The Hassle Factor - how welfare reform looks in Camden, New Jersey

Reason, Dec, 2000 by Michael W. Lynch

Why is it so hard to find out where former welfare recipients have landed? Part of the reason is that once people leave the system, the government no longer tracks them. If people are working, you might expect to see evidence of it in the community--more entrepreneurial activity, small industry, shops, and the like. But it's hard to find any of that. "I don't know what the impact on the city would be," says Frank Ambrose, who notes, "You don't see building. You don't see any new companies coming in."

Most national studies of women who've left welfare show that upward of 60 percent of them are working. In New Jersey, Mathematica Policy Research found that 56 percent of former welfare clients in its statewide sample were employed. But no one knows for sure if these figures apply to Camden.

They do know, however, why people are leaving: Welfare isn't worth the hassle. "We put pressure on the recipients to do something," says Ambrose, who thinks the program is getting people to work. "Prior to this we had job training programs, but people weren't put under pressure. We weren't very threatening."

Hitting the Floor Smiling

Ted Goertzel, a sociologist at Rutgers University's Camden campus, started studying welfare recipients in 1992, when the first wave of reform hit New Jersey. Since then, he has conducted a series of focus groups with welfare clients. In the early 1990s, Goertzel says, the assumption among welfare recipients was that the system would always be there, that it was a force of nature. "I would try to raise the question about what would you like to do for a career, for work," says Goertzel. "And it was like talking to kids in grade school. Work was something that was very far off, unrealistic, maybe they'd like to work with children, be a physician. It was nothing practical, nothing that would happen in the short term."

Today, Goertzel finds meaningful short-term planning. "They realize that they are going to have to find jobs, that they have to find some way to support themselves, that they can't rely on the welfare system as a permanent security blanket," says Goertzel. "That idea has gotten across.

Polls and individual experience support Goertzel's focus-group findings. The Mathematica survey found that more than 80 percent of Work First clients know that welfare benefits are limited and that they must work to continue to receive them. Six in 10 said the law's time limits affected their decisions, prompting them to try harder to find and keep jobs or seek out training to get them off welfare. Even a study by Legal Services of New Jersey that doesn't mask the authors' disdain for the new system concedes that it has made clients understand that they must work.

Welfare veteran Deborah Keys was hassled off the system. I catch up with her a week later at Camden's Housing Authority office, where she has just ended a workday spent remodeling a public housing unit. The 46-year-old Keys decided welfare wasn't worth it when her caseworker told her she would have to go to school or get a job to keep receiving her grant. Keys protested that she wasn't going to work for free. Her caseworker retorted that she wasn't going to get her check. "I said, 'I'll find a job somewhere, somebody will give me a job,"' recalls Keys. "I'm not going to go somewhere and work for free just for that little bit of money."