When the Family Support Act was passed in 1988, there was optimism it would help thousands of welfare mothers get jobs because of its provisions for job training and child care.
But there was pessimism because of its ``workfare`` provision that requires adults on welfare to work to qualify for state support. Opponents call it ``forced labor.``
The act is in its initial stages of implementation; most states are only beginning to explore what it means to their welfare programs and budgets.
The ``workfare`` portion of the five-year, $3.3 billion legislation mandates that, to receive monthly welfare grants, able-bodied parents with children older than 3 must get further education or training or work for a public or private nonprofit agency. Those with children younger than 3 must participate part time. There are no wages. Pay is the monthly grant.
The federal law gives states the right to set up their own requirements and to fashion their own versions of the act`s Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program.
It`s estimated that 400,000 people each year, most of them women, will benefit from JOBS. Because the law includes an extension of Medicaid and child care for one year to families moving into the private work force, it`s also projected that the act will enable some 475,000 people to continue working as they move off welfare.
Child care is critical for welfare mothers who must work. A 1982 U.S. Census Bureau study showed that 32 percent of low-income women and 45 percent of unemployed single women could not work because they could not find affordable child care.
``The Family Support Act . . . goes part of the distance in addressing the major needs related to child care that poor parents on welfare face,``
Laurie R. Kauffman writes in a recent issue of Entrepreneurial Economy Review, published by the Corporation for Enterprise Development.
Kauffman, president of LRK Associates, a Washington consulting firm, stresses the importance of not counting child-care expenses as income when determining parents` welfare eligibility. The act allows welfare parents up to $175 a month for children older than 2 and $200 for infants, but child care averages $280 to $300 a month, Kauffman notes.
She points out that the federal government does not match the state dollar for dollar for child care and that states can set their own ``market rate`` for child care.
It is workfare, however, that draws the most impassioned criticism.
``Although slavery was abolished in this country, we see mandatory workfare laws resurrecting it,`` asserts the National Welfare Rights Union, based in Detroit.
Noting that a family of four required $16,500 in 1987 to live above the poverty level, the union says that instead of welfare, there should be a national guaranteed annual income and that ``all workfare programs be abolished.``
California is ``a microcosm of what is happening in welfare nationwide,`` said Ethel Long-Scott, executive director of the Women`s Economic Agenda Project, a nonprofit advocacy and educational agency in Oakland for economic justice for women and children. ``And what we`re finding here is that the act will get women off the welfare rolls-but not off poverty.``
She says the act has ``no provision for new money for job training or to create new programs. Women will have to go through the existing ones.``
The act, Long-Scott believes, is ``filled with carrots and clubs. It gives a few things, but the mountain of financial burdens it puts on the states, pushing something already bursting at the seams, outweighs the benefits. What the act does is get the federal government out of welfare.``
Labor displacement is another issue: Welfare mothers will be replacing paid employees, she says. ``This means welfare mothers will become a cheap labor source when they get into paid labor market,`` Long-Scott said.
A recent study of the Job Training Partnership Act by the federal General Accounting Office supports this charge: ``In many instances, on-the-job training contracts appeared to provide wage subsidies to employers,`` the report said.
Long-Scott says the act, by including workfare, ``will increase the number of people denied assistance-a horrendous situation. Workfare should be abolished. Work without a wage is slavery. You can dress it up any way you want, but that`s what it is: slavery.``