Karen Ayee was not happy with New York City public assistance.
A single mother of three from the St. Nicholas Houses in Harlem, her benefits have nearly been cut off several times despite her continuing city-approved training to be a Licensed Practical Nurse. Last month, however, Ayee, 42, got the unlikely opportunity to take her grievances to the top.
On Sept. 18, Ayee testified before Human Resources Administration (HRA) Commissioner Robert Doar during a meeting organized by Harlem advocacy group Community Voices Heard, urging for more flexibility and oversight of welfare-to-work programs.
“It is difficult…to keep a job if I’m not properly trained. This is why I am pushing so hard to stay in school,” Ayee said in her testimony. “[But] I am constantly being threatened with sanctions, WEP [Work Experience Program] assignments and having my childcare cut off.”
“There was pressure to take a job that’s not sustainable,” Ayee said later in a telephone interview. “You have to fight to be trained…[otherwise you are] in and out and tossed around.”
New York City tells a different story.
To the Bloomberg Administration, welfare reform is an overwhelming success. After national political outcry over people languishing on public assistance, federal “work-first” overhaul in 1996 placed a five-year limit on aid and required most beneficiaries to work. Under Giuliani, city public assistance rolls declined substantially. At its peak in 1995, 1,160,593 New Yorkers were on welfare; as of August, the number was 357,473, the lowest level since 1964.
“We promised to move New Yorkers to self-sufficiency,” Mayor Bloomberg said in 2006, announcing the record lows. “We are delivering on that promise in a historic way.”
While the reduction is undeniable, most who leave welfare remain impoverished, either by returning to public assistance, or working low-wage, short-term jobs that have little opportunity for career advancement. Additionally, frustrations with a sometimes complicated and ineffectual system cause people to avoid it all together. More New York City residents are off welfare, but the overarching goal of lifting people out of poverty is largely failing.
Fitting the trend, Central Harlem has a small welfare roll despite widespread poverty. As of 2006, 9,748 people receive public assistance in Community District 10, or 8.2 percent of 118,143 residents. However, 39.8 percent of families with children under 18 live below the poverty line ($20,650 for a family of four), according to the Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey, an update of Census figures.
At Central Harlem’s St. Nicholas Job Center, only104 people had found work between January 1st and September 23rd, well short of HRA’s 2007 site goal of 1,401. The center’s 7.4 percent fulfillment of its 2007 goal is the lowest rate of all New York City job centers, which are on average 64.2 percent of their way towards the overall goal of 80,000 jobs (51,316).
“With very few exceptions, these are not positions that get people from public assistance to self-sufficiency,” said David Jason Fischer, Project Director for Workforce Development and Social Policy at the Center for an Urban Future, an advocacy group. “[The poor] are cycling from unemployment to menial jobs,” he said, describing most post-welfare employment as a “revolving door” back to public assistance. “These are not jobs that people hold for a long period of time…you remain poor.”
Here’s how welfare in New York City is supposed to work: down on your luck, HRA gives you enough money to live on, while providing job training and helping you search for something steady. For a few months, you go to a job center two days a week to get training and look for work and you do an unpaid job for the city – the Work Experience Program – the other three days. Soon, armed with job skills and experience, you land a job, and you’re off the dole, back on your own two feet.
Those in the training programs tell a different story.
“They were supposed to train you for jobs and how to get one,” said Tanya Worrell, 40, standing outside the Arbor Career Center on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, one of Harlem’s main sub-contracted work search and preparation sites. “All we did was sit around all day…people just leave the program because they don’t like it,” she said, echoing the views of multiple recipients who are required to go to the center. Arbor did not respond to a request for comment.
That is not how Mayor Bloomberg saw it in 2006. “People are leaving the welfare rolls in record numbers,” he said. “They are getting – and keeping – jobs that allow them to live independently and enjoy the dignity of work.”
The statistics disagree.
Last year, HRA data showed that only about 23 percent of people who leave welfare each month have work. The rest simply stop showing up for appointments. And, 67 percent of new public assistance cases each month are returnees.
“It’s not clear they are terribly good and secure jobs,” said John Krinsky, an Associate Professor of Political Science at City College of New York-CUNY who studies the politics of welfare and work in New York City. “Living at 125 percent of the poverty line…they aren’t officially impoverished, but they are bloody poor.” Krinsky did note that separate subsidies for things like childcare and healthcare help, but are still not enough.
Despite welfare-to-work’s challenges, some in the city said they were content with the program.
“It has served me well,” said Travis Marshall, 50, who entered the system two months ago after being in and out of work for years. After an assessment, Marshall was placed with the Metropolitan Transit Authority for his “work assignment,” where he cleans subway cars three days a week, and spends the other two at Arbor, searching for jobs in case he is not hired by the MTA full-time.
“You have to follow the rules and regulations [of welfare] until you get self-sufficient,” Marshall said while selling a “loosie” cigarette to a passerby for 50 cents.
Malcolm Cassell, 24, said he was pleased with the job training at Arbor, where he has been coming for two weeks. “If it wasn’t for this program, I’ll be just like everybody else – unprepared for the workforce,” he said.
The Parks Opportunity Program (P.O.P.), a six-month position in New York City parks, receives better reviews than W.E.P. Unlike W.E.P., P.O.P. pays, but it is limited to 4,000 people.
Jennifer Lopez began public assistance in June and was placed in POP in August. She said she makes $339 every week – $8.49 per hour – through POP instead of the $120 per week she received in public assistance. “It gives you good experience,” Lopez said, explaining that using leaf blowers, weed-wackers and pickup trucks could serve her well if she works as a building superintendent or landscaper after the six-month program ends. “It’s working for me.”
Still, those that believe the current welfare-to-work system is preparing them for living-wage jobs are in the minority.
A 2005 report by Community Voices Heard, “The Revolving Door,” the most comprehensive on the issue, concluded that “many recipients are still stuck in a welfare system that pushes them to move to work, even if they do not yet possess what they need to get and keep a job and move beyond the public assistance system.”
Like Karen Ayee, the mother from Harlem, Maimuna DesVignes, a 49-year old homeless mother from the Bronx, got to explain her frustration to Commissioner Doar last month. Despite listening attentively, Doar made no promises following Ayee and DesVignes’s testimony.
“[HRA] sends people to short term jobs and then people come back to the program,” said DesVignes in a telephone interview. She recently found a job – on her own – as a part-time administrative assistant at the Harlem Children’s Zone, a local non-profit, but her welfare benefits end in December, long before her finances will be stabilized, she said.
“A revolving door is an excellent description,” she said.
