Chutes & Ladders

Jeanette” leaned against the shabby exterior of Welfare Center 62, an infant daughter on one shoulder. Although Social Security had issued Jeanette a notice stating a delay in the processing of her daughter's Social Security card, her welfare caseworker had just refused to accept this surrogate document and had terminated her daughter's benefits. As cash assistance is allotted on the basis of the number of people in a family, this glitch was potentially devastating to Jeanette's immigrant family of three. Despite her children's legal eligibility for welfare benefits, she was faced with the possibility that her children would soon be without food.

Since her welfare caseworker spoke only English, Jeanette had no idea what he had said to her, beyond an angrily uttered “No!” which she took to mean her documents were unacceptable. Nor was she confident that he had understood her questions, spoken in Dominican Spanish, since they were entirely disregarded.

On learning of Jeanette's predicament, Andrew Friedman, co-director of a nascent Brooklyn non-profit organization specializing in welfare rights, Make the Road By Walking (MRBW), wasn't surprised. “People have no idea who to turn to when they get cut off, which often happens illegally,” Friedman explained. Welfare rights lawyers and community advocates such as Friedman and Oona Chatterjee, Co-Director of MRBW, are familiar with cases like Jeanette's. In the age of shrinking public assistance programs, client/caseworker communication is on a downswing.

People familiar with New York's welfare situation don't blink at the fact that since the Giuliani administration took office, the welfare rolls have been trimmed from 1.4 million people to 900,000. Many also know that the Human Resources Agency (HRA), the bureaucracy which administers in New York City, has signaled a new era in welfare administration with the citywide transition from Income Support Centers to Job Centers, overseen by the Family Independence Administration (FIA). But while many know about—even laud— welfare's retrenchment and Work- fare's expansion, they aren't necessarily appraised of the plummeting quality of HRA services for those recipients who play by the new rules.

What do New York welfare advocates say about the changes? Friedman puts it bluntly: “There's a total lack of quality control in HRA which would never be acceptable in the private sector. The pace of change in the system is relentless. The HRA constantly expands the Work- fare program even though they've been unable to follow their own regulations since the 1996 Federal and 1997 State welfare laws were passed.” Friedman's not the only one to notice. In October 1998, Katherine Kraft of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, and Irene Bush, a professor in the University School of Social Work at Rutgers University, published a pioneering “accountability” study of welfare reform. Ignoring the eagerly-supplied opinions of middle class reformers, they let the natives speak for themselves, producing a welfare recipient consumer satisfaction report that makes interesting reading for anyone seduced by the myth of a nation of happily cut off and well-adjusted ex-welfare recipients.

The quality control problem led MRBW to turn their clients with welfare problems into community organizers. Concerned with the effects of the HRA's revamping upon welfare recipients and applicants, MRBW formed the Coalition for an Accountable and Respectful HRA (CAHRA). Armed with the preliminary results of a survey of 1,000 welfare recipients about HRA services begun in May 1998, they intend to expose the unpunished and sometimes sloppy mistakes they say their clients experience inside the Income Support and Job Centers. They argue that caseworkers should speak their client's language and that information should be translated. Most provocatively, they insist that the HRA must create a structure of accountability which would serve to redress mistakes made by caseworkers, and penalize HRA staff for being rude and unhelpful to clients or breaking their own regulations.

After Father John Powis, a Brooklyn priest, announced MRBW's first meeting, enthusiasm for community policing of the HRA rose to an alltime high in the Brooklyn parish. That meeting was crowded. MRBW's clients didn't understand why they had suddenly received notices announcing the termination of their benefits. Some couldn't comprehend the notices at all, since they were written in English. Even under the new laws, many of them shouldn't have been cut off in the first place. Those who have lost their SSI benefits or food stamps with no warning or find themselves struggling under the weight of an overly generous Workfare assignment, feel it's time to demand HRA accountability.

Harnessing the nervous energy generated by all cutting and revamping done in the wake of welfare reform legislation, MRBW quickly recruited their own clients to help investigate mistreatment at the Job Centers. At informal teach-ins, MRBW client-recruits learned to decipher the legalese that changed their lives. A few mornings every week, Friedman, Chatterjee, and a few clients make their way down to one of the Centers. They ask people whether they have problems communicating with their worker, if they have felt discriminated against, dissuaded from requesting a fair hearing, or not been made aware of their welfare rights.

Policing the HRA's implementation of the laws would have been helpful when Roque, a recently widowed father of five, saw his food stamp allotment cut from $300 to $12 a month for his family of 6, due to an HRA worker's miscalculation. It would have been helpful when Fabio Nunez, a 71-year-old Dominican man living alone, lost his food stamps under the new laws banning certain legal immigrants from receiving welfare. Nunez's termination should not have happened because of an important modification of the 1996 Federal welfare law in New York, protecting some legal immigrants over 60 and under 18.

Nunez had taken up the matter with his caseworker, who, for some reason, refused to reinstate the food stamps despite his continuing eligibility. Without legal advocacy, he would have been permanently without basic food money.

Yoralis Vidal is a welfare recipient turned community organizer. A former client of MRBW's, she wants to defend people like Fabio Nunez. After the 1997 state welfare legislation was implemented in New York, Vidal lost her benefits, and Chatterjee and Friedman helped get her illegally turned off benefits turned on again. Her experience in the system helps her to skillfully elicit information from more timid clients.

When a few disgruntled older patrons complain that their HRA workers are refusing them basic services, like handing them an application or answering a question, Vidal is miffed. “Then go in and ask again,” she urges them. When an elderly Puerto Rican woman is denied the form she needs because her worker says he's “too busy” to get it, despite the fact that she's already waited in line for three hours, and the form is within the reach of the HRA employee serving her, Vidal intervenes. The older patron dryly sums up her situation with a tired smile: “I am waiting all day for a yellow piece of paper.”

Those in CARHRA argue that the HRA's hostile attitude toward welfare recipients, and zero-tolerance policy toward recipients who fail to follow any request or rule down to minutiae-level details, is no accident. They say it's a conscious strategy on the part of a swamped bureaucracy with a mandate to cut caseloads by 10 percent every year for 3 years.

According to Chatterjee, when clients ask to speak to their caseworker's supervisor, they are frequently told “Speak to your worker,” and can only return to the caseworker who failed to provide the necessary assistance in the first place. For those emboldened clients who feel mistreated, the HRA does have a complaint line telephone number, but according to Friedman, it is busy 24 hours a day.

The terse communiques announcing the termination of benefits or summoning recipients to the Job Centers also provide ample opportunity for miscommunication. Such confusion can result in a loss of benefits. Periodically, the HRA notifies recipients by mail to appear at a Job Center with all their supporting documents. During these “Face-to-Face” appointments, the HRA reassesses the eligibility of the client, making sure that he/she still qualifies to receive benefits. Friedman's not impressed: “The Face-to-Face appointments are basically a regimen to give the client an opportunity to miss an appointment and lose their benefits.” Failure to understand an HRA message and its implications never seems to be attributed to poor or cryptic instructions, but rather to the inattentiveness of the client. When a recipient's benefits are cut off, the notice sent provides the most vital information about fair hearings in fine print at the bottom or back of the page. As a result, many of the clients who come to MRBW have failed to note this alternative.

Beyond the tiny print and missed appointments, some welfare recipients and applicants are faced with an even bigger problem: literacy. While James Whelan, the deputy press secretary for the HRA, originally described the HRA's reading materials for the public's consumption as, “targeted for a sixth grade reading level,” he later downgraded his initial assessment to “plain English,” while also stating that materials are translated into Spanish.

Liz Kruger, associate director of the Community Food Resource Center, has found there is nothing plain or sixth grade about HRA handouts. “It's our experience that the materials are both complicated and incomplete, and very often only available in English, when at least 50 percent of welfare applicants and recipients are non-English speaking.”

Kruger points out that HRA information is “heavy on risks, responsibilities, and sanctions, and tends to exclude benefits and rights.” While communication problems might be considered inadvertent oversights in an expanding bureaucracy, the MRBW-documented pattern of workers omitting to inform clients of their rights cannot be. Rather, HRA workers neglecting to help clients obtain the correct documents and failing to suggest or accept substitutions represent, “violations of the HRA's legal obligations,” according to Friedman. Conceivably, if a structure of accountability were in place within the HRA, at least some of these lapses in communication would warrant disciplinary action.

MRBW staff concur that programs which epitomize the welfare reform trend contain structural disincentives to enter the system. The City's “Ladders to Success” and “Work First” programs are cases in point. These built-in deterrents, reminiscent of the poor-house work tests administered to desperate alms-seekers of late 19th century London, now preoccupy lawyers such as Helen Lee of the Legal Aid Society. Lee argues that Ladders to Success and the administrative reality of the Work First concept often translate into austere forms of punishment for being poor.

Under the HRA's self-coined “strategy of diversion,” potential recipients of welfare are diverted by almost any means possible to work, often regardless of circumstance. During the intensive screening process meant to weed out “malingerers” among would-be welfare recipients, HRA workers meticulously investigate whether family members, friends, church charity, or other community organizations might be alternative income sources. If no leads pan out, the applicant begins a mandatory 35-day, full-time job search—the “labor market test of employability.” (Anyone hired during the labor market test is refused cash assistance.)

Recent initiates to Ladders to Success have told Lee that after failing the supervised job search, they were “put in a room, given a phone book, and told to start cold-calling.” Lee also reports that when there are no real jobs available for those applying, “financial planners” in the centers end up discussing hypothetical opportunities with people applying for emergency aid. Failure to comply with any part of the process results in rejection of the application. If deemed un-divertible, applicants are assigned a “work activity,” even if disabled, mentally ill, or otherwise “hard to serve,” despite the fact that the law clearly exempts the disabled or sick from such work assignments.

Whelan characterized the application process as an opportunity for quality time: “The quality of interaction is much greater in new Job Centers than in the (former) Income Maintenance Centers. People are spending more time with workers. They meet with financial planners and social service people who try to assess their needs.” Kruger disputed this representation: “They're [HRA clients] asked to fill out 30 to 40 pages of technical and confusing questions about themselves at different offices all over the city. It's an obstacle course to apply for and receive welfare.”

The fact that counties have to meet WEP participation rates affects both the unhealthy and the uneducated enrolled in Workfare. Attentive to the administrative reality of the new programs which seemed legal on paper prior to their implementation, Don Friedman is critical of the results thus far. Meeting participation rates has meant that people who are in the Ladders to Success program may have diminished their chances of finishing high school or improving their literacy skills. “If education and training are ever offered to people in Ladders to Success,” he says, “it is in conjunction with the maximum number of hours of Workfare that can be assigned.”

When asked whether Workfare limits educational opportunities, Whelan, the only HRA staff person I was permitted to speak with, volunteered, “The mayor does believe in work. Work is central for everybody receiving public assistance. To re-establish the social contract, work is vital. Our people do try to work our schedule around their schedule, but the stress is for people to be at work.”

The ladder may better resemble a chute for New Yorkers on public assistance. The Job Centers may soon be offering 10 percent employee bonuses for cutting caseloads by 10 percent over 3 years.

Given the current state of welfare services and the anti-welfare political climate in New York, it is striking that when I asked MRBW's Oona Chatterjee what surprised her most about her work, she quickly replied that it was the optimism of the struggling welfare recipients. “They really believe that if they can engage the system on a rational level, they will get justice.”                   Z

Elsa Davidson is currently pursuing a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York. She writes about urban culture.