Cover
story
Welfare reform makes children prime victims
By Arthur Jones
NCR Staff
Although on Wall Street the Dow
Index has reached hardly imagined heights is recent weeks, more American
children are going to bed hungry in 1999 than in 1996 as a result of welfare
reform.
According to a 15-month, 10-state Welfare Reform Watch
Project, children are the prime victims of welfare reform and The
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The
project was initiated by Network, the Catholic social justice lobby, in
conjunction with five other religious groups.
The findings in Poverty Amidst Plenty: the Unfinished
Business of Welfare Reform are that children are experiencing
serious deprivation -- and social service facilities [food banks, soup
kitchens] are stretched beyond their limits.
The Network Welfare Reform Watch Project was launched two years
ago to monitor as rigorously as possible the implementation of the new
legislation. The project had two components: statistical and
anecdotal.
The anecdotal dimension involved watchers --
individuals affiliated with Pax Christi USA or Network or the participating
religious orders -- who educated themselves about welfare reform in their
states welfare plan and monitored welfare clients progress and
sometimes met with clients personally.
Project watchers, in a 12-month period from October
1997 to October 1998 could actually see many former welfare recipients whose
health was declining and who were sliding more deeply into poverty.
The statistical survey used clients at social service facilities
associated with the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of St. Joseph and Daughters of
Charity.
A Drexel University sociology professor, Douglas Porpora, analyzed
data in 2,555 questionnaires collected in three phases from 59 Catholic
facilities in 10 states (California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts,
Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas).
These were the states with among the highest caseloads for Aid to
Families with Dependent Children -- AFDC. Over an 18-month period the project
survey discovered:
- Numbers of disconnected -- unemployed people not
receiving any welfare benefits -- rose sharply, from 52 percent to 79
percent.
- Numbers on welfare dropped sharply, from 33 percent to less
than 5 percent.
- Fewer poor people are receiving Medicare (down from 76 percent
to 60 percent) or food stamps (down from 63 percent to 52 percent).
Assemblies point to problems
Welfare rolls began dropping in many states before the 1996
legislation, due at least in part to an improving economy, reports Mercy Sr.
Kathy Thornton, Network project director. In Wisconsin, for example, according
to the Welfare Reform Watch Project final report, The combination of a
healthy economy, well-designed training programs and relatively generous
child-care support helped people shift from welfare to jobs.
By contrast, in states such as New York and Tennessee, fewer than
30 percent of the people leaving welfare found work. And even in Wisconsin,
where 83 percent made the shift from welfare to jobs, only 62 percent were
still employed six months later.
Federal and state reports on declining welfare rolls make the
transition to work seem easier than the reality, said Beverly McDonald of
Groundwork for Justice.
At the 11 Michigan assemblies organized by Groundwork, 1,700
low-income people trying to make it in the work force described the
reality:
- The struggle to improve job skills -- A woman told the South
Oakland County assembly that she takes 17 credit hours toward a paramedic
license, works 20 hours a week and sees her children only on Sunday.
- The child care dilemma -- A mother told the Marquette area
assembly that if she leaves her children in substandard day-care, she is not a
good mother. But if she doesnt work because decent child care is not
available, she is not a good mother either because she risks the loss of all
public assistance for her child.
- Transportation difficulties -- Great distances often separate
the jobs from the places where low-income workers or potential workers live.
The Traverse City assembly was told that driving a $1,000 car to work is
like waiting for a time bomb to go off.
McDonald said Michigans welfare to work program is
work or else, even though there are protections in the state law against being
sanctioned because you do not have child care or reasonable access to
transportation.
But none of the women testifying know that. The families
that testified, she said, were probably surviving on a mix of
strictly low-income earners or welfare supplements. There are so many myths. It
would be a rare woman who hasnt worked on and off. What they run into, of
course, as the 15-year-old car quit or the child care provider wasnt
there, is that these are very tenuous attachments to the work force.
McDonald continued, These are part-time, minimum wage -- six
hours today, three hours tomorrow, seven hours on Friday. Nonstandard hours at
times when theres no public transportation and child care centers
arent open -- jobs no one else wants to work in a good economy.
The key Michigan finding: For low-income families, even steady
employment does not necessarily mean family self-sufficiency.
There is a further problem. Network discovered that most
states are not collecting information on people once they leave the welfare
rolls to determine how theyre faring.
Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan has a
straightforward means for measuring how people are faring economically.
Actual consumption, he said, is the bottom-line determinant
of material well-being.
Americans going off welfare are likely to consume less of
everything --including food.
The Network Project learned that their respondents consumed less
medical care and less dental care than two years earlier; consumed more meals
from free food banks and more dinners from soup kitchens. They are more likely
to be going hungry than they were in 1996.
The studys participants were predominantly female (79
percent), and 68 percent of those had minor children living with them.
Thirty-eight percent of the women had not completed high school; only 13
percent had education beyond high school.
Women under 30 were less likely to have jobs than men of the same
age (22 percent versus 36 percent). Over 30, 20 percent of the women had jobs
and 18 percent of the men. The Network respondents were almost equally divided
according to race and ethnicity.
Forty-three percent of the respondents said they were eating fewer
meals or less per meal than six months earlier because of the cost. Twenty-four
percent reported their children were having to skip meals or eat less.
Current policy not working for
everyone
Nearly half (49 percent) said their health was fair-to-poor.
Almost one third (31 percent) had been unable to pay for medications ordered by
their physician; 45 percent couldnt afford needed dental care. Fourteen
percent of their children received no dental care; 25 percent could not afford
emergency dental care for their children when the occasion arose.
The Network Project reported that the working poor are suffering,
too. Forty-one percent of those with jobs said they had experienced hunger in
the previous six months. The children of the working poor surveyed were
suffering from lack of food (22 percent), lack of adequate health care (14
percent) and unmet dental needs (24 percent).
Network said that Second Harvest, the nations largest food
bank network, reported a 10 to 35 percent increase in food assistance, and
70,000 turned away empty-handed in 1997 because there was no food.
States the Network report: The hunger and lack of health
care experienced by large numbers of people using private social service
facilities indicate that current welfare policy is not working for
everyone.
The challenge in finding solutions, declares Network, involves
returning responsibility for the alleviation of poverty nationwide back to the
federal government. Network recommends a litany of governmental actions that
echo from the Johnson war on poverty years -- suggesting how little
the root causes of poverty have altered: further increasing the minimum wage;
providing accessible assistance for people unable to work; pushing banking and
finance reform to give low-income communities access to credit; committing to a
full-employment economy to provide work at sustaining jobs for all able to
work; enacting educational reforms to provide basic skills essential to
employment opportunities.
Network, meanwhile, has committed itself to lobbying on food
stamps, day-care, affordable housing and similar issues, while embarking on a
further watch project.
The next phase will monitor the effect of time limits on benefits
for people in poverty, examine the effect of inadequate public transport on
people getting and holding jobs, and identify steps required to pass
legislation to alleviate a range of needs.
National Catholic Reporter, April 30,
1999
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