Special Report

Enabling people who are now on welfare to find and keep paying jobs is neither as cheap nor as easy as political rhetoric suggests.

Department of Human Resources workers say it may take longer than a few years to get many of the people now on welfare in shape to work.

“There are skills that have to be learned,” said Erin Snowden, director of the Calhoun County Department of Human Resources. “If they are raised in a very dependent situation or a situation where very little emphasis is placed on work ethic, they learn at a very young age a cycle of dependence.”

Breaking that cycle will take time, she said. People on welfare need job training, educational programs and child care. Under the federal reform proposals, the states will get block grants to fund such programs, but they will not be required to match that money.

The result, Ms. Snowden and other experts say, will be less money to run support programs needed to wean people from welfare.

“Alabama will have a hard time putting together a program because it will only have a fraction of those resources,” said Mark Greenberg, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, D.C. His agency has been watching the welfare issue and the changes reform will spawn.

“It used to be the argument was that we knew those programs were needed, but how do we get the money to pay for them. This year, it has become politically impermissible to say that reform costs money,” Greenberg said.

But states that have pioneered welfare reform recognize that it does cost money to fix the system. Wisconsin, which has implemented a flagship welfare-workfare transition, continues benefits to welfare recipients even after they get jobs, said Joel Sanders, director of the Alabama DHR’s welfare-reform unit.

About 30 percent of the people who get checks from Aid to Families with Dependent Children are working. In Alabama, benefits are so low that once a person starts working, the welfare check is almost always stopped. Thus only 2 percent to 3 percent of the Alabamians on welfare hold jobs. High-benefit states such as Wisconsin spend millions in training and education, subsidizing jobs for welfare workers and tossing in child care to ease the transition.

Alabama’s JOBS program spends about $12 million annually on subsidized child care to help about 6,000 women learn job skills and rear families at the same time. It has at least five partnerships with employers to give jobs to people on welfare. Some counties, including Calhoun, are looking at forging similar partnerships.

In addition, some case workers and agency staffers would like to see regulations tightened to require people leaving welfare to keep jobs once they get them. In many cases, once a JOBS participant finds work, she may decide she doesn’t like the job and quit, ending up on welfare rolls again. “If they quit that job, they know they can come back in here and apply for benefits,” said Luanne White, JOBS case manager in Tallapoosa County. “They should not be able to do that. We need to have stronger sanctions.”

Some people disagree with the JOBS exemption that says women with children under 3 don’t have to participate. If non-welfare working mothers have to return to their jobs within weeks after giving birth, why should welfare mothers be allowed to do differently, they ask.

It will help if people seeking welfare are told when they apply for benefits that they will be expected to find jobs quickly, said Sanders. More emphasis should be placed on personal responsibility and getting people on welfare to understand it should be a short-term arrangement, he said.

“The value of work is a very American thing, and it is one the welfare system has not honored,” he said. “I think we’re coming to a time when someone asking for the state’s help is going to be told about why they are where they are.”