At the main security gate of Midway Airport, amid the periodic squawk of metal detectors and the flashing succession of pictures on the X-ray machines, you can also see stark and jumbled images of what happens when people on public aid go to work.
Eighty-five people work here for MAXaero Security Co. doing pre-board screening, checking baggage claim tickets and pushing wheelchairs. About half are single mothers. For most, this is their first job or their first job in some time.
MAXaero does not run a welfare-to-work initiative here. There are no self-congratulatory press conferences. The company does not ask its employees if they receive government assistance, although a casual survey shows many do.
This is simply the kind of job people on public aid are likely to get.
In fact, one member of Pathways, a group of welfare recipients the Tribune is following through the vagaries of reform, worked here.
The basic requirements are minimal: a high school degree or GED, a clean drug test, no felony convictions.
The pay is low, just a nickel above the federal minimum wage of $4.75 an hour. No benefits unless you count the occasional glimpse of a celebrity passing through the airport.
For these jobs, Bill Scott, director of Chicago operations for the Houston-based company, interviews people whose idea of interview wear are jeans, T-shirt and a dozen gold earrings. He hires employees he has to teach to smile.
On any given day, about 15 percent of the work force calls in sick, can’t get to work for some reason–most often problems with child care or transportation–or just doesn’t show up.
Every month, about a dozen people quit or get fired. The average worker lasts between 6 and 10 months.
Here, at the junction of concourses A and B, is a checkpoint for the realities of welfare reform.
Over the next five years, most people who receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, will be required to start working or risk losing their benefits.
It will be hard enough for some people to get jobs. Despite the strong economy, there are still more potential workers for low-skilled jobs in the Chicago area than there are openings.
Key to welfare reform
But the real key to making welfare reform work is not only a matter of finding jobs, but keeping them, and keeping them long enough to eventually move into better jobs and off government support.
“Placing a person on the job is the tip of the iceberg,” said Bob Wordlaw, chairman of the work-force development committee of the City of Chicago-Cook County Welfare Reform Task Force. “Once you place someone, that’s when the real work begins.”
Inexperienced workers can face practical and psychological obstacles that increase their chances of quickly losing or quitting their jobs.
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The lack of reliable child care and transportation have long been identified as barriers to employment, but there are other issues too. Issues that can best be described as learning how to be an employee. Most of these problems–absenteeism, tardiness, unprofessional behavior–can be found at almost any workplace. But they pose particular challenges for people who have worked only a little or not at all.
At STRIVE, a job training and placement program that contracts with the Department of Human Services, graduates keep their first job for an average of 13 weeks.
Small missteps can cause someone to stumble hard. At one Chicago company, a woman hired off public aid was making photocopies on her second day of work when the copier jammed. She thought she had broken the machine and, too scared to tell anyone, she left. She never went back.
With job training and support, experts say, those situations could be avoided. But they fear there won’t be enough help available for new workers–an estimated 5,400 welfare recipients must join the work force each year in the Chicago area alone–and that some people will hit their five-year, lifetime limit on receiving aid before they establish a firm foothold in the working world.
Public perceptions of what it takes to put welfare recipients to work complicate the task because they tend to veer between two extremes: that people on public aid just need a shove to get moving or they are so dysfunctional they will never make it in the work world.
Truth between extremes
Undoubtedly, there are those at both ends of the spectrum, but most people fall somewhere in between.
The first wave of new employees includes people like Barbara Schat, who has been working part time behind the seafood counter at the Dominick’s Finer Foods, 7000 S. Pulaski Rd., since mid-May.
Although Schat, 35, has been on and off public aid for 17 years, since she had the first of her three sons, she began making her own stab at welfare reform six years ago.
One day, she looked around the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her children, at the bunk beds stacked in the dining room, and decided to make something out of her life.
She got her GED and enrolled at Daley College, completing an associate’s degree in accounting last spring.
Though she regularly shopped at the neighborhood Dominick’s, it never crossed her mind to apply for work there. “It’s a big chain. It’s kind of intimidating,” she said.
The chain, though, is working with the Department of Human Services to find public aid clients to fill job openings.
When a job came open for a seafood handler, an employee at the Englewood local office of the Department of Human Services, remembering that Schat once worked at a seafood place, recommended her and arranged the interview.
“She was never meant to be on welfare,” said job retention specialist Deborah Hopkins. “She just never had someone to push her. I think she never felt she was good enough to work.”
By all accounts, she has done the job and done it well, at least these first eight weeks.
The Department of Human Services has begun screening and referring public aid clients for jobs at more than a dozen companies, all in the Chicago area.
Officials acknowledge they want to make a good impression on their new business partners, and, thus, are being very picky about their job candidates.
Only the most employable public aid clients are currently in the pool–there are about 1,000 resumes on file–and every resume sent to an employer goes through the department’s central Chicago office first to double-check that the person is appropriate.
Before Hopkins referred Schat for the job, she made sure she had reliable child-care arrangements and transportation. And she made sure she was motivated.
That Schat already had so many pieces of her life in place puts her among those welfare recipients– experts put the figure at about 20 percent of the caseload–who can make the transition to work without major assistance.
These are the people who will get jobs first and have a better chance of keeping them. They may also go even further. “I know there’s more ahead for me,” Schat said. “I could become the accountant for Dominick’s someday.”
Wanted: Flexibility
If, indeed, welfare reform is to fulfill any such dreams, it will require some flexibility and understanding on the part of employers, particularly when it comes to employees who may need more help.
Marci Gonzalez, who is 25, began working for the Naperville branch of Banner Personnel Service Inc., 22 months ago.
When she started, the company, which provides temporary and permanent employees for other businesses, decided to try her out in their own office first.
There were a few problems. Gonzalez, who worked part time as a receptionist, got nervous on the phone and talked so fast that people sometimes couldn’t understand her. Her clothes were not always appropriate. She came in late.
Instead of giving up, her supervisors kept nudging her forward with sympathy and discipline.
Along the way, they learned a few things too.
When Gonzalez took off an entire day to take her 2-year-old son to the dentist, they learned that, for her, it took all day to get to the dentist because she had to drive from Aurora, where she lived, to a clinic in Chicago and back. They found out that what she wore to the office was also more a matter of necessity than choice. So, her co-workers began to give her the suits that didn’t fit them anymore.
Over time, Gonzalez developed into such a valuable employee that the company kept her for itself. In February, she became a full-time administrative assistant. She still has the occasional problem with tardiness, but she’s working on it.
“If I have to come in early, then I’m right on time, right at 7:30,” she said. “But to be there at 9, I don’t know. I can’t be there at 9.”
Tales with blurred endings
For every story like hers, an image whose outlines suggest success, there are many others with much blurrier edges.
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One involves Yvonne Forrest, 25, who used to work at the security checkpoint at Midway Airport.
Forrest worked for MAXaero for nine months. It was her first full-time job, she says, and she started it in May 1996, about a year after she was assigned to Pathways, a welfare-to-work program designed to help people gradually move toward independence.
She first went on public aid after she had her daughter, who is now 9. She also has a 5-year-old son.
Forrest sometimes came to the monthly Pathways meetings with her hair dyed to match her outfits. She talked about becoming a beautician. She didn’t seem to be making much progress. That changed, along with her pink hair, after she began working. She got the MAXaero job out of the blue, on her own. Forrest was visibly proud of her job. She liked to talk about it during the Pathways sessions at a DHS office on the South Side. Indeed, when someone looked askance at the starting salary of $4.80 an hour, she responded: “You have to start somewhere.”
In May, she was profiled in the group’s newsletter, a huge grin across her face, saying “I love working!”
But, by then, she had already left MAXaero. She says she told the company she was resigning to take another job. The company says she just stopped coming to work in March. By most reports, she was an average employee, with some attendance and tardiness problems, but whose outgoing personality often compensated for her shortcomings. While Scott, the director of operations, says he can’t blame employees for moving on, considering the job’s low pay, he wonders whether money is what makes the difference.
“I think we need some programs for people to get some training or at least an understanding of what the real world is about, that you come to work when you’re scheduled to work, that you work for your eight hours,” he said. “A lot of the people I see don’t seem to understand that.”
Forrest now works for a couple who run a small trucking company out of their home, doing some part-time filing and general office work.
The wife, she says, is teaching her to type. She thinks she’d like to get a job as a stenographer someday. As she talked, she made a few typing motions with her neon-green, 2-inch fingernails.
It reminded her of a concession she would have to make for that job. “Once I get into the stenography business,” she said, “the nails have to go. All the way off.”
Looking down at her hands ruefully, she added, “But once I get good at it, I can probably grow them back.”