Meet Sarah, a 30-year-old client of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago whose name has been changed in the interest of confidentiality. When Sarah learned that she was pregnant, she was without marketable job skills, day-care options or support from the child’s father. She had no choice but to turn to welfare for support. During her child’s first years, Sarah held a number of low-paying jobs, but child-care problems often got in the way of long-term employment.
Nonetheless, she was determined to find steady work. On her own, Sarah sought out job training, and after a long and diligent search, she landed a job as a security officer. By the time her child was of school age, Sarah was off the welfare rolls. But after five years of good performance on the job, Sarah’s carefully laid plans fell apart. She was fired unlawfully, and although the Legal Assistance Foundation was able to help her get her job back, it took nine months. During that time, Sarah looked for another job without success. She did not qualify for unemployment compensation, so she needed the safety net of public aid to provide food, shelter and health care for herself and her young children.
In many ways, Sarah’s story is typical of the majority of welfare recipients. They want to work, but they have a very difficult time finding a job. The jobs that they do find are often low-paying and tenuous. Their efforts are further frustrated by a lack of critical support services to help them stay employed and sustain them between jobs.
According to Welfare Realities, a well-regarded book of welfare information, more than 70 percent of adult Aid to Families with Dependent Children recipients have recent work histories. Unfortunately, AFDC rules create a disincentive to work by reducing the amount of assistance a working family receives by an amount nearly equal to their earnings. As a result, they lose assistance almost immediately, which also means a loss of child care and health benefits, which they generally do not receive from their employer.
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Illinois has begun to address this problem through the Work Pays program for working AFDC recipients. Participants continue to receive small AFDC supplements plus child care and health services, until their annual income reaches the federal poverty level, $12,320 for a family of three. In the year that Work Pays has been in effect, the percentage of AFDC recipients working has increased from 5 percent to 11 percent of the overall case load, and the number is rising. Work Pays is an example of a program that seeks to support and encourage, not penalize, the working poor.
On the other hand, many of the currently popular welfare reform initiatives seem to rely on welfare myths, not reality. They assume, incorrectly, that most people who need welfare do not work and do not want to work. Proposed “reforms” consist of harsh work mandates and arbitrary lifetime welfare benefit limits. By ignoring the real facts, such proposals threaten the safety net that welfare provides to these poorest of the working poor. They would also defeat or seriously impede efforts to work, making these individuals poorer and more, not less, dependent. Across the United States, it will be the children on AFDC who pay the dearest price.
As this debate rages on, the new Republican majorities in Springfield and in Washington must not ignore the following facts:
– In the U.S., there are 14 million welfare recipients, nearly 10 million of whom are children. In Illinois, there are 247,000 families on AFDC and approximately 480,000 children.
– About 50 percent of all welfare recipients leave welfare within one year, and about 75 percent leave within two years. But nearly half will return to AFDC within a few years when faced with job loss, child care problems or other common obstacles.
– Leaving welfare does not mean leaving poverty. In the 1970s, 73 of every 100 poor children received welfare. By 1990, that number had dropped to 50. Twenty years ago, a worker earning minimum wage could lift a family of four over the federal poverty line. But because the minimum wage has not increased with the rate of inflation, today that worker’s earnings put the family at just 63 percent of the federal poverty level.
– Like Sarah, most Illinois wage earners do not qualify for unemployment compensation. A recent study showed that just 11 percent of AFDC recipients who had gone to work and then lost their jobs qualified for unemployment compensation. Welfare is their only safety net until they are able to secure new employment.
– More than half of all AFDC recipients in Illinois do not have a high school diploma, yet only .05 percent of the state’s public aid budget is allocated to education and job training programs. Worse, Illinois forfeited some $130 million in federal funds over five years because the state did not meet the required funding obligations.
– Inadequate child care is an obstacle to employment, yet child care services for AFDC families are woefully inadequate. According to the Illinois Child Care Resource and Referral program, there are 118,000 children under the age of three in AFDC families, yet the state funds only 25,000 infant and toddler child-care slots.
When Sarah lost her job, she and her children would have lost their safety net if proposed welfare reforms had been law. She would have exceeded even the most generous lifetime benefit limits currently being floated in Congress, and found herself in a desperate struggle for survival that would render a sustained job search virtually impossible. Still other suggested reforms would require her to “work off” her benefits by spending her days performing meaningless tasks that do nothing to help her find and retain employment.
Undeniably, there are real problems with the current welfare system. Those of us who work with AFDC recipients on a daily basis have long been advocating change. But the newly elected political leaders here in Illinois and in Washington have a responsibility to open their minds to the realities of welfare, and look beyond the common stereotypes so easily accepted as fact. Reforms targeted to a small minority of welfare recipients threaten to level the heaviest penalty on the majority of welfare recipients-the working poor like Sarah who are trying hard to play by the rules and pull themselves and their children out of poverty.