Help Wanted - welfare reform

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2000 by Alexander Nguyen

Why welfare reform needs good social workers

MILWAUKEE RESIDENT MARY Rhoden has been on and off welfare for years. Her trouble hasn't been getting a job. In fact, she's had quite a few. It's keeping them that's the problem. The mother of five fought with her supervisor and was fired as a counselor for a teenage program. She quit as a hotel maid because the boss got on her nerves, and she walked out of a clerical job because others made more money.

Rhoden's difficulties aren't just the product of bad attitude. According to a profile of her in The New York Times, Rhoden was molested as a young child, and when she tried telling her mother, her mother ignored it, leaving Rhoden with a deep distrust of authority. At 13, Rhoden ran away from home and eventually went into foster care but, like many women on welfare with a history of sexual abuse, her problems remained. By 17, she was suicidal, attempting once to poison herself. Rhoden's lingering mental health issues pose a steep barrier to her success in the workforce.

For the most part, the Times seems to have known more about Rhoden's deep-seated psychological issues than her caseworkers at the welfare office did. Despite participating in various training programs and cycling in and out of the welfare office for years, she never thought of confiding in her caseworkers. But then, why would she?

Rhoden's welfare caseworker is likely the same check-writing eligibility clerk who has always been there, scrutinizing her utility bills, searching for signs of unreported income that could bring an end to her monthly assistance checks. Only now, since welfare reform came to Wisconsin in 1996, Rhoden's caseworker does all that with the reminder: Get a job.

Judging from Rhoden's story, the "get a job" approach hasn't been too successful for her or a good number of other welfare recipients. A recent study from the Erikson Institutes Project Match found that simply funneling people into jobs without adequate preparation has failed miserably: 57 percent of former welfare moms were again unemployed after only six months and 70 percent had left or quit their jobs within 12 months.

But imagine a different scenario:

What if Rhoden went to the welfare office and instead of finding a low-level clerk, she were greeted by a sympathetic social worker? Someone Rhoden could trust and who, along with job leads, might connect her with psychological counseling to help her deal with her sexual abuse. And when she did get a job, what if the social worker called once in a while to see how she was getting along, encouraging Rhoden to tough out the hard times and advising her on how to deal with her boss?

To be sure, a social worker's counsel is not nearly enough to conquer the lasting effects of childhood sexual abuse. But there's some evidence that a good social worker can be the glue that helps make women like Rhoden stick with jobs and start climbing up the economic ladder. And those folks still on welfare today are going to need all the help they can get.

Doled Out

Welfare rolls are at their lowest level in 30 years. More than five million former recipients are now working. States like Wisconsin and Wyoming have shed more than 90 percent of their rolls over the last six years--the nation, 53 percent.

Thanks to that massive decline, Democrats and Republicans alike now shower the new system with praise. No longer do we hear the stories of the "welfare queen" and calls for cracking down on cheats. Instead, as The American Prospect wrote recently, welfare reform has radically changed several million people "from being considered `undeserving poor' because they don't work, to being viewed as `deserving' poor because they do."

Despite the bipartisan declarations of success, it's a little early to declare victory. The exodus from welfare has slowed to a crawl in some states: New Mexico's caseload fell by only a fraction of one percent last year, and Tennessee's declined by 1.5 percent, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The numbers suggest that after four years of this social experiment, the majority of folks who were to get jobs have got them. As for the rest, well, they are demonstrating what liberals have always argued: that poverty is a complicated social ill, stemming from a host of complex issues that can't be cured solely with a welfare check--or an admonition from the government to get a job.

The welfare rolls today are loaded with women like Rhoden. In 1998, researchers at the University of Utah conducted a survey of state residents who had received welfare for at least three years. A huge proportion of long-term recipients reported serious problems that posed significant barriers to their ever getting off the dole. More than half were victims of childhood physical or sexual abuse; 55 percent experienced domestic violence; over 40 percent suffered from depression; 47 percent were addicted to drugs and alcohol; and 41 percent were struggling with serious health problems.

Welfare reform has given states the money and flexibility to create new programs, such as drug treatment and mental health counseling, that are desperately needed for a sizable proportion of women still on the rolls. But officials have discovered that just because they build programs doesn't mean women will come. That's largely because front-line caseworkers in most welfare offices aren't trained even to figure out what kind of problems their clients have, much less how to help them.