Dream deferred: the most inspired caseworker in America's most lauded welfare agency can barely do his job

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2004 by Jason DeParle

Mi-ike!" she rasped. She stood so close it was all he could do to keep from backing away. She talked with such a loud lisp he thought she might be retarded. She was missing half her teeth, and her skin looked almost plastic. If she weren't so big in the butt, he would have guessed she was smoking crack. That's the thing he had noticed about addicts: Their butts were the first thing to go. As her sandpaper voice silenced the room, even the receptionists stopped to stare. "I need a coat, Mi-ike! You're my caseworker now, Mi-ike!" Michael Steinborn felt his loathing for his job surge to new highs. "She's a mile a minute with the 'Mikes,"' he thought. "My new best friend."

Since inheriting her case months earlier, he had known her only as a computer code. She hadn't answered his appointment letters. (Typical.) She hadn't complained when he docked her check. (Not typical.) Now here she was in shirtsleeves in January, with the wind-chill factor 24 below. Coats weren't part of Michael's job on the front lines of Milwaukee's famous welfare experiment. That's what the office had its high-priced "community outreach" team for. But given days to produce, the outreach team had produced only excuses. "They haven't gotten you a coat?" he asked. "Look at me, Mi-ike--does it look like I have a coat?" There was a thrift shop down the street. Michael promised her a coat. He was halfway out the door when he spotted the hole in the scheme: He only had $4. He climbed back up the stairs, bummed a loan from a coworker, and ran four blocks through the snow. The drifts swallowed his office-worker shoes and buried his toes in ice.

The thrift store was out of coats. Them was another thrift store two blocks away, and another sprint left him surrounded by coats--blue coats and black coats, long coats and short coats, so many coats that he was losing his way when a voice came into his head. It was the familiar voice of self-reproach, his You Idiot! voice, and it reminded him that he wasn't there to make a fashion statement: just pick one, you idiot! He chose a blue ski jacket with a pink collar, nicer than anything he had expected. It cost $11. He had $9. The clerk made a show of contempt, but let the difference slide. It wasn't exactly a landmark in the annals of social work. But Michael allowed himself a frisson of satisfaction. The nail filers in outreach had sat around all week; Michael Steinborn, can-do guy; had gotten something done.

She lifted her arms over her head and made a sour face. "It's a little snug when I do this, Mi-ike!" The slapstick line came to mind: "Then don't do this!" But the coat had another problem. The zipper didn't work. Back he went, six blocks through the snow. Back to the sign that warned: "No Exchanges. All Sales Final." What was he supposed to say? Special exceptions for dumb-ass social workers with ice in their shoes? A bit of groveling brought a lined denim jacket and a zipper that zipped. "Mi-ike!" she said. "The other one was better looking than this!"

Mi-ike wasn't going back out in the cold. Mi-ike wasn't wearing a coat himself. He left his at home because his clients' kids kept wiping their Cheeto hands on it. Mi-ike was done talking about coats. "Okay, Mi-ike," she said. How about a bus pass? Four days later, in shirtsleeves again, she told Michael's supervisor that no one would help her find a coat.

A social worker! Michael Steinborn couldn't believe he was a social worker! Six months earlier, he was an unemployed jack of the building trades, drinking vodka for breakfast and wondering how he and his pregnant girlfriend were going to get by. Now he was a caseworker--er, "Financial and Employment Planner"--offering indigents career advice. He hated the grip of starched collars on his throat. He hated the office's new-carpet smell. Above all, he hated feeling responsible once again for the fiascos of ghetto life. Raised in the central city, the son of a small-time landlord, Michael had patrolled the ghetto since grade school, when his father first dispatched him to help collect the rents. "Son, take it from me," Ted Steinborn had warned, after another tenant had skipped out on a debt. "They'll take and take, and then they'll spit you out." Michael took pride in never ducking a fight and had his nose broken three times. The last thing he brought to his profession was a sentimental view of the poor. "I never wanted to be a sucker for a sob story," he said.

Yet as a caseworker, Michael was surrounded by sob stories, and like his father he believed some of them. He could carry on about his clients' bad-faith betrayals, but sometimes he felt he was lying, too, talking up the promise in their going-nowhere jobs. "People will call and say, 'I got a job!' I feel like saying, 'You're going to have a really fucked-up time living on $6.41 an hour.' But my job is to bullshit them, to say, 'Hey, that's great, it's a first step.'" Clients liked Michael. Clients trusted Michael. To an extent rare among the city's 150 caseworkers, Michael's career served as a tutorial on what conscientious casework can (and can't) achieve.