Twenty-two-year-old Teresa Smith doesn’t like living on welfare. Almost every day, she goes looking for work. But, so far, she’s come up empty.
“There aren’t enough jobs out there,” said Smith, who last worked six months ago in a fast-food restaurant. “I’ve been going to department stores. They tell me the same thing: `We’ll call you when we need you.’ But they never call. I can’t even get a minimum-wage job. It’s that bad.”
Smith and her 2-year-old daughter, Mikeatta, live in the South Side’s Robert Taylor Homes public housing development, which President Clinton visited Friday to lobby for his anti-crime bill now pending in Congress.
But, earlier in the week, the president made an announcement even more vital to Smith and hundreds of thousands of other young public aid mothers throughout the nation: a $9.3 billion welfare-reform plan aimed at helping-and forcing-them into the work world.
Under the plan, mothers born after 1971 who are receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, would be given expanded job training and education. But after two years, they would have to find a job or take a government-subsidized minimum-wage job, or risk the loss of their benefits.
If the program helps her find a job, Smith is all for it.
“I don’t want to be on welfare the rest of my life, where my daughter would think that’s what she’s got to do the rest of her life-wait on a welfare check once a month: food stamps and $268,” she said.
“If they take this public aid away and give you a job, that would be a big improvement,” she said. “Because then the taxpayers wouldn’t be taking care of anyone else’s kids. You’d take care of your own kids.”
That’s a nice ideal. But Smith and most public aid recipients have heard it all before. They wonder if this is just another empty promise, or if there really will be jobs for them at the end of the rainbow.
“We do look for jobs,” said 19-year-old Cody Hardeman, who lives with her 9-month-old son, Darien, in the Taylor Homes. “They just don’t want to give them to us. They’re not offering us anything now. They’re not offering us jobs.”
Over the years, welfare-reform proposals have come and gone without making much of a dent in the problem, much less putting an end to “welfare as we know it,” as Clinton has promised.
And, despite assurances from administration officials, there’s no guarantee that life in the work world will improve the lives of mothers and families now on welfare.
Indeed, aspects of the plan-such as a provision to give states the option to refuse increasing the cash benefits of mothers who have additional children while on public aid-could deepen the poverty of some families, recipients said.
“There are so many what-ifs. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on cancer,” said one 34-year-old woman in the Far North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park who didn’t want her name used for fear that prospective employers would discriminate against her as a welfare recipient.
Besides, she said, “By the time it goes through Congress, it’s going to be watered down several times.”
At its heart, the Clinton plan is simple: Force government and recipients to think of welfare as temporary. Require the system to focus on helping mothers prepare for a job, find one and keep it.
But it’s that very simplicity that has drawn criticism.
“The two-years-and-out (provision) is devastating to people,” said Sharron Matthews, executive director of the Illinois Public Welfare Coalition. “It has no flexibility. Decisions should be made on an individual basis.”
Over the past six years, 23-year-old Maria Hennyson has worked as a hotel bellhop, a drugstore cashier, a restaurant cleaner and a maid. She has been married and divorced during that period, has lived in three cities, has been homeless with her two young children and has been treated for depression.
She’s still trying to get her high school equivalency diploma through Truman College in Uptown, but it’s an uphill struggle.
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“For me, I have a hard time learning,” she said.
She said a two-year limit on training would undermine her educational efforts: “The whole time you’re in school, you’d be worrying, `What am I going to do in two years when this (training period) runs out?’ “
Before she had to take a break from classes at Truman College because of medical problems, Hennyson was getting state-subsidized child care of $700 to $800 a month. But that’s a service she would have a hard time affording on her own with a minimum-wage job.
She also was receiving money for a monthly Chicago Transit Authority pass to get to and from Truman. But under the Clinton plan, it would be up to the states to decide whether to provide such job-related assistance once a welfare recipient found employment.
“If I have $4 and my stomach’s empty, I’m going to get myself something to eat rather than take the bus,” said Hennyson.
In its complexity, Hennyson’s story is typical. Many welfare mothers lead lives that are chaotic and unsettled compared with middle-class experience. Yet, huge bureaucratic public aid programs have a hard time addressing such complexities on an individual basis.
Theresa Nihill, supervisor of family and individual counseling for United Charities/Family Service DuPage, said, “We give people five years to become self-sufficient. In that five years, they get concrete financial assistance, which can be anything from money to repair cars so they have transportation to child care and medical kinds of things.”
Participants join support groups and receive regular counseling that continues well after they’ve gotten a job.
“It’s real difficult to figure out how you’re going to manage getting your kids to day care, how you’re going to find the time to spend with them in the evening, plus get the things done that you need to at home, and get yourself to work,” said Nihill. “Those are things they never really had to deal with before.”
Joyce Hunt knows how scary the idea of a job can be.
“I’ve never worked in my life,” said the 21-year-old mother who lives in the Robert Taylor Homes with her 2-year-old daughter, Angel, and 1-year-old son, Charles. “In a way, I’m kind of afraid of work. I’m just used to doing things around the house and for my mom. But I know I’d be better off with a job.”
That, at least, is what the Clinton administration says.
In a 51-page summary of the reform plan, the administration indicated that even with a job with the minimum hourly wage of $4.25, a family of three would rise above the poverty line of $11,870.
The combination of earnings, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit would push total income for that family to $13,790, or 16 percent over the poverty line, according to the analysis. By contrast, the combination of food stamps and the median AFDC grant would be only $7,525.
But public aid mothers and welfare advocates warn that such apparent improvements in a family’s financial situation may be illusory.
For one thing, finding a real job will be far from easy, even with improved training and education.
People trying to get off public aid often are at a distinct disadvantage in the private job market. Besides the unfair stigma of having been on welfare, many also face discrimination as members of minority groups.
Unless the Clinton plan addresses racism in the job market, many would-be workers will continue to find their path to a good-paying job blocked, recipients and welfare advocates said.
Further complicating matters for welfare recipients is a job market glutted with workers who lost positions in the recent recession.
“There are a lot of people out there-more experienced, more educated-who can’t get a job,” said Ruth Brandwein, vice president of the Washington-based National Association of Social Workers. “If you have a high unemployment rate, where are these (welfare mothers) going to get jobs?”
As for the government-subsidized jobs, they can provide welfare mothers with desperately needed work experience and, even more important, a strong boost in self-esteem, Brandwein said.
But they’re limited to only a year. And a continuing cycle of subsidized jobs and training programs could quickly become frustrating if there’s little hope of finding a regular job.
But even if she lands a full-time job, a welfare mother’s problems are far from solved.
There’s the question of medical coverage. As even the Clinton administration acknowledges, the welfare reforms won’t work if public aid families lose their health benefits when mothers go to work. Universal health care is an essential first step.
“Without universal health care, you can’t really talk about welfare reform, because a lot of women now stay on welfare to get the health benefits,” said Brandwein.
And child care is another major stumbling block. Under the Clinton plan, mothers in training and in the government-subsidized jobs would be eligible for financial aid for child care, and such aid could continue for a year after the mother obtained a job in the private market.
Then, it becomes the mother’s financial responsibility-and it can be a crippling burden.
“If you have a minimum-wage job, all your money would go to day care and transportation,” said 23-year-old Stephanie Berry, a mother of two children.
“So why work?”
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