Denise Colona couldn’t believe how much she loved being a clerk after spending half her life on welfare.
She showed up for work a half-hour early daily. She worked late, no matter how long it took to finish the job. And most important, her boss at the U.S. Army Reserve center here regularly praised her.
But she has a gripe.
She takes home the same welfare grant no matter how much she works. Under Wisconsin’s new program to move people off welfare, people holding public jobs are not considered employees. So, they don’t get overtime or benefits, and in most cases, they do not get even the minimum wage.
“We should be treated like Joe off the street instead of being discriminated against,” complained Colona, 39, as she shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes upward. She may be on welfare, but, she added, she is also a worker.
This is an issue debated far beyond the sloping hills of mostly rural Fond du Lac, one of two lightly populated counties where Wisconsin is testing its new welfare program. Unions, businesses and public officials see it as a confusing early tangle as the nation moves from welfare as most knew it.
And they are looking for a ruling soon from the Clinton administration, which went along last year with the decision to open the door to experiments like the one in Wisconsin as it ended the government’s 61-year-old guarantee of support for needy families.
The battle lines here are very clear. The unions want welfare recipients doing public work protected by federal labor laws. Business groups say recipients on public or private jobs are trainees, not employees, and should not be protected.
And most of the nation’s welfare directors say welfare reform will sink if minimum wages and labor laws apply.
So far, the White House has been tight-lipped about the issue. But in meetings with union officials and welfare recipients, administration officials have indicated an inclination toward the unions’ position.
Burned by the White House before, the unions are taking nothing for granted and have mounted a massive public campaign to point out the dangers they say are likely to take place.
“The labor movement is not opposed to helping people become active wage earners, but we are opposed to people being forced into positions with no rights at all, virtually like slaves,” said Don Johnson, president of the Illinois AFL-CIO.
While the unions talk about defending welfare recipients’ rights, business leaders say the unions are simply protecting themselves.
“The real issue is that the unions are trying to pad the rolls with people they can organize,” argued Jeff Joseph, of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington.
To be sure, several major unions, such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, have been eying the prospects of organizing so-called workfare employees.
So, too, has ACORN, a nation-wide community organization, which has signed up several thousand workfare employees in New York and Los Angeles.
“We are saying that these people need to have the right to organize,” said Lisa Donner, ACORN’s campaign director.
Her group already has staged several demonstrations protesting job conditions in New York City, which has more than 30,000 workfare recipients cleaning streets and straightening out files beside city employees.
It is also true that organized labor has been motivated out of self-interest: It is worried that thousands of its members will lose their jobs or their workloads to workfare employees.
The unions say the new federal welfare law that took effect last year made it easier to replace public workers, a point strongly disputed by welfare officials.
“If you have low-wage workers replacing lower-wage workers, you really have a musical chair system,” said Jennifer Grondin, a lobbyist for AFSCME in Madison, Wis.
As Wisconsin officials view the system that will spread to the rest of the state in September, they see few of the horrors raised by unions.
Welfare recipients, they say, will be directed into four work categories, ranging from going directly to work to a mix of public jobs and training.
“The two lower levels are not jobs. We don’t want to make them into career options,” said David Blaska, a spokesman for Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development.
“And if you raised this thing up to where transition jobs are paying minimum wages, it would soon become a terminal position,” he added.
The American Public Welfare Association, which represents the nation’s welfare officials, recently issued a statement, siding with Wisconsin and urging the administration not to apply federal labor laws.
The same concern is shared by the business community.
If companies must treat welfare recipients working on short-term projects as full-fledged workers covered by federal labor laws, they will be “much more reluctant” to accept the workers, said Sandy Boyd, an official with the Labor Policy Association, a Washington-based business lobby.
But Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist frowns on most of the hand-wringing about treating workfare recipients as regular employees. He doubts that workfare employees will be on the job long enough to organize. And he firmly believes that workfare recipients should receive the minimum wage.
If that’s a financial burden for the state, then the state should trim the required hours so it can treat workfare employees as “real employees,” according to Norquist.
In the world of work, Norquist said, people get a paycheck, not a monthly welfare grant. That is why he is urging Wisconsin officials to abandon the monthly grant for workfare employees.
When you receive a paycheck, he said, you can see the link between your job and your rewards.
Unlike Wisconsin, Illinois and many other states have not yet formally laid down their new welfare plans, though they face a July deadline set by the federal government.
In their current planning, Illinois officials say they intend to base their payments to workfare employees on the $4.75-an-hour federal minimum wage.
Wisconsin started its new welfare program, Wisconsin Works, in Fond du Lac and Pierce Counties in March. A month later, state officials were ballyhooing their success in putting 23 people to work; 16 in jobs with no state funds at all.
Many found jobs through local temporary agencies, state officials say. Faced with the loss of their welfare grants, some took the first jobs they could, which was often at a fast-food operation.
That was true for Diana Ybanez, a 24-year-old mother of three. She took the first job she was offered, thinking she could not turn it down, although state officials say that is not the case if there are good reasons.
The job backfired. She went to work 10 hours a day, six days a week at a nearby factory for $6.50 an hour.
But within a week she quit because she was working from late afternoon to early in the morning and could not find a baby-sitter.
State officials say day-care facilities are available in such cases, but Ybanez said she could not find any available after midnight. “I told them I would rather have my children safe than sorry,” she recalled.
Since she had quit a job, Ybanez lost her welfare grant as punishment, one of the steps under the new state policy. She says welfare workers told her she no longer could be helped, while state officials say she was, in fact, still guided toward jobs and training.
Only recently she went to work as a clerk in the local office of the state Department of Social Services, and she is tickled with the job.
“I feel like I am one of them,” said Ybanez, who also spends time learning how to use computers at the local Job Service office.
She often works beside Annemarie Papenfuss, a state clerical worker, who welcomes her assistance, and does not fret about losing her own job. With several job cutbacks at the agency, Papenfuss said, she could put in 10-hour days for weeks and never catch up with her work.
The benefit of going to work at the U.S. Army Reserve Center for Denise Colona was the recognition that she could snap together and become a model employee. The downside was the demeaning way a few reservists treated her.
“I got my foot in the door,” said Colona, who gets $440 a month in welfare for herself and her teenage daughter.
She had planned to stay on the job through May, but Friday was her last day. Given a June deadline by her state caseworker to find a full-time job, she decided she had to work on her computer skills and search for a good job, something more than a minimum-wage position.
Yet while her short stint as a clerical worker has buoyed her job hopes, she still has major doubts. She fears that she will not find a decent-paying job, since she has limited computer skills.
And just the idea of leaving welfare behind unhinges her.
“It’s scary,” she said, “after being on the system so long, there is nothing to back you up if you fall.”
