Whose Welfare?

Wefare reform threatens workers' welfare

Washington, D.C.

Jeanette Somerville rose to speak. The packed hotel ballroom grew quiet.

It wasn't easy for her to tell her story publicly, but her life -- everything she had worked 30 years to achieve -- was on the line.

"Thirty years ago I was on welfare," she explained. "All I ever wanted was a job. I have one, thanks to the union. I thank God for this union."

Somerville, 48, a former school janitor, is a full-time steward from Local 44 (Council 67) in Baltimore. She joined 450 AFSCME leaders and activists in Washington, D.C., at a December conference to confront a threat to the jobs of union members throughout the country: welfare reform.

"This new welfare law, I'm afraid it's going to make me lose my job, and I'll be back on welfare again," Somerville confessed.

Working for dignity. The conference, called "Welfare Reform: Working For Dignity," was AFSCME's first step in developing a nationwide response to the country's new welfare law.

"Sisters and brothers, this law is our NAFTA," AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee told the conference.

"The only difference is that instead of our members' jobs and living standards being put at risk by a low-wage workforce in another country, they're being jeopardized by the creation of a new, low-wage, disenfranchised workforce right here at home."

The welfare reform measure, enacted by the 104th Congress and signed into law by President Clinton, fundamentally changes the way welfare operates. The legislation shifts the administration of welfare programs to the states and requires the head of every family on welfare to find a job within two years or lose their benefits.

Approximately 2 million jobs are estimated to be needed for these welfare recipients. AFSCME leaders fear that these jobs will be carved out of the public sector-and that union members will lose their jobs to "workfare" workers.

In New York City, 35,000 Work Experience Program positions have been created for workfare recipients who are now performing a variety of services provided until recently by public employees. Nearly a million residents qualify for welfare benefits in the city, and local officials are planning to increase workfare jobs to 100,000 this year, according to press reports.

AFSCME supports moving people from public assistance to the workplace, McEntee explained to the conference, but "we have a problem with the notion that a welfare recipient should have any less a right to a decent wage, a safe workplace and union representation than the men and women they work alongside."

Local agreements made. Unions have begun to negotiate with government officials around the country to protect the rights of members and to ensure that fair labor standards, the minimum wage, workers' compensation, federal occupational health and safety laws, and discrimination protections will be applied to workfare recipients.

Henry Nicholas, president of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees (NUHHCE)/ Local 1199, announced to participants in the Washington conference that even while they convened, Philadelphia officials had reached an agreement with an AFSCME-led union team to bring workfare recipients into union workplaces in an equitable manner. Nicholas, an International vice president, suggested that the Philadelphia agreement could serve as a model for other jurisdictions.

Workers in big cities are not alone in their concern over welfare reform. In tiny Jerseyville, Ill., a farming community 50 miles north of St. Louis, Mo., Local 1479 Pres. Dan DeSherlia of Council 31 is baffled by the changes coming from Washington.

"I just don't know how we've come this far," says DeSherlia, 44.

DeSherlia earns about $35,000 a year managing the town's freshwater treatment plant. He's doing well enough to own a home and two old cars. The local economy receives almost all of his $25,000 after-tax income. And with two young daughters, a lot of that money goes to McDonalds, he says with a laugh.

DeSherlia fears that the pressure to place welfare recipients in jobs might one day force officials of his town of 7,500 to use workfare recipients in jobs today held by union workers.

"If I lose my job," he asks, "what am I supposed to do? Go on welfare? And then take someone else's job, and so on until nobody working for the town has a job that isn't subsidized by federal welfare laws?"

"Who's going to pay my $7,000 in taxes if I lose my job?" he asks. "What happens to the shops and stores, gas stations and banks in Jerseyville if my family goes under?"

DeSherlia recently won language in the new four-year contract between the town and the 14-member AFSCME local that forbids the town to displace public employees with welfare recipients.

"We'll see where that leaves us down the road," he said.

For many states, cities and towns, a big corporation may be coming down that road.

Corporations step in. Lockheed Martin IMS, Electronic Data Systems and other high-profile corporations are competing to take over the administration of welfare programs-replacing current staff with automated systems or with non-union employees.

Addressing the Washington conference, McEntee declared: "There's a way to turn welfare systems into job placement systems, but it's not by turning them over to the same defense contractors who got rich overcharging the Pentagon for hammers and toilet seats.

"The best way to get more bang for the buck is to keep big corporations out of public services," he said.

AFSCME is leading the charge to confront welfare reform. The union plans to work with the AFL-CIO to organize a labor-wide conference on the subject this year and to sponsor conferences for AFSCME members across the country. The union will work with the AFL-CIO and its affiliates to establish a united set of principles for all labor unions.

In addition, AFSCME will urge the White House to block state efforts to let for-profit contractors take over administering Food Stamp and Medicaid programs at the state level.

Finally, AFSCME and other unions are asking for a legal definition of workfare so that employers in both public and private sectors designate workfare participants as workers entitled to the full range of labor protections enjoyed by the rest of America.

AFSCME Sec.-Treas. William Lucy believes that the fight for workers' rights is not AFSCME's alone. "The task before us," he told the conference, "is to begin forming the broadest-based, most inclusive coalition to fight for the poor, their children, immi-grants and, at the same time, to fight for working families-to fight for ourselves."

McEntee added that "if we're better educated, better organized and better mobilized than the other side, this just may be one instance where we're able to turn it to our advantage. Whether it's in Albany or Lansing or Sacramento or here in Washington, we need to begin talking a little less about what welfare has always been and a little more about what it needs to be: jobs with a future for every American.

"Instead of telling some workers they have to give away their old job, let's start creating some new ones."

Baltimore's Jeanette Somerville can't help but agree.

"Dear Lord, yes," she said in an interview. "We've got to create jobs for these people ... or the bottom's going to fall out of working people's lives."

By Ray Lane