mothers for work and require absentee fathers to pay child support. The measure, though threatened by a presidential veto, passed on a surprisingly lopsided 93-3 vote after its Democratic sponsors reached compromises with conservative Republicans on key provisions. The bill would provide a relatively modest $2.

They vacuum floors, scrub sinks, answer phones and mow lawns alongside full-time county workers, but some of the indigent who toil for the county in exchange for a welfare check say they are being exposed to dangerous working conditions without receiving the proper equipment or training. Workers in the county-funded General Relief program say they have developed skin rashes, breathing disorders, back strain and other health problems related to their work.

Workers who earn the minimum wage have not had a raise in nearly seven years, but that has not stopped the price of groceries or rent or anything else from going up. A pay increase--at least another dollar, from $3.35 to $4.35 an hour--is certainly in order. California's Industrial Welfare Commission can provide it. The current rate works out to $6,700 a year--poverty wages for any family.

The new federal budget agreement gives President Clinton much of what he wanted when he promised to fix some of the most glaring problems he saw in the welfare reform measure he signed into law last year. The bargain struck Friday between the White House and Republican leaders in Congress does not change core features of the welfare law, including its work requirements and time limits on benefits.

When the clothing factory where she worked for 11 years went out of business, Helen Brittingham found another job at another garment maker. When that company went under only a year later, Helen Brittingham didn't find another job. At first, she kidded her friends that maybe she was jinxed. Eventually, she made herself comfortable at home and consoled herself with nice things to eat. "I'd sit there all day and say, 'Helen, you need to go look for a job'--procrastinating. . . .