Woozy protest time

National Review, Sept 1, 1997 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The City of New York, population seven million, has a welfare population of one million, which is well over 10 per cent. If the figure were to apply nationally, thirty million Americans would be on welfare. Clearly it is desirable to reduce the number of welfare recipients. If that can't be accomplished, clearly it is desirable that as many welfare recipients as possible should contribute something to the city -- whatever; help to clean the streets, to wash the dishes, to patrol the parks. The welfare bill of 1996 put a little muscle in the whole idea by insisting that those welfare recipients capable of working should be required to do so, in order to qualify for welfare benefits. They call it workfare. Responsibility to enact the new arrangements devolved upon the states, under the new law, inasmuch as the states are now enjoined to write legislation governing their own welfare practices.

What happened in New York City last week was that 68 churches, synagogues, and non-profit groups came together as a coalition demanding that New Yorkers cease to avail themselves of the services of workfare recipients. Involved in their specific petition wasn't one million New Yorkers, but 38,000, screened by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration as manifestly qualified to do something while receiving welfare other than staying home and watching television. The protestors likened the workfare program to slavery. You will think this an exaggeration. But nothing about New York City is ever an exaggeration. The placards carried by the protestors had slogans such as, "Rudy We Will Not Be Your Slave Drivers." The Reverend Peter Laarman, pastor of the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, labeled workfare an "evil system." Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor of the Stephen Wise Synagogue gave as the reasons for so designating it that workers were forced to do what they did without pay, that what they did drove down wages for other workers, that the new workers didn't have bargaining rights or adequate bathroom facilities, and that this made the whole thing akin to "enslavement."

Mayor Giuliani countered by saying that workfare had reduced welfare rolls by 285,000. The experience in New York is similar to that in other states, e.g., Oregon. It was anticipated there that tens of thousands of people moving from welfare to workfare would throw themselves on the railroad tracks of philanthropy, crowding the churches and civic buildings, begging for shelter. What happened is that half of the welfare recipients found work.

There is one aspect to the workfare phenomenon in New York City that needs noticing, however perfunctorily. It is that if a dozen people appear at a hospital prepared to wash the dishes or do the laundry, that means so much laundry and so many dishes don't require tending by the regular workforce. But any argument based on protecting existing labor from competitive availability has to be thought of in the larger context. If the 68 petitioners in New York wish at all costs to protect existing jobholders, then they would be much better off spending their time picketing Ellis Island, and enjoining Washington to clamp down on legal, as well as illegal, immigration. To tell an unemployed, healthy New Yorker that he/she must not work at that hospital lest the work done make redundant existing jobs is terribly messy economics, the equivalent of saying that to do nothing is economically healthier than to do something.

No, the primary motive of the 68 petitioners is to rail against New York's insistence that people who receive welfare go out and do something. If one million people in New York City are on welfare, then the money they are being paid is being produced by somebody else. Everybody in New York City (and everybody everywhere), contributes to the cost of welfare, through income taxes, primarily; but also through sales taxes. The sharp intuition of advocates of workfare, whose most conspicuous spokesman was Ronald Reagan thirty years ago, was that for the able-bodied to sit idle receiving welfare is spiritually demoralizing and economically larcenous. Mr. Giuliani stressed that many workfare practitioners can be expected to go on to regular jobs, and can profit from what they are now required to do. To learn to wash dishes isn't a victory over an arcane expertise. Anybody can do it, with minimal instruction. But to do it a few hours every day can awaken you from the kind of torpor that infects whole welfare populations. It is a means of probing a conscience sometimes inert; and a modest means of giving to the people of the City of New York a little token of gratitude.