About People On Welfare
By Sammy Beanard
People on welfare want to join the workforce and become financially independent. The lesson of my experience is that welfare reform must include the commitment of resources for health care, child care, job training, and job creation for it to succeed. Without the commitment of real government resources in these areas, welfare reform will certainly fail, and the "two years and out" proposal will simply result in greater impoverishment of families like mine.
People on welfare want a fair chance. They do not want to be set up for failure. They do not want a system that creates false hope and temporary jobs, and that only forces families to turn back to welfare for financial support.
The main question I hope to answer today is: "what are the obstacles that welfare recipients face in trying to get off welfare and stay off welfare?"
Welfare was created to help families in need and financial distress. The loss of a job, the death of a family's breadwinner, or the abandonment of a family by a breadwinner, are all examples of why welfare was created and continues to be necessary.
No one would argue with the idea that the primary focus of welfare ought to be getting welfare recipients back into the workforce as soon as possible. Both Republicans and Democrats have long pledged to reform welfare to achieve this goal. Unfortunately these pledges have not been accompanied by plans to put people back to work.
It is true that many special programs have been created over the years to transition people from welfare to work. Based on my own experience, I believe that these programs have not succeeded, because:
1: Funding for government jobs programs have been too low and unpredictable, and there is a lack of secure private sector jobs which provide necessary income and benefits.
2: Special assistance to get available jobs has been provided only to a limited few, because of limited funding.
3: Welfare-to-work programs are customarily administered as threats, forcing participating welfare chents to follow the requirements of the program or lose their checks. Unless there are good, secure jobs available, these threats only force people to "go through the motions" of job training and job search to document compliance with the program when everyone involved knovs that there is no job at the end of the line.
In short, current efforts to reform welfare have set people up for failure, not for work.
It will be impossible to move people off welfare unless there are secure jobs in the private sector, or unless the government is willing to create such permanent jobs itself. Job training itself won't solve the problem unless there is a commitment to creating jobs. I now have skills but no job to go to.
About the author
Sammy is constantly researching interesting information and writing articles to make it easy for his readers to understand.
To see more of his writing, visit his web pages about Social Security Number Search sites and Criminal Court Records Online. from http://www.FreeArticlesAndContent.com
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