Social Justice

The Boston Phoenix
December 9 - 16, 1999

[Features]

(Not) making it in Massachusetts

Welfare reform in Massachusetts is helping some, but pushing others into dire straits. Is there a better way?

by Ben Geman
Barbara has asthma so severe that she couldn't keep a waitressing job. She has a five-year-old daughter. And she's clinically depressed. She lives in rural Massachusetts, receives food stamps, and relies on a food pantry for more help with groceries.
"I'm glad I don't have too many people to buy [presents] for," says the 25-year-old, somehow able to look on the bright side in a season of holiday stress. "They all understand what kind of situation I'm in. They know if I give them a card, that's fine."
Until last winter, Barbara (not her real name) received cash assistance from the state. Although she wanted to apply for an extension on benefits, she says her caseworker discouraged her from doing so. So she was forced off the rolls when her two-year time limit -- the signature of the state's welfare-reform policy -- expired. Not long ago, when things were desperate, she made an appointment to apply for a reinstatement of benefits, but was told that it would be a difficult process. She didn't show up for the appointment.
Barbara will probably find relief in a class-action suit filed against the Department of Transitional Assistance (formerly the welfare department) by the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, which charged that, in its zeal to trim the rolls, the DTA is denying extensions like the ones Barbara wanted to apply for. Last week, a Suffolk Superior Court judge ruled that the DTA has improperly denied reinstatement of benefits to more than 200 people. Thanks to the ruling, which found that refusing to restore benefits on purely procedural grounds (such as missing an appointment) was not authorized by law, it's very likely that Barbara may get her benefits back.
For now, though, she and her daughter will have to wait.

As originally conceived, welfare was the government's safety net for society's less fortunate. Over the years, it's come to consist of cash assistance plus food stamps, subsidized school lunches, and other programs. Controversial welfare-reform efforts by the states and the federal government restrict cash assistance, although recipients are still eligible for food stamps, and Massachusetts offers help with child-care costs.
The federal law, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, puts a five-year lifetime limit on cash assistance. The state's reform law allows able-bodied recipients with children over the age of two to receive cash benefits for no more than two years during any five-year period. (More than 90 percent of the families receiving welfare consist of mothers with one or two children.) Those with children over the age of six must do 20 hours of paid or volunteer work to continue receiving aid. In addition, cash benefits are no longer increased for recipients who have more children while on welfare. (Disabled recipients, teenage mothers, and people who have disabled children are largely exempt from time limits and work requirements.) Since last December, when the DTA began cutting benefits to families that had exhausted their two-year limit on cash assistance, more than 3500 families have been cut from the rolls for that reason.
In Massachusetts, reforms aimed at moving recipients into jobs have for the most part been hailed as successful. Since the state's policy was enacted in 1995, welfare rolls have fallen from about 103,000 families to about 48,000. Most of the caseload decline, state officials say, has come about as families still eligible for benefits have left welfare to join the labor force. Nationally, the welfare caseload has decreased from about 4.4 million families in August 1996 to about 2.5 million families in June 1999, according to the Urban Institute, a think tank based in Washington, DC.
"As time goes on, more recipients are entering the work force and staying there," is the way DTA spokesman Dick Powers interprets an agency study released last April that showed increasing levels of employment among ex-recipients. "It proves the previous system expected nothing of people, and that's virtually what we got in return. The new system puts demands on certain segments of the population, and the result is that more people are leaving welfare for work, heading down a path toward self-sufficiency."
Indeed, the April study came up with encouraging results. One year after their cases were closed, 71 percent of families that had left welfare before the time limits kicked in were employed a year later. Average full-time earnings in these households were about $1400 per month (before taxes). Another study showed that 75 percent of recipients who left welfare as a result of the time limits were employed.
Those findings may not tell the whole story, however. DTA critics point out that surveys of former recipients paint an overly rosy picture, tracking only those whom the department can find and who are willing to talk about their situations. The study that looked at recipients who had left welfare after their time limits expired failed to consider the roughly 50 percent of such recipients who had asked for extensions on their cash assistance. (The DTA denies such requests in more than eight out of 10 cases.) The department is preparing a more complete survey of what's happening to families that have reached the time limit, but it isn't due until the middle of next year.

Anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that some families are facing the very problems that welfare-reform critics predicted. Human-service providers and advocates say the new policy is pushing former welfare recipients into low-wage, inflexible jobs for which they lack the necessary preparation and support. Moreover, if they lose those jobs, they cannot return to welfare for cash assistance. And losing their jobs is a real possibility for many former welfare recipients.
"There are some people with barriers," says Jeb Mays of Working Massachusetts, a coalition of unions, activists, welfare recipients, clergy, and others who oppose DTA policy. "They may be able to get a job, but they can't hold it. Not because they are not willing, but circumstances in life make it not possible."
The Urban Institute says that welfare reform has had mixed results nationwide. "The general sense we have by reviewing all the various surveys is that a high proportion of the people leaving welfare are employed, but wages are not high and many are saying they are having hardships," says Demetra Nightingale, director of the institute's welfare and training research program. A national Urban Institute study of former welfare recipients who left the rolls voluntarily found that the most common form of employment is low-wage service-sector jobs, that between one-third and one-half are having trouble providing food, and that 20 percent have reported problems paying rent.
In fact, both Boston mayor Tom Menino and area shelter providers have linked welfare reform to rising homelessness. Last year, the city's emergency shelter commission found a 15 percent rise in demand at family shelters. The state's overheated housing market is the chief culprit, but Philip Mangano, the executive director of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance, says welfare reform is playing a role as well. "The reality out there is that the number of people who have lost their benefits and who are falling into homelessness has increased over the last six months," he says. "It is not that the sky is falling or the wolf is at the door -- it is not those kinds of numbers -- but there is a slow, incremental increase." Mangano's organization estimates that about 200 people -- almost all of them women who have lost benefits under welfare reform and who have placed their children in state care or with relatives -- have turned to shelters this year.
It's not that the DTA wants families to become homeless. Indeed, the agency makes "emergency assistance" available to cover back rent for families at risk of losing their housing. But despite the safeguards, some families affected by welfare reform are falling though the cracks. Linda Wood-Boyle, executive director of the Somerville Homeless Coalition, says she's seeing some of them at her agency.
Wood-Boyle calls the combination of welfare reform and the tight housing market a "two-sided attack" that's proving to be too much to overcome for some poor women -- even some who have jobs. "I have clients . . . who have been forced to make a choice between living in their car or on the street with their children or doing a voluntary surrender of their children to DSS and moving into the adult shelter," she says. "They have to make very painful choices."
The reality is that a number of former recipients who've been kicked off welfare -- or will be -- may face too many problems to succeed, let alone thrive. "It's a population that has a number of barriers -- mental health, substance abuse, lack of education, lack of English skills. [They're] people that are not easy to put into jobs," says State Representative Anne Paulsen (D-Belmont), one of the legislature's leading DTA critics. "We are now down to the hardest to serve. People who have been able to get off welfare for the most part have."
"If cutting the rolls is your only measure of success, then Massachusetts is way up front, but that's not the point," adds Mays. "Requiring your life to come together in the space of two years may work for a lot of people, but it does not work for some."
The DTA has already taken some potentially helpful steps, such as adding more domestic-violence specialists. That's especially significant in light of a study by the McCormack Institute for Public Affairs at UMass Boston, which found that more than 60 percent of women on welfare in Massachusetts have been abused, many in the recent past; the trauma of domestic abuse can lead to depression, which makes it difficult to work. And the DTA does, in fact, offer other support services, such as child-care aid and transportation assistance, even after cash benefits have been cut off. For families on the edge, access to these supports is crucial.
Unless recipients are made aware of all DTA benefits, however, services and new specialists won't do much good. A study released in March by the Massachusetts Human Services Coalition found that many welfare recipients in Dorchester didn't know they would be eligible for food stamps or health insurance after leaving welfare.
Critics of DTA policy, from Paulsen to Menino to anti-poverty advocacy groups such as Working Massachusetts, say it's now time to reform welfare reform. "It's the hard line, the Republican way," says Menino of the current policy. "That's the problem, they want to be tough on people." To the mayor, who has called for more job training, that attitude doesn't always make sense. "Do we have abuse? I will be the first to admit we have some abuse," he says. "But you don't take it out on all the people, and that is what we are doing."

For the state, however, zeal about reducing the rolls is backed with ideology. "Every job is a good job," proclaims internal DTA literature. DTA officials call the "work first" model a launch pad -- and they're trying to help people who start at the bottom climb a bit higher, funneling more than $20 million in state and federal money into job-readiness and retention programs designed to help people entering the work force. "We have to make sure people keep the jobs and move up the economic ladder to become self-sufficient," says Dick Powers, the DTA spokesman. "We see the role of the agency as not merely to provide for recipients, but to accommodate the working poor of Massachusetts."
Yet critics say the DTA is not doing enough to make sure that people who've had their benefits cut are equipped to enter the work force. "We have a different definition of job readiness than they do," says Rebecca Lashman, policy coordinator with the Boston Private Industry Council, which administers federal welfare-to-work grants (and which, she says, has generally worked well with the DTA). "It seems the most important thing to them is someone reaching the end of their time limit, instead of asking what are the issues they need to work out."
Those issues may include problems like the ones Alice (not her real name), a 22-year-old welfare recipient from Marlborough, is dealing with. Until recently, Alice was enrolled in a GED and computer-training program. When she missed classes because she had to undergo a series of medical tests, she says, the DTA pulled her from the program. "I don't want to stay on welfare for the next two years. I want to try to get the GED and get off welfare," Alice says. "But every time I try, they give me the runaround. They want us to get off welfare and they give us the time limit, but they don't try to help us."
Brian Flynn, an attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services, offers another example: a client suffering from severe trauma as a result of a childhood rape, whose problems went undiscovered by the DTA before her cash benefits were cut off earlier this year. "The major thing we see lacking in the welfare department, in our view, is screening to see if those problems are out there," he says. "We see that a lot."
Such cases aside, though, Powers says that critics of the DTA's work-first policy are missing the point. "The bottom line is that if you count on a welfare check to get out of poverty, that's not going to happen," he says. "If you take a job, even a minimum-wage job, you have some hope."
It's true that welfare is no ticket out of poverty. The average monthly welfare grant for a mother with two kids is $579. The most that a family of three can take in by combining a welfare grant and outside income is $1230 per month. But to Mac D'Alessandro of the Family Economic Initiative, a coalition of welfare and anti-poverty activists, that shoestring budget is proof that people are using the system because they have nowhere else to turn.
"For all those people who criticize welfare as creating a dependency, just look at the grant levels," he says. "You say no one could get by on this, and the vast majority of people do not want to be there. But they do not have the means to be anywhere else."
Besides, the success of the work-first model has a lot to do with the strength of the economy. Even someone with little work experience may stand a decent chance of landing a job when the unemployment rate is a measly 3.2 percent, the Massachusetts figure for October. (Federal unemployment for the same period was 4.1 percent, a figure that held steady for November.) That isn't likely to be the case if a recession hits. In 1991, the low point of the last recession in Massachusetts, the state's unemployment rate averaged 9.1 percent, and the federal rate was 7.3 percent.

So what's going to happen? Even Powers admits that there's no way to measure whether the reform policy will lead to lasting change. "I don't think a true analysis of it will be possible for a generation," he says. "We are talking about a system we hope will not only change the mindset of adults, but the child who witnesses the adult going out and working for the first time in her life. . . . We certainly hope the impact will be a positive one."
But Anne Paulsen believes the state must fine-tune its approach to welfare reform even before the results are fully gauged. The state representative is one of several legislators and advocates who pushed for modest changes in DTA policy during the legislative session that ended this month. Among the suggestions: allowing education and job training to count toward the work requirement; strengthening the ability of recipients to appeal extension denials; requiring the DTA to consider whether a parent requesting an extension needs more time to complete an educational or job-training program; and assessing the barriers to employment that recipients face, whether low literacy, disabilities, or domestic violence.
Governor Paul Cellucci vetoed each of the proposed changes when the long-delayed state budget was finally passed in November. "They feel Chapter Five [the welfare law] is the bible of welfare reform," Paulsen said afterward, "and that changing it in any way, even a way that's helpful to people, can't be done."
Which is a shame. Even inside the agency, caseworkers don't all agree that the work-first policy is the best way to help the poor families served by the DTA. One supervisor at a Boston-area DTA office, who spoke to the Phoenix on condition of anonymity, calls the DTA's refusal to allow education and job training to count toward the work requirement a bad policy that mars a generally good record on welfare reform. "Ultimately, if people are better educated they will get better jobs," says the supervisor. "That's just basic."
Beyond specific fixes, advocates say the DTA must take a broader view. The agency must try to understand what it's like to be poor with children, the fatigue and anxiety it instills. And it must try to understand why thousands of people, even in a booming economy, are in such circumstances in the first place.
Diana Bardsley, a family advocate with the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, has come to believe that making welfare work is about thinking bigger than any one rule or law. "Let's all start looking at this as an `us' problem, not a `their' problem," says Bardsley, whose Framingham-based organization runs shelters and other programs. "We are all in this together as a society. Once we push people away into a different category, that somehow makes it okay to be more punitive with people.
"We are doing that," she adds, "with the system we have now."

Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.