Last summer, as the California legislature struggled to close a staggering budget deficit, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger bemoaned CalWorks, the state’s welfare-to-work program, as being too lenient on the work requirement and overly generous in its benefits. At one point proposing its elimination, he ultimately compromised by tightening the rules to make it tougher to be eligible for welfare-to-work benefits. The financial penalties for those not meeting work requirements, or for those who use up the maximum 60 months of assistance, will increase. And cost of living adjustments will not come automatically. These changes are expected to decrease the number of people on welfare rolls and save California hundreds of millions of dollars every year. But those changes will not take effect until July 1, 2011.
Until the new rules go into effect, and in order to save $375 million a year, the state is cutting the employment assistance programs that are central to welfare-to-work, including subsidized childcare. Additionally, work requirements are being suspended for a large share of recipients. Parents with special hardships and very young babies have always been exempt from the work requirements in California. But now single parents with a child aged 1-2 or with two children under the age of 6 will no longer have to work to collect a welfare check. These two groups make up over a third of all applicants to the welfare-to-work program.
For the next 21 months, large numbers of Californians will be eligible for welfare without having to work at all. This is a return to the welfare approach that existed in this country until a national overhaul in the 1990’s. Following the 1996 national overhaul of welfare, California’s welfare rolls fell from 921,000 families in 1995 to 466,000 families in 2008. During the last year of economic recession, the numbers on welfare rolls have climbed, and it is estimated that it will include 557,000 families in 2010, or about 1.3 million individuals.
I have long had doubts about Governor Schwarzenegger’s commitment to the conservative ideals. But his sudden change of course, to basically not require people to do anything but have children in order to get welfare from the government, is completely unacceptable. Society has worked so hard over the last decade-plus in order to try to instill the values of hard work in the people who used to live their lives suckling off the teat of the government’s coffers. To no longer require recipients to work in order to receive welfare, albeit temporarily, will undo all those years of positive reinforcement.
It is my fear that, as July 2011 approaches, those who have managed to receive free government money for nearly two years will have become accustomed to it. They will attempt to strong-arm the members of the state legislature to postpone the requirement to have to return to work in order to receive benefits. Furthermore, it is also my fear that many state legislators, eager to maintain their elected offices, will cave in to such unreasonable demands and try to erase or ease the more stringent rules that were supposed to take effect. By that time, a new Governor will have taken over in California. There is absolutely no guarantee that this next Governor will have any sort of commitment to the conservative ideal of asking people to work in order to receive money.
These are trying times in California. It is in tough times like these when we find out the true character of people. This is not the time to relent on our expectations for people to try hard in order to succeed in society. We cannot allow people to cruise by in life by relying on others to support them. We must continue to demand that people work hard and do their best if they want a better life. This supposedly temporary direction that Governor Schwarzenegger is taking with regards to welfare is a slippery slope. It is a dangerous path that California should not be taking.
A few weeks ago, I came across a news story that more people need to know about. A state appeals court in San Francisco upheld Alameda County’s right to place limits on how long residents may receives general assistance welfare payments from its social services agency. In a 2-1 decision, the appeals court ruled that the time limits are legal under state law. It also said that the county’s definition of “employable adults”, which is any adult younger than 64 who is mentally and physically fit to hold a job, is sufficient.
Alameda County has been trying to impose time limits on general assistance recipients since 2007. A lawsuit was filed in 2008 on behalf of six general welfare recipients stating that the plan violated state law and would cost thousands of people their homes. As part of the lawsuit, one of the arguments was that an inability to speak English was sufficient to qualify a person as unemployable, and thus eligible for general assistance welfare. Another argument was that a lack of job skills could make finding employment impossible, and so people who lacked job skills should also qualify for general assistance welfare.
In July 2008, Alameda County Superior Court Judge David Hunter said that the county needed to define who is “employable” and agreed that, even if a person is mentally and physically fit, a lack of necessary work or language skills could prevent a person from getting a job. But in his appellate decision, Justice William McGuinness wrote, “A definition of ‘employable’ that turns upon a person’s physical or mental fitness to work is consistent with the plain meaning and common usage of the term.” Those who are representing the defendants are planning on appealing the issue to the California Supreme Court.
Back in June, the Alameda County supervisors decided to limit the amount of time that a person could remain on general assistance welfare to three months. The director of the Social Services Agency, Yolanda Baldovinos, says the agency will begin its 3-month limit on January 1, 2010, saving the agency $3 million over the last six months of the 2009-2010 fiscal year.
The Alameda County Social Services Agency provides roughly 8,500 residents with $336 per month in general assistance welfare. Approximately 75 percent of those recipients are deemed “employable”.
I want to leave any discussion of a time limit on general assistance welfare for a later time. I want to focus on the “employable” aspect of this issue. People speak of government waste in broad and general terms all the time. Well, this is a concrete example of government waste. Not only is it waste, but if the appeal to the California Supreme Court allows the policy of giving general assistance welfare to employable workers to continue for an extended period of time, it is an outright abuse of government resources. How did such a policy manage to go on for so long in the first place? It is outrageous.
To insinuate that a person is not employable, and thus eligible for general assistance welfare, simply for not having job skills is insane. Just because a person has managed to go through a significant portion of his or her life without acquiring any sort of advanced skills does not mean that they are not employable. There are plenty of jobs in this world that basically require punctuality, hard work, and common sense. If employers find others to be better job candidates, that’s tough luck for the person with the lack of skills. It should not entitle the person to receive general assistance welfare. And then there is the issue of why that person does not have job skills in the first place. What was that person doing in all the years leading up to their current situation? Why weren’t they trying hard to acquire the skills that would one day help them land a job? Where is the sense of personal responsibility for one’s past actions? More of an effort should have been put in long before the current situation towards the goal of improving oneself and making oneself a more attractive candidate to potential employers.
Now let’s look at the argument that a lack of English skills should qualify a person as unemployable. I know for a fact that there are many jobs that do not require a mastery of the English language. I see people who can barely speak English working at lots of jobs. Beyond that, it begs the question of whether the person is even trying to learn English in the first place. Part of landing a job in the work world is acquiring whatever skills that can help set oneself apart from the crowd. In such an environment, perhaps it would be a wise idea to make a concerted effort to learn English. Language skills are important if one wants to become a fully-functional member of society. Even amongst the customers who gamble at the casino in which I work, I see far too many people who do not seem to be making any sort of effort to learn the English language. Understandably, this will leave these people trailing others in any attempt to get a job in mainstream American society. But just because a person is a poor candidate for a job does not entitle the person to money from the government. Tangentially, if more people learned to speak English, perhaps the government wouldn’t need to waste money by printing up ballots and pamphlets in so many languages.
One final thing. I go to work every day, try my best, and put in an honest day’s work. Despite the fact that I do this, I am not a wealthy person. I could definitely use an extra $336 a month to help pay my bills. But I don’t look to the government to help me with my financial situation. It wouldn’t even occur to me to do so. To hear about some people in Alameda County, the county in which I reside, getting $336 a month for not doing anything makes my blood boil. Instead of playing the victim and trying to act like they are unemployable, they should go out and try to find a job. Remember, we are not talking about people who are mentally or physically disabled here. Instead, we are talking about people who, plain and simple, have not acquired the skills to make themselves attractive to employers. According to Alameda County, that is 75 percent of the people who have been receiving general assistance welfare. The government should not reward them financially for that, and they should be ashamed of themselves for attempting to steal taxpayer money.