Wages of Welfare War

Tassy dropped out of the program after five months when she learned there were no code-enforcer jobs for her or any of her 27 classmates. Tassy believes she and her classmates were just quotas the city was trying to meet in order to receive federal funding. Vickers denied the accusation. "No one goes into a training program with the guarantee of employment," Vickers says. Tassy finally found a job last month. Goodwill, not WAGES, connected Tassy to an opening at the Coast Guard station in Miami Beach. She makes $6.25 an hour washing dishes, serving food, sweeping floors, mopping, and wiping down dining room tables.

Treva Landrum had been working steadily for eleven years, first as a nursing assistant caring for an elderly patient and later as a cashier at Joe's Supermarket. When the corner store closed down, Landrum suddenly joined the ranks of the unemployed. For about two years, Landrum tried unsuccessfully to get off welfare on her own. She enrolled in vocational training courses and scrounged money for bus fare just to get to job interviews. Landrum had applied at every hospital in town; for a position as a switchboard operator at the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (now called the Department of Children and Families); and at the State Attorney's Office. "No one would call back," she says from the living room of her neatly kept apartment in Liberty Square.

When WAGES came into her life in 1997, the program forced her to do more job hunts or face sanctions. (WAGES withholds cash assistance and food-stamp benefits if welfare recipients don't participate in the program.) Every time Landrum didn't get the job, she would have to enroll in courses designed to prepare chronically unemployed women to re-enter the work force. "I went through that cycle of courses and searches several times," Landrum says. Victory to Vision, she recalls, was one such prep class. "It was a bunch of crap," Landrum says. "But I sat through it with the promise of a job." A job, that according to Landrum, didn't exist.

Landrum was tired. She decided not to comply with WAGES anymore. When the 38-year-old gave birth to her second child in 1998, she chose to become a stay-at-home mom. As a result WAGES cut off her cash assistance. Landrum, who depends on her fifteen-year-old son's SSI (disability check), child support, and food stamps, says her family no longer is covered by Medicaid either. "I don't want my children to step on the stones that I've had to step on," Landrum says. "I want them to step on some stairs, concrete stairs that go up."

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Local WAGES coalitions work within the guidelines of state and federal policies. But on the ground, they enforce welfare laws and administer services such as subsidized child-care, job training and placement, transportation, and transitional benefits -- all areas that, according to critics, haven't met the standards for success. At the heart of the problem, opponents say, is that WAGES providers don't have a complete picture of their recipients' needs. Furthermore they aren't familiar with the new laws and apply them inconsistently. As a result most program participants receive piecemeal information and miss out on the services available to them.

"I have not been impressed with the level of case management," says Edith Humes-Newbold, Mayor Penelas's advisor on welfare-to-work. "The laws are applied inconsistently, and caseworkers don't take the time to really get to know the participants."

Robin Reiter, Miami Herald vice president and former co-chair of the local WAGES coalition, had never heard of Minority Families. She wasn't moved when she heard of the group's problems with WAGES. "As good as WAGES may be, it will never provide full satisfaction for everyone," Reiter says.

Although WAGES punishes some for not participating, many have dropped out of the program in frustration. "It's a very complicated system that involves far too many cooks," says Valory Greenfield, the public benefits attorney. "It allows far too many people to be served in a very superficial and generic way."

Indeed, for all the cooks involved in coming up with a recipe, there is not a single WAGES participant sitting on the board of the Miami-Dade/Monroe WAGES coalition. A committee within the board nominates candidates; there is no external or community process for nominating people to the local coalition. "It just hasn't been done like that," says a WAGES coalition staffer who did not want to be named. "We advertise nominations and take applications; everything is public record."

According to the Qualitative Study of WAGES, coalitions make decisions mostly based on information they get from service providers and administrative staff; board members do not receive regular feedback from WAGES participants. "The philosophy of democracy is that people should have a say," says University of Florida professor Elizabeth McCulloch, one of fourteen researchers who worked on the WAGES study. "The people who are being governed by these rules are poor people. They're the ones who know how it's actually all working out."