Job Market in W.Va. Defies Efforts to Reform Welfare

Welfare reform was designed to move people who are employable off the rolls, said Robert Rector, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, who helped write the 1996 law. "The idea is to say you can't simply collect a check and do nothing," Rector said. "You need to engage in some work activity." Calling the reform a nationwide success, he added that "those individuals who sat on the rolls for 60 months without obtaining any substantial employment or training, they're very unrepresentative. Totally unrepresentative. This is a very atypical group."

The West Virginia University researchers, however, say their findings apply to many states. As lawmakers move to reauthorize the 1996 law, West Virginia's experiment provides lessons for policymakers and state welfare officials, said L. Christopher Plein, chairman of the department of public administration at West Virginia University and a co-author of the welfare reform studies.

Congress should consider that not all states are alike, Plein said. "While work participation is a very good goal, there are circumstances which make economic self-sufficiency difficult," he said. "The bottom line is that those who are in need of public assistance reflect the diversity of our society, and that many times circumstances beyond one's control requires them to rely on public assistance."

As West Virginia's example shows, states need time before they can implement new rules, Plein added. "The state's initial response lacked coordination," he said. "It was more of a reactive posture: 'How are we going to make the performance measures that have been put before us by the federal government?' The response was one of confusion."

What West Virginia -- and other states -- did initially, Plein said, was apply an overly cautious interpretation of the federal law. It focused on clearing welfare cases to the detriment of the very people the law was intended to help. The federal government had imposed mandatory work-participation rates for welfare recipients (50 percent of each state's caseload). But it let states count caseload reductions toward work participation.

States with unfavorable job markets such as West Virginia discovered that one way to avoid federal sanctions was to clear their caseload. They made welfare recipients reapply for aid under the new law -- with complex applications that led many people to opt out. They also imposed strict rules and sanctions for failing to comply with the rules.

Beyond Medicaid and food stamps, the state could offer little practical help, such as job training, to those who were knocked off the rolls. "I think it's probably a failure of the system," said Margaret Waybright, commissioner of child and family services for the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources. "But we just don't have the staff capacity to provide services for those clients no longer in the program."

Even so, she said, the southwestern part of the state has proven especially difficult. "It's pretty bleak," she said.

Mingo County, hard by the eastern Kentucky border, looks lush and green this time of year, despite the mountains that have been scalped by mining. But many of the houses along the main roads are trailers or very old cabins, and many families are in deep economic holes.

The poorest people here, as in most places, are single parents with young children. Mary Dixon, 35, is one of those. She received $452 a month in TANF until last fall, two months after she had surgery for ovarian cancer. Since then, her rented double-wide burned down, forcing her and her four children to squeeze into her mother's trailer. Her only assistance consists of food stamps and a Medicaid card.

She owns a Dodge Caravan minivan that does not run. Her former husband, she said, does not pay child support. She is still undergoing treatment for cancer. Her children, ages 6 to 12, are too young to help. "I stay with my mom and pick up pop cans," she said.

Like other former welfare recipients interviewed, Dixon was bitter about the term limits. "I was working for my check," she said. "The last two months of my check, I couldn't work. I was in the hospital. Mingo County came after me and said they were going to take my check away. I had to go out of the hospital and report to them in person that I had cancer."