Overview

The interest and involvement of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) in welfare reform is very much rooted in the mission and core values of the social work profession. These core values, which include social justice and belief in the dignity and worth of each person, have been embraced by social workers throughout the profession’s history and are the foundation of social work’s purpose and perspective.

Overall, NASW believes that the most promising strategies for improving public welfare lie beyond the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. As a nation, we should develop universal systems of support for meeting basic needs, including health care, food, housing, child care, and education; create job opportunities that pay a living wage and provide a full range of benefits; and ensure economic security through adequate income support for individuals and families unable to sustain themselves through employment.  

While working toward those universal systems of support, NASW believes a number of improvements can and should be made to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).  Those changes include such things as providing greater access to education and training, increasing the supply and quality of child care, and restoring benefits to legal immigrants, but in this testimony, we focus on three issues that despite their critical role in the success of any reauthorization have thus far received insufficient attention.   

(1) Ensuring that TANF program rules accommodate the needs of families with disabilities.

There is a distinct lack of awareness regarding the high percentage of families on TANF that are coping with disabling conditions.  The most common disabilities for welfare recipients include physical or mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, developmental disabilities, and responsibility for the care of a disabled family member.  Many are coping with more than one of these problems.     

The General Accounting Office (GAO) found that at least 44 percent of TANF recipients have physical or mental impairments or are caring for a child with impairments, compared with 15 percent of the non-TANF population.[1]  Figures around 50 percent, both higher and lower, have been confirmed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Inspector General, as well as The Urban Institute, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) and others. 

Given the fact that close to half of the current TANF population is coping with a disability, any reauthorization which does not take into account the special challenges these families face in moving into the workforce is doomed to fail.  However, it is important to remember that just  

because a person has a disability which may be a barrier to work does not mean that she cannot work.  With appropriate services and supports, including accommodations in state policies and procedures and in the work place, most parents with disabilities should be able to work and would very much like the opportunity to do so.     

Recommendations

The 2002 Work, Opportunity, and Responsibility for Kids (WORK) Act permitted states to count up to six months of rehabilitative services as a work activity, if during the second three-month period rehabilitative services were combined with other work activities.  While this is an improvement over the House bill (which provides for only three months), it still would leave many parents with disabilities without sufficient time to build the skills and systems of support needed to successfully move from welfare to work.  To provide these families with a more realistic chance of success, a provision should be adopted that would give states the flexibility to count additional time in rehabilitative services as work, if needed to meet the needs of a person with a disability in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. 

A statewide study in Florida conducted in 1994-1999 found that treatment duration was linked to employment outcomes.  Work outcomes improved for each additional month in treatment.  In general, women who stayed in treatment for seven to twelve months had better employment outcomes and more success in leaving welfare than those who spent less time.  Increased length of treatment was also associated with higher wages.[2]

The Drug Abuse Treatment and Outcome Study (DATOS), sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, found that recipients in substance abuse treatment for more than one year were almost twice as likely to be working as those who remained in treatment for only three months.[3] 

States should have the option to exempt from the work requirement and time limit parents caring for a child with a disability if caring for the child prevents the parent from meeting the state’s work requirement.  Caring for a child with disabilities severely impacts a parent’s ability to comply with TANF requirements. 

Appropriate, safe child care for children with disabilities is very difficult to find.  In many areas, it is non-existent.  The medical needs of some children require frequent medical visits and care.  If the need for such care lessens, parents then can be brought more fully into the program with their allotted time for receipt of benefits still intact.

A GAO report found that 15 percent of TANF families include a child with impairments and in 8 percent of TANF families there is both a parent and a child with impairments.[4] 

A study by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) found that one-fourth of non-employed mothers receiving TANF had a child with an illness or disability that limited the mothers’ ability to work or attend school.[5] 

The 1996 law requires states to impose sanctions where a parent “refuses” to comply with a state work requirement. Unfortunately, many parents are being sanctioned are not refusing to comply, they are unable to comply because of a disability or other barrier.  In many cases, they do not even understand what is required to comply. 

Any increase in the number of hours of required work activity or participation rates are likely to put additional pressure on families with disabilities.  Without strong protections against inappropriate sanctioning, it is likely that the number of inappropriate sanctions will increase.   

A study done in Minnesota found that sanctioned families are four times as likely as the caseload as a whole to have substance abuse problem, three times as likely to have a family health problem, twice as likely to have a mental health problem, and twice as likely to have been a recent victim of domestic violence.[6]    

One-third of the families who were sanctioned in Utah cited an individual health condition as the reason for their failure to participate; one-fifth cited mental health problems.[7] 

In Iowa, one-fifth of parents who were placed in the state’s limited benefit plan a second time (akin to a sanction) said that their disability/health contributed to their being returned to the sanction status, while almost three out of ten cited their lack of understanding of program rules.[8] 

States should be required to have procedures that review a family’s circumstances prior to the imposition of a sanction; determine whether additional assessments are needed (and secure them); determine whether there are services and supports the family needs before work can be required and whether modifications are needed to the requirements so that the family is better able to comply. 

Such procedures have been implemented state-wide in Maine, Tennessee and Vermont, and in a pilot program in Philadelphia. They have been found effective at reducing unnecessary sanctions and increasing compliance with work activities. In Philadelphia, fully 82% of families to have been sanctioned were brought into compliance via procedures that called for a personal contact with the family before sanctioning.[9] 

Because all later decisions for families with disabilities hinge on the quality of the initial assessment, it is important that they be done by qualified personnel.  Family self-sufficiency plans developed without meaningful assessments are all too likely to be ineffective, waste state and federal resources and prevent families from receiving the assistance needed to move successfully from welfare to work.

(2) Ensure fair and equitable treatment of racial and ethnic minorities. 

To date, few comprehensive studies have focused on the effects of the implementation of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) on racial and ethnic minorities.  However, there is evidence to show that welfare caseloads have become increasingly concentrated in urban areas that are disproportionately minority, and that racial and ethnic minorities are becoming a larger percentage of many welfare caseloads.  At the same time, there also are indications that racial and ethnic bias has played a role in welfare policy development and implementation. 

States in which African Americans make up a higher proportion of welfare recipients are statistically more likely to adopt punitive policies such as full-family sanctions, family caps, and time limits shorter than the federal government requires.[10] 

Two studies from Virginia found that caseworker discretion had a significant impact on what assistance recipients were offered.  In one, 47 percent of white recipients but no African-American recipients received discretionary transportation assistance beyond the gas vouchers available to all recipients[11] and in the second, 41 percent of white recipients but no African-American recipients were referred to discretionary educational programs.[12]  

The same study also found that during job interviews 55 percent of African-American applicants were interviewed for 5 minutes or less, while all white applicants received interviews of 10 minutes or longer.  Black applicants also were more likely than white applicants to be subjected to pre-employment tests.[13] 

Recommendations

(3) Ensuring a qualified, stable and professional TANF workforce.

Following enactment of the PRWORA, workers whose primary task had been to determine client eligibility were suddenly called upon to conduct client assessments, link recipients to job readiness and placement activities, make referrals to related programs and special services, and track client activities.  Many states simply have not invested sufficiently in the training needed to prepare their frontline workers for these additional tasks, nor have they hired more highly skilled staff. 

One common misperception regarding the TANF workforce is that it is mainly composed of social workers.  In fact, fewer than one percent of NASW's membership identifies public welfare as their primary practice area.[14]  Social workers are trained professionals who have bachelors, masters, or doctoral degrees in social work from an accredited social work program.  In contrast, the majority of public welfare caseworkers today have little to no professional social work training.  Frontline staff often possess college degrees, but typically in fields unrelated to social service delivery.  Some states only require welfare caseworkers to have a high school diploma.

In Illinois, more than 73 percent of front-line workers said that four or more major new activities had been added to their workloads since AFDC was transformed into TANF and 78 percent wanted more training than they were receiving.[15]

Under conditions that include inadequate training and heavy workloads, turnover rates for new staff is 30 percent during the first year.[16] 

Since the ultimate success of welfare reauthorization depends, in large part, on the skills and abilities of the TANF workforce to implement the policies, it is critical that resources be directed to address current shortcomings.   

Recommendations

Conclusion

If provisions similar to those recommended are implemented, it is likely that five years from now policymakers will truly be able to “build on success;” however, if current shortcomings go unaddressed, it is more likely that families with disabilities, racial and ethnic minorities, and the TANF workforce, itself, will instead be topics of a hearing on “Welfare Reform: What Went Wrong?” 

NASW appreciates the opportunity to provide testimony on this important program and looks forward to working with the Committee to craft legislation that will give all parents receiving TANF the opportunity to increase their independence and adequately meet the needs of their families.    

 

Footnotes

[1] U.S. General Accounting Office, TANF Recipients with Impairments Less Likely to be Employed and More Likely to Receive Federal Supports, (GAO-03-210), December 2002. 

[2] Metsch, Lisa R., Margaret Pereyra, Christine C. Miles, Clyde B. McCoy, and Brad Wohler-Torres,   Employment and Welfare Outcomes of Drug Participants in Florida, University of Miami School of Medicine, October 2001.    

[3] Butler, David, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Hard-to-Employ, Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, April 2002. 

[4] U.S. General Accounting Office, TANF Recipients with Impairments Less Likely to be Employed and More Likely to Receive Federal Supports, (GAO-03-210), December 2002. 

[5] Polit, Denise, Andrew London and John Martinez, The Health of Poor Urban Women: Findings from the Project on Devolution and Urban Change, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, May 2001.

[6] Minnesota Department of Human Services, Internal Memorandum, 1996.     

[7] Derr, Michelle K., The Impact of Grant Sanctioning on Utah’s TANF Families, University of Utah, October 1998.   

[8] Fraker, Thomas M., Lucia A. Nixon, Jan L. Losby, Carol S. Prindle and John F. Else, A Study of Iowa’s Limited Benefit Plan, Mathematica Policy Research Inc., May 1997.    

[9] Stein, Jonathan, Helping Families Meet Program Requirements, Memorandum, Community Legal Services, September 2002. 

[10] Soss, Joe, Race and Welfare in the United States, Presentation to the Coalition on Human Needs, January 2002.

[11] Gooden, Susan T., All Things Not Being Equal: Differences in Caseworker Support Toward Black and White Welfare Clients, Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, 1998.    

[12] Pittz, William and Gary Delgado, Race and Recession, Applied Research Center, Summer 2002.

[13] Ibid. 

[14] Gibelman, Margaret and Philip H. Schervish, Who We Are: A Second Look, National Association of Social Workers, 1997.

[15] American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31, Overworked and Underserved: A Report on the Status of the Illinois TANF Program for Caseworkers and Clients, January 1999.

[16] Ibid.