UNITED STATES-LABOUR: Welfare Workers of the World, Unite

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Sep 10 1997 (IPS) - Unions and activist groups in New York are campaigning to organise what could be the city’s most neglected workers: more than 35,000 welfare recipients who participate in New York’s Work Experience Programme (WEP).

On the one hand, supporters of WEP unionisation say that the welfare recipients need higher wages than the current, relatively low level of welfare benefits they receive for performing part- time municipal work. In New York City, which leads the nation in creating jobs for welfare recipients, many WEP workers receive only about 100 dollars in benefits for 20 hours of labour each week – or less than the federal minimum wage of 5.15 dollars per hour.

On the other hand, public sympathy for welfare recipients has ebbed in the United States, as President Bill Clinton demonstrated last year when he signed a widely popular law which requires most federal recipients to earn their cash assistance by taking on part- time jobs within two years of entering the welfare rolls. The 1996 law also cuts off welfare aid for most people within five years.

Although welfare recipients have been stigmatised by politicians as lazy or underserving, many of the organisers seeking to recruit WEP workers into unions argue that such stereotypes miss the mark.

“Many of these people are college graduates, people who worked 15 years and then got laid off,” says Amber Cartha-Jones, a city parks worker who recently joined the organising unit of District Council 37 (DC 37) of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the main union for public employees.

“They are people who earned 700 to 800 dollars a week,” she argues. “These people are employable. They just need real training and a chance to get a real job.”

As a result, DC 37 is pushing for New York state officials to change existing laws to redefine WEP participants as workers, rather than simply as welfare recipients. Under current regulations, people who are part of WEP – also commonly known as “workfare” – are not regarded as workers regardless of how many hours they labour, and therefore are not given the same rights.

New York’s Office of Collective Bargaining decided 20 years ago that welfare recipients involved in job programmes could not be regarded as employees. Even though the workfare roster has swelled in New York since then – and even though the number of people involved in workfare nationwide is expected to surpass one million by the year 2000 – that ruling remains in force.

“The law is quite clear,” insists New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. “People who are working in exchange for welfare benefits are not considered employees, because they are in a transitional state.”

Some experts wonder what, if anything, will be the end result of that transition.

“In the previous evaluations of workfare programmes, they have generally been found to have little effect on increasing the employment and earnings of those subject to the regime,” says Mark Greenberg, a senior staff attorney at the Centre for Law and Social Policy in Washington.

Instead, community activists say, programmes like WEP have been used to replace some traditional types of city jobs – such as cleaning and maintaining parks – with worse-paid, and often unprotected, welfare recipients.

About 7,000 WEP workers participate in cleaning parks, a job which normally pays about 21,000 dollars a year for a full-time city employee. “They’re a boss’s dream,” says Larry Holmes, an organiser with Workfairness, another group trying to unionise WEP workers. “They have no rights (and) they’re paid nothing.”

Holmes argues that if New York expands its workforce of welfare recipients who lack vacations, benefits, standard pay and even job safety safeguards, all workers will feel downward pressure on their own wages and standards.

Most unfair of all, he says, is the notion that WEP work is not the same as “real” labour. “If it looks like work and smells like work, it is work,” he insists.

In the past, however, many types of workers – from farmers to nurses at non-profit hospitals – were similarly regarded as legally different from “real” workers, but eventually won their rights as workers after lengthy organising campaigns. DC 37 is hoping that it can force a similar change in the law, and has already started to sign up WEP workers to join its union.

Meanwhile, both Workfairness and the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now (ACORN), two grassroots activist groups, have signed up WEP workers and held protests designed to raise the profile of the workfare issue. ACORN this summer collected pledges from 13,000 of the more than 35,000 WEP workers saying they want to belong to a union.

Soon, according to DC 37, Clinton’s welfare reforms may well drive the number of WEP workers here past 100,000. At that point, the movement to unionise could grow even stronger. “For (workfare members), it’s not a question of whether they should have a union, but rather when they will have a union,” claims Daniel Esakoff, DC 37’s organising coordinator.