John Howard has seen the light, and it shines from America. The way forward for Australia, he says, is more labour market deregulation, combined with the new 'Work for the Dole' scheme. These initiatives, he claims, will provide more jobs. This argument is dubious in itself, but we also must consider what kind of jobs he is talking about. This article by American writer RAY GOFORTH, taken from the Internet, outlines some of the disturbing facts about 'Workfare', the US Work for the Dole scheme.
TANF (ie. dole) recipients are currently required to work 20 hours per week (increasing to 25 in 1998 and 30 in 2000). Workfare participants are not actually paid a wage but instead continue to receive their welfare benefits in exchange for fulfilling their required work allotment. As a result, the workfare 'wage equivalent' varies depending upon the size of the welfare grant from the federal government to the individual states (which vary state by state) and the required work hours (the federal guidelines constitute a floor, not a ceiling upon how many hours can be required).
The TANF guidelines do not define whether workfare participants are 'employees' when placed in 'work activities.' As a consequence, it is entirely unclear what workplace protections those on workfare enjoy. For example, some states have paid workfare participants the minimum wage while others have not. Some states have recognised the right of workfare participants to join unions while others have denied this right. In May 1997, the White House announced that workfare participants should receive the minimum wage but many states have expressed their intention not to comply until directed to do so by the courts. Congressional Republicans are said to have drafted a minimum-wage exception for workfare participants which they will attempt to pass as soon as possible.
The second major issue that arises from workfare participants' unsettled status has been confusion over whether they can form and join unions. New York state agencies have ruled that people on workfare are not employees and cannot be represented by a union. In contrast, the state of Alaska allowed the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees to organise 300 workfare workers because they were performing substantially similar work to jobs already covered by an existing union contract. It is not known what would have happened had the state of Alaska opposed this organising effort.
Even if workfare participants can form and join unions, it is still unclear just what those unions would be empowered to bargain for. Because workfare participants are paid with a welfare cheque, union organisers are uncertain if they can bargain over wages. The only successful organising actions to date have concerned working conditions. In New York City, the Parks Department has refused to provide gloves, coats and sanitary facilities to its 5000 workfare workers. The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation assigned workfare participants to handle biological and toxic waste without training or safety gloves. Not surprisingly, ACORN has persuaded 6500 of New York's 35,000 workfare participants to sign union authorisation cards.
In Los Angeles, organised (but not unionised) workfare workers performing janitorial work at County-USC Hospital protested against working conditions and won new uniforms and an employee discount at the hospital cafeteria. The Alaskan AFSCME won its workfare members increased training and pledges to move them into permanent government jobs.
Many governments have already taken advantage of workfare to displace their regular low-wage workforce. The city of Baltimore has replaced an estimated 1000 regular workers with workfare 'trainees' who earn less than the minimum wage. The Baltimore public school system alone has 208 'custodial trainees' who earn the equivalent of $1.50 an hour. Johns Hopkins University only reversed its plan to replace union workers with workfare participants after protests that drew crowds of more than 1000 people.
Perversely, the displacement of regular low-wage workers with workfare participants has the effect of recycling workers back into the TANF welfare program. Those workers who currently hold low-wage jobs but are not on welfare may find themselves replaced by workfare participants and forced on welfare themselves. Those workfare participants who manage to find 'real work' (non-workfare) will be constantly menaced by the possibility that they too might be replaced by a cheap and docile workfare participant. Such a dilemma befell Hadie Hartgrove who was laid-off from her part-time custodial job with the Nassau County government. As a result, she ended up on welfare. With irony so thick you could walk across it, Ms. Hartgrove's workfare assignment turned out to be her old job, with far less pay and no benefits.
As so often happens in the world outside of Congressional strategy sessions, the Workfare program has had the opposite effect of what it was intended to accomplish. Rather than empower welfare recipients to learn job skills and find a productive niche in our economy, it has created a class of Americans who are forced to work for sub-minimum-wage, are denied the right to organise, and may not enjoy the benefits of still other employee protections available to the rest of the American workforce. The availability of a sub-minimum-wage labor pool will undoubtedly have a stabilising if not depressing effect upon wages for comparable positions that as of yet are not filled by workfare participants. Unionised employers may not feel the same compulsion to bargain with their workers knowing that there is a bottomless pool of 'trainees' who they can draw upon. And as noted previously in this article, some employers are simply eliminating union jobs in favour of workfare trainees.