Looks Good on Paper: With welfare-to-work, presentation is everything

Harper's Magainze

By Tracie McMillan
Read the original publication in Harper’s Magazine.

The welfare system was overhauled, in 1996, on the premise that the un-employed and supposedly unemployable could be forced into jobs. Tougher restrictions on welfare, we were told, would lead the poor to self-sufficiency
and eventually to upward mobility. But to enter the job market, welfare’s millions first had to figure out how best to present spotty and nonexistent work histories to potential employers. I assisted in one of these welfare-to-work professional makeovers last winter, when I volunteered at a Manhattan welfare office and was paired with Carmen
Jurado, a home-less single mother originally from Ecuador. Together, Carmen and I pieced together this record of her muddled work life, the initial step in fashioning an orderly resume for a job interview she had the next day. The
can-do spirit of the 1996 reforms was evident in posters affixed to the of-fice walls: a cowboy bestride a bucking bull, a rock climber clambering up a vertical bluff. Yet trying to transform Carmen’s work experience into an effective CV seemed to me the more daunting undertaking.

Carmen arrived at the office an hour before closing, so we didn’t have long to review her relevant work history, much less determine how best to package it— tasks made more difficult by her limited English and my even poorer Spanish. Aside from a stint in an electronics factory soon after immigrating here in the 1970s, Carmen conveyed that her work life before 2000 had been confined to off-the-books odd jobs, like peddling water and mangoes at the Coney Island beach. Under the new welfare rules, though, she was placed in a “workfare” assignment at the Salvation Army, where she put in three days a week in exchange for her welfare check. On the other two weekdays, Carmen, like most New Yorkers then on welfare, was sent to job-readiness classes. (Welfare reform permitted each state to tailor its own requirements.) In these classes, the uninitiated are introduced to the mores of work culture, including how in job interviews to tactfully avoid mention of homelessness, past drug use, or any on-the-job confrontations.


Carmen could have been a model for what Republicans and Democrats touted as the triumphant end to “welfare as we know it,” given that her workfare assignment led to a permanent positional the Salvation Army. (Instead of being mailed a $500 welfare check each month, she said she earned $6.75 an hour while continuing to receive Medicaid and food stamps.) But even though the number of welfare recipients nationwide had been cut in half by 1999, many who left the rolls had already been working and needed only to formalize their employment. For the rest, getting a job has rarely been easy. Most face one of several substantial obstacles to work— battling mental illness or poor health, caring for small children, or struggling to speak English— and about half face more than one barrier. Today, fewer than 10 percent of New York City’s welfare recipients find and keep a job for six months. Carmen’s tenure at the Salvation Army was brief. She brought her children with her to work one day, after a sitter canceled, and was fired as a result. She ended up back in the city’s welfare offices, where she began the job-search process all over again. 


It was difficult for Carmen to tell me which of her past jobs were actual private-sector ones and which were workfare assignments, because she has so often cycled between the two. She said she had worked full time at a city child-care center in 2003 or 2004 but only later remembered that this work had netted a welfare check, not an hourly wage. In any event, she left the position after arguing with a supervisor about teachers being too rough with the children. Every time Carmen runs afoul of welfare’s rules, as in this instance, she puts her welfare check at risk of “sanction,” whereby a portion of each payment is withheld as punishment, though the money allotted to her children still shows up. Because welfare recipients are required to follow an array of exacting guidelines, missteps are frequent and sanctions common. Unlike New York, thirty-nine other states withhold an entire family’s check for one member’s infraction. In Idaho and Wisconsin, sanctions can result in a family being cut off for life. 


When I asked Carmen about her education, she eventually recalled a course in home health care she had taken in 2005, but she said she never did anything with it, since the certificate was lost in the mail somewhere en route to her homeless shelter. It was one of only a few times Carmen had been able to enroll in any sort of educational or vocational classes: city welfare rules have traditionally prohibited recipients from counting education— even English lessons— toward their workfare requirements. But without improved skills, welfare clients seldom do better than a low-wage job. Some, like Carmen, survive by learning the rules well enough to hold on to benefits whenever work fails them. Many others fare worse. In 1990, four out of five do. American families that qualified for welfare received it; today, two in five do. Although the proportion of poor single mothers in jobs has increased, from 32 percent in 1996 to 47 percent today, the share who neither work nor draw assistance has more than doubled, from 16 percent to 35 percent. 


Whether stocking merchandise at the discount clothing sore Conway or delivering meal store residents at a senior center, Carmen has yet to land a job outside of service and sales. In fact, three in five welfare clients who find work end up in the service sector, typically with jobs that pay minimum wage and offer little opportunity for advancement. Carmen told me about her highest paying job, as a $7.75-an-hour security guard at a Brooklyn hospital. After five years in homelessness, she and her family were able to move into a subsidized apartment— she paid $250 of the monthly rent, and the city chipped in the remaining $1,150. But the city housing program, designed with the faulty assumption that beneficiaries’ wages rise the longer they remain employed, soon reduced its monthly share to $900. Carmen couldn’t meet her increased payment, and the city marshal eventually showed up to evict. She and her children returned to he homeless shelter, and Carmen to the welfare rolls. 


I received no formal training before meeting with Carmen. The welfare office did give me a photocopied handbook that suggest I refashion her experiences into a “functional” résumé; i.e., one that emphasized marketable skills over employment. So when Carmen told me she spent a summer steering riders onto Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel, that was proof of her competence in “managing crowds” and “interacting with customers in a professional manner.” This tactic, I hoped, would help shift attention away from the disorder of her work life. All CV writing involves sleight of hand, of course, but the functional résumé in particular captures the tenor of the strong welfare reform-era economy, when employers were greatly in need of workers with “soft skills.” As the economy has worsened, employers have become more selective, but welfare offices haven’t necessarily updated their strategies— or rhetoric. The handbook also recommended that clients be urged to emulate Tess, the heroine of the 1988 film Working Girl, and attributed her shift from secretary to executive largely to the moment she “sheds the downscale duds.”


Carmen already had a job in mind when we met: from a bedraggled folder she pulled out a flyer that announced an opening at Daffy’s, the discount designer-clothing store. (Here, and wherever possible, I tried to target the résumé to the position.) The flyer made clear that the job was available only to welfare clients in good standing, suggesting Daffy’s might be one of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. businesses that receive federal tax credits, wage subsidies, or other financial inducements to hire off the welfare rolls. According to the drugstore chain CVS, which has taken on more than 60,000 welfare recipients since 1996, the success of such hires depends heavily on the hard work of job developers. Unlike me, an experienced low-wage head hunter not only coaches welfare recipients but also fosters relationships with businesses and learns about the specific needs of each available job. 


When I came to the portion of the résumé where education and training would normally appear, I stopped the welfare staffer overseeing volunteers and asked his advice. Should I say anything about Carmen’s formal education, which ended after seventh grade? No, said the staffer, who commended me for including Carmen’s security and home-health-aide training. (I also felt proud for having thought to list the address of Carmen’s homeless shelter, since it gave the impression of a permanent residents.) Professional job developers I later spoke to explained how it’s harder to positively spin other aspects of a welfare client’s erratic work history. A too-brief résumé, or one showing multiple jobs within a year, suggests that the applicant is likely to struggle to keep a position. To counteract such weak points, some job developers help clients prepare cover letters in which gaps between jobs are explained away as instances of overcoming adversity, and unpaid responsibilities like caring for sick relatives or fixing up an apartment are presented as marketable skills. 


the welfare staffer suddenly began to reprimand me for listing the years of Carmen’s employment along the left side of the résumé, as opposed to incorporating them into job titles. When he continued to upbraid me for placing more emphasis on work history than on skills, I finally snapped, saying that he should get a paid worker to do it right. But agency restructuring has left welfare offices devoid of job developers— and in need of volunteers like me. Despite city welfare offices renaming their caseworkers “job-opportunity specialists” soon after the 1996 reform, the actual work of placing welfare clients in jobs was rapidly being outsourced to private contractors at that time. (My volunteer night was organized by a local nonprofit, New York Cares.) The contracts for employments services are “performance-based,” meaning almost all agency payments come only after a client gets a job. Although politically popular, such constructs put significant financial pressure on agencies to skimp on the preparation that goes into readying welfare recipients for work, since it goes unpaid, and to rush clients into the first openings that arise, no matter the fit. 


Four of the jobs Carmen and I decided to list on her résumé, including this one at U.S. Security Associates, were in private employment, not workfare, yet distinguishing between the two seemed like it would only draw further attention to the inconstancy of her work history. Instead, I played up Carmen’s customer-service experience, a tack later vindicated by a human resources manager of Aegis Communications, which regularly hires New Yorkers on welfare. For entry-level jobs, I was told, Aegis looks for a worker with “customer-service background and training, a bubbly personality.” Daffy’s may have been in the market for the same sort of skills, because they gave Carmen the job. Within days, she was cleaning dressing rooms, earning $7.15 an hour, and set to clear about $400 every two weeks. 


The résumé presentation (here I cut an extra period) may or may not have contributed to Carmen getting hired. But it certainly did nothing to affect any of the myriad reasons she repeatedly found herself without work. A few weeks after she started at Daffy’s, a supervisor, who had also begun requiring Carmen to clean toilets, fired her for drinking tea on the job. Rather than contesting the firing, Carmen told me she “said something rude” and left. No amount of spin, for that matter, can reconcile the discrepancy between welfare reform’s lofty aspirations and the bleak facts on the ground. In New York, nearly half o welfare clients are considered so unlikely to find work that the agency doesn’t even require them to look, and of those the city deems employable, fewer than 50 percent secure jobs. Nationwide, only 23 percent of clients find steady work during their first year off the rolls. As for Carmen, she applied for a position at Macy’s, across the street from Daffy’s but wasn’t hired. Soon she was back on welfare, shuttling between caseworker meeting and job-skill courses, and preparing to repackage her work history once again. 

Tracie McMillan is a reporter living in Brooklyn. She writes about poverty and food.

Follow Tracie

Follow Tracie on Facebook
Follow Tracie on X (Twitter)
Follow Tracie on Instagram
Get Tracie's Newsletter