Wisconsin Works is a masterpiece of public relations. Visitors from Britain, New Zealand, the Netherlands and nearly every state in the union have come here to study W-2. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government gave Wisconsin a national award for “Innovations in American Government.”
The program has been tirelessly promoted by our ever ebullient governor, Tommy Thompson, who calls W-2 “by far the biggest change in American social policy in 60 years.”
W-2, after all, was supposed to “make work pay,” to free AFDC mothers from the trap of welfare, to replace a “broken” system of dreaded dependency with “an environment of hope and opportunity,” as Thompson put it.
It was Milwaukee County, of course, that was seen as a welfare wasteland and the true test of W-2. But as a revealing study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute suggests, W-2 has fallen far short of its lofty promises.
ETI examined all state Department of Revenue files (not just a sample) to track how many single mothers have found jobs in Milwaukee. In the county and in the Inner City, the results were similar: More single mothers moved into wage-paying jobs before welfare reform than after its institution.
By the early 1990s, the booming Wisconsin economy had created a labor shortage that was generating jobs even for Inner City Milwaukeeans. From 1993 to 1995, there was a 7.5 percent annual increase in the number of Inner City single mothers winning employment, compared to a 5.3 percent annual increase in the years since then, when reform began in Milwaukee.
What Thompson has created is not a program that finds jobs for welfare mothers but one that relentlessly makes them jump through hoops and slashes their subsidies until they drop out. The county’s welfare rolls dropped from 34,438 to about 6,000 in the last three years.
What happened to the 28,000 or so people who dropped out? Extrapolating from ETI’s statistics, here’s what you find: About 20 percent were already working and breaking the law by not reporting it. They were quite rightly thrown off the dole. This is the one great success of W-2.
For a big chunk of people, the program had no discernible impact. About 22 percent found wage-paying jobs, but this rate of placement is a drop from the years prior to welfare reform. Another 17 percent were simply switched into other programs. Grandparents who operate as foster parents, for instance, are now paid through “Kinship Care” rather than AFDC. Another 18 percent of mothers still left in W-2 are mostly hardship cases with disabilities that make them difficult to hire or expel from the program.
As for the rest, they have been ill-served by W-2. About 12 percent of AFDC mothers were already employed but making so little they got a supplement from welfare, which was intended to reward them for working. W-2 simply kicked them out, slashing their income. And another 11 percent of AFDC mothers dropped out or were pushed out and are left with no job or means of support.
In their zeal to kick out welfare cheaters, the Thompson administration has created a program that relentlessly discourages anyone in the Inner City, including thousands of the working poor, from collecting benefits that should subsidize and reward them for working.
A classic example is food stamps, federal money guaranteed to anyone poor. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had to launch an investigation of Wisconsin to force W-2 agencies to begin offering food stamp applications to people. Even so, some 32,000 eligible Milwaukeeans do not get them.
“W-2 agencies give the least possible service they can,” says Pat DeLessio, a Legal Action of Wisconsin attorney who represents low-income clients. “The program pretends to help people.”
If the state offered every worker the day care and medical subsidies W-2 promised to “make work pay,” it would have been very expensive. Instead, the system is so complicated that some mothers have to enroll in three different medical programs to cover all family members. Not surprisingly, some 100,000 Milwaukeeans eligible for medical assistance are not getting it. ETI also estimates that some 80,000 eligible children aren’t covered by the child care subsidy.
A real work program would make things simple for overwhelmed single mothers. Rather than three medical assistance programs, there would be one, as Minnesota has. Rather than fighting to get food stamps, working mothers could simply use a debit card, as in most states.
But W-2 is not a work program – it’s a program to deny government benefits. The result is a documented increase in the homeless and in people going to food pantries. The result, as one study shows, is that most W-2 mothers show clinical signs of depression, while 70 percent spend more than two hours a day getting to and from child care and work.
Yes, the welfare rolls were cut, but W-2 has failed miserably at offering what Thompson promised: “the true compassion of a hand up to people who need help.”
