But job preparedness is only part of the problem. Welfare recipients segueing into the workforce must cope not only with new demands and new situations but also with the remnants of an old bureaucracy that seems designed to make them fail.
Take Maria Ayala, her sister-in-law Carmen Ayala, and Alice Collins, members of the first class of TEAM/MPI trainees who now have jobs on MPI's production floor and have all recently received promotions and raises. The three qualify for state health-care and child-care assistance for two more years, but in order to get it they often have to interrupt their workdays with trips or phone calls to various agencies. Maria Ayala recently had to miss work, for instance, to attend a child-care-reimbursement hearing. And Collins, a single mother of four who has been on and off welfare since 1985, must frequently call social-service agencies from the office. "Every week, it's something different," she complains. "And if you don't have your paperwork done, they'll cut you off."
Those on the other side of the system agree that the process is unnecessarily onerous. "When you start peeling away the layers of the onion, you begin to cry," says Mary Hoppe, a spokesperson for the Florida State Wages Board. "When you look at some of the transitional benefits and what's required for people to access them, it's absolutely ludicrous. To get a free bus pass, you might have to leave work in the middle of the day, take a bus to your local social-services office, wait in line, then take the bus back to work. It isn't work friendly to the employee or the employer."
For small-company executives, the "procedural roadblocks" that Hoppe describes are exasperating. Time spent by employees running bureaucracy-related errands is time that isn't spent on the job. TCA Fulfillment Service, a $1.2-million telemarketing and fulfillment company in New Rochelle, N.Y., employs 30 former welfare recipients as entry-level data processors and in customer service. Those who are still eligible for medical, housing, and food assistance often take off a morning or an entire day to meet with caseworkers. "It's like social services doesn't really care if they have a job," TCA vice-president Lynn Giordano says. Then there's the paperwork that gets piled on the company executive herself. "I'm always writing letters to various agencies saying that they work here, how much they make, and how many hours they've worked," Giordano says. "It's a mountain of paperwork, and it's redundant. People who haven't worked here in two years still send me forms to fill out."
Even so, she says, "for the people I have now, it's all worth it, because they're so good. They're reliable and dependable, and they fit in very well." As she ramps up her company, Giordano continues to tap Opportunity America, a private employment agency that specializes in training and placing welfare recipients. Like many of its nonprofit counterparts, Opportunity America receives government contracts to find jobs for welfare recipients. Giordano pays nothing, so she saves on recruitment. And since Opportunity America takes just part of its fee up front and the rest in two installments after three and six months' retention, she knows that the agency will do everything in its power to keep people on the job. "I talk to the people at Opportunity America at least three times a week," she says. "I get advice on how to handle behavioral and attitude problems, and I know they'd intervene if I asked them to."
Welfare recipients segueing into the workforce must cope with the remnants of an old bureaucracy that seems designed to make them fail.
More prevalent than companies like Opportunity America are the community-based organizations that not only train and place welfare recipients but also provide case management and sometimes serve as quasi human-resources departments for the companies that hire from them. Frank Tucker has been drawing on CBOs for three years to staff Tucker Technology Inc., his $5-million telecommunications company with headquarters in Oakland, Calif. The CEO hires former welfare recipients on a project-by-project basis, putting them to work mainly pulling cable. "I learned the hard way," Tucker says. "I used to just run an ad or go to the employment-development office in whatever city I was working in. If I hired 10 people, on the first day there were two no-shows. The first Monday, I'd lose another two. And after the first paycheck, I'd lose another two to three. The turnover was killing us."
The CBOs funnel to Tucker candidates he can trust: people who have passed drug tests and showed up consistently for several weeks of job-readiness training. The programs also help new employees organize car pools or map out public-transportation routes. And they keep the pressure on. Tucker calls the organizations, for instance, when his employees don't show up or if they routinely call in sick. "It's less of a strain on our human-resources department to go through the CBOs. I'm going to hire more from this pool," says Tucker, who plans to grow his business by more than 50% this year.
He's not alone when it comes to relying on CBOs. The Welfare to Work Partnership reports that 48% of the members who hired at least one former welfare recipient in 1999 sought help from a CBO, up from 25% in 1998. "If companies try to do this themselves, they'll fail," says partnership president Segal. "This is a big problem for small companies, and they must form partnerships with nonprofits."
That's not always as easy as it sounds. Most nonprofits are accustomed to treating the former welfare recipient, not the employer, as the customer, says Florida's Hoppe. "You took a lot of folks working in social services, and you said, 'OK, now employers are the customer, and you have to market to them. You have to be efficient in how you respond to their needs,' " she says. "Well, it hasn't happened overnight. It's like dismantling the Soviet Union." In addition, many entrepreneurs are suspicious of anything that smacks of government interference. But Segal cautions against minimizing the public sector's role. "Many people no longer on welfare rolls are still entitled to Medicaid and food stamps," he says, and consequently they still have one foot in the system.
