Edition: U.S. / Global

What Welfare-to-Work Really Means

By Jason DeParle
Published: December 20, 1998

One Saturday morning this fall, a 54-year-old Bronx woman who has spent more years on welfare than she can remember answered a small-type summons from the city government, the second that she has received this year. ''Dear Sir/Madam,'' it began. ''You are being called in to evaluate your employability.'' She stuffed two doctors' letters into a worn envelope, filled a plastic bag with prescription pills and enlisted her son as an interpreter. They traveled to a drab building off Union Square, where they waited for an hour in hard plastic chairs until a caseworker summoned them to a cramped cubicle. ''The reason we called you in,'' he began, ''is everybody on public assistance is required to work.'' The son, a jobless 21-year-old, answered through a mouthful of gum: ''Well, we got letters from her doctors saying she's not really able to work.''

The standoff had begun.

The first of the creased letters handed across the desk described a case of colon cancer, successfully treated three years before, followed by diabetes, gallstones and a liver condition that leads to ''recurrent abdominal pain.'' The second added hypertension and warned that ''unless very light duty is assigned, this patient should not work.'' The caseworker, a Nigerian immigrant who had worked his way through night school, was not persuaded. He noted that the woman's application for Federal disability benefits had just been denied and that the city's doctors, who had examined her in the spring, found her to be employable. ''Our doctors feel she is able to work,'' he said.

''They'll make anybody work,'' the son said. ''They don't care what's inside.''



The caseworker was particularly skeptical of the woman's assertions, written on a questionnaire, that she was unable to ''sit,'' ''balance,'' ''bend,'' ''climb,'' ''work in an office'' or ''work outdoors.'' ''She can't sit?'' he said. ''Well, she's been sitting here quite a while.'' The son sounded angry. ''You all gonna be responsible if something happens to her?''

''Are we responsible?'' The caseworker lingered over the question. In the end, he would relent and agree to another medical exam -- but not quite yet. ''We wouldn't put her in the park,'' he said. ''We wouldn't put her in sanitation. If we put her to work, it would be office work.'' And besides, he said, ''if anything happens, we can always call an ambulance in.''


The Mayor Declares His Last Great War

Last summer, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani walked into a bank auditorium in midtown Manhattan and delivered a remarkable talk on welfare -- remarkable both for the scale of new work obligations he pledged to impose on the city's vast welfare population and for the lack of attention his plan received in a culture that routinely bellows at lesser provocations. Addressing a city that had more than a million people on public assistance -- or one of every seven residents -- when he first took office in 1993, Giuliani promised ''to end welfare by the end of this century completely.'' A few caseworkers in the audience clapped and a reporter asked a technical question about child care. Elsewhere, scarcely anyone noticed.
