For Immediate Release
Thursday, May 16, 2002
House Republican Welfare Bill Embraces Quotas, Rejects Real Work for Real People
WASHINGTON —The Republican-sponsored welfare bill that just passed the U.S. House of Representatives represents an unworkable, cookie-cutter approach heavy on numerical quotas that fails to help people find and keep real jobs, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), AFL-CIO, charged today.
"The Republican bill's work requirements are unrealistic and focus on arbitrary quotas instead of real people," said AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee. "They want to replace good jobs with unpaid workfare and would leave thousands of families without any hope for a better future."
H.R. 4700, which reauthorizes the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, takes a welfare model that failed in New York City and forces it upon all the states. It would raise the current work requirements to 40 hours weekly per recipient and 70 percent of each state's caseload. Bound by these rigid rules but without additional increases in federal aid, the already-strapped states would have to abandon flexible strategies that blend work, education, training and job search to give welfare recipients the individual help they need to find and keep jobs. And the states would also have to redirect existing TANF resources into creating and supervising hundreds of thousands of workfare slots in which welfare recipients work for their welfare check instead of a paycheck.
The bill also includes sweeping new waiver authority that gives unprecedented power to cabinet secretaries, deliberating with governors behind closed doors, to bypass congressional authority and modify programs approved and funded by Congress without any accountability.
AFSCME called on the Senate to pass alternative legislation that supports work by helping poor unemployed adults get the skills they need to leave welfare for good jobs while offering them enough child care, transportation, health care and other work supports when they do.
"Families don't need counterproductive work requirements, and the states don't need another unfunded mandate during a huge fiscal crisis. What is needed is the resources and flexibility to provide recipients with childcare, education and training so that they can eventually become self-sufficient," McEntee added.
