Jobs Program a Model of Success

Work: Former welfare recipients find the prospect of permanent city employment a strong incentive.

By LEE ROMNEY TIMES STAFF WRITER

Loa Angeles Times December 12, 2001

LaTatia Taylor spent I I years on the welfare rolls, working "little jobs" but never earning enough to make it on her own.

In this economy, the mother of two living in South-Central Los Angeles might have good reason to worry: Many former aid recipients have found themselves on the low-wage fringes of the job market, facing layoffs and slashed hours.

Instead, Taylor is up to her calves in cement most days, fixing sidewalks for the Los Angeles Department of Public Works' Bureau of Street Services. She is a union member with full benefits and in just 15 months has seen her hourly wage climb from $8.36 to $13. Her recently won civil service status has her planning for a promotion to truck driver. She owns her first car. And her sons, ages 10 and 13, brag to friends that their mom "fixes the streets."

"I feel real good about going to work every day, working for something rve earned," said Taylor, 32, who rises at 4:45 a.m. to get to her work site by 6.

Taylor is part of a program that has placed 228 Los Angeles residents--mostly former welfare moms--in city jobs. So far, 83% of them have stuck it out, with many moving into waiting civil service positions with room for advancement.

Most welfare-to-work programs provide temporary on-the-job training, with no guarantee that a real job will be available once the training ends. And many jobs that do materialize are dead ends. But at a time when private-sector employment is rocky for the region's low-income, predominantly minority former aid recipients, the CityJobs program is being held up as a model that works.

To be sure, the public sector can't absorb all the former aid recipients being pushed off welfare. And not everyone is willing or able to don hard hat and boots and step into the traditionally male blue-collar jobs that tend to offer better wages. But the program has steadily expanded, and proponents hope to replicate it elsewhere.

In the last year, the program has spread beyond Street Services to four other city departments. And 50 new participants are being recruited to fill already funded Bureau of Sanitation positions. Discussions are underway to broaden the program to include non-welfare recipients living in poverty.

"To be able to build a relationship with an employer who offers a living wage, like the city, is terrific," said Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit public policy research group in Los Angeles that has studied the effects of welfare reform. "Ifs a fine model."

Research released by Flaming's group last year showed that of the former aid recipients who had found work between 1990 and 1998, only 17% had remained with the same employer for 21/2 years or more. Those workers saw their earnings grow to about twice those of their less stable counterparts, who cycled in and out ofjobs.

For example, only half the former recipients who found work were employed at any time during a given three-month period. And many moved into low-end service sectors hammered in the wake of the Sept. I I terrorist attacks, service providers say.

First conceived four years ago in the wake of welfare reform, CityJobs stemmed from a rare collaboration among the city's Community Development Department, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 347 and the Metropolitan Alliance, an umbrella organization for community groups, churches and labor unions concerned with poverty in minority communities.

Welfare reform imposed lifetime limits on the benefits recipients can collect, as well as work requirements, directing governments to move aid recipients off the rolls and into jobs. But some early efforts pushed existing workers into the ranks of the unemployed, said Teresa Sanchez, a field representative for SEIU Local 347.

Large numbers of weifan recipients were being put to work at rock-bottom wages, displacing public employees in some states, she said.

The coalition worked to come up with a program that would provide better wages and permanent jobs, and won Los Angeles City Council approval for a pilot project for 100 participants in the Bureau of Street Services. Federal welfare-to-work dollars from the U.S. Labor Department would subsidize half the salaries during a six-month on-the-job training program. (So far, $7.4million has been budgeted to fund the expanded program, city staff said.)

Despite the workers' trainee status, they would have immediate union membership and full benefits. And wages were high enough for recipients to get off welfare immediately, said Community Development Department assistant general manager Susan Cleere Flores. Most important, the city would ensure that permanent civil service positions--with built-in career ladders--were waiting for those who could pass the city test at the end of the training period.

Bureau of Street Services director Bill White was skeptical, concerned that an infusion of unskilled, untrained employees who hadn't worked steadily in years would slow down his crews. But he had a soft spot for the program, for personal reasons: White had launched his own career under the Comprehensive Employment Training Act, a federal program that channeled the needy into public-sector jobs in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Under the program, White started work as a city animal control officer, "and the rest is history."

"You can start in this bureau working hard, with no high school education, and if you want to work hard and go to school you can actually [be promoted] and be director," he said. "That's why rm a true believer in this program. I'm a living example of how that can happen."

By 1999, the first batch of trainees began working in White's department. Among them was Louise Currie. Currie had received minimal welfare assistance over the years and was working as a part-time teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Still, her meager earnings qualified her for CityJobs.

The work was tough, and the schedule exhausting: The mother of four has to catch a 4:30 a.m. bus to get to work. Gaining acceptance as the only woman at the Reseda maintenance yard where she started also was trying.

"I made them respect me," said Currie, 40. "They said, 'These locker rooms are for men,' and I said, Not anymore because I'm going to take me a locker!'And I did. I didn't want to go home in those hard boots and hard hat and dirty jeans."

Like Taylor, Currie- who now has a civil service classification of laborer and is aiming for heavy equipment operator--loves the work. She has built sidewalk ramps for the disabled, dog parks, gutters and street medians and watched her semimonthly checks climb from $546 to as much as $1,300 with overtime.

The program was expanded this year to include Bureau of Sanitation maintenance laborers, clerk typists at public libraries and the Community Development Department and maintenance laborers and custodians at Los Angeles World Airports.

About 50 trainees will soon be channeled into Bureau of Sanitation jobs for a program to replace all city trash cans. Those positions are already filled, and participants will also be trained to be sanitation truck operators, Sanchez said.

Most of the participants have been women on welfare. But custodial parents living below the poverty line and noncustodial fathers of children in poverty are also eligible. Among those is Zelvin Harris, 4 1, who spent a decade out of work after a failed marriage knocked him off balance.

Harris built up a child support debt that topped $90,000. As a result, he lost his driver's license. He ended up homeless. But now he works as an airport custodian and is making modified child support payments.

"I've been at the bottom of the ladder, economically," he said, "and it's time for me to progress. Anyone who's working now is really blessed."

The city's welfare-to-work funding dries up this year, as it does for cities around the country. But city staff hopes to continue funding the program through Workforce Investment Act funds, aimed at everyone ftom welfare recipients to the unemployed and underemployed, said Cleere Flores of the Community Development Department.

Meanwhile, proponents are pushing to expand it elsewhere.

"I think it's an exceptional program that could be emulated by other cities," said Goetz Wolff, director of the Center for Regional Employment Strategies, an arm of the County Federation of Labor. "The scale of a city the size of Los Angeles makes it significant."