Nonprofit Agencies React to New York's Workfare Program Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Oct 22, 1997 source:thepeople@igc.org THE PEOPLE OCTOBER 1997 VOL. 107 NO. 7 NEW YORK CITY-- NONPROFIT AGENCIES REACT TO NEW WORKFARE PROGRAM The workfare program in New York City--the moving of welfare recipients to no-salary jobs in the city in order for them to be eligible for their welfare benefits--has come under sharp criticism and opposition from a coalition of more than 70 of the city's nonprofit agencies. The criticism comes at the very time when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is seeking to place more workfare participants with the city's nonprofit agencies. These coalition members consider the program to be exploitative in that it undercompensates the welfare workers, gives them little or no training that will lead to productive full-time jobs and places them in unsafe working conditions. Further, the city has cut more than 20,000 regular city workers from its payroll and has substituted workfare people in these jobs, but without the benefits or pensions and the comparable salaries of the former workers. The two latest nonprofit institutions to join the antiworkfare coalition are the very prominent Riverside Church and Abyssinian Baptist Church. A ministerial spokesman for Riverside Church noted: "There seems to be some concern whether this is a just program," and called for the abuses in the program "to be fixed." Raphael Warnock, assistant pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, a leading Harlem church and one of the largest Baptist congregations in the country, expressed concern that workfare is merely a cheap method of getting welfare workers to do city jobs once held by permanent workers. "We are worried that workfare is being used to displace other workers who receive respectable compensation," said Warnock. "We are concerned that poor people are being put into competition with other poor people, and in that respect we think workfare is a hoax." There are numbers of other nonprofit agencies in New York City, however, that have refused to take the coalition's pledge not to hire workfare personnel. These groups, although very critical of the program, have cooperated with it and have provided the training for its participants that the city has neglected to provide, and have even supplemented the welfare checks of participants in attempts to help these workers get off welfare and obtain permanent jobs. There are still other nonprofit agencies that are glad to accept workfare participants as free labor and that do little or nothing to help them to advance in life. New York City's Mayor Giuliani, in responding to the nonprofit coalition members' attacks on workfare, has accused them of supporting the cycle of dependency and has added that workfare has helped the city financially by reducing its welfare rolls, while studiously failing to notice that some of that help comes from reductions in the city's payroll. What is this if not an admission that capitalism cannot provide decent jobs for everyone and that the dutiful politicians, the servants of capitalism, must seek ways to reduce the cost of government that capitalism's creation of poverty has caused? For the local government, the shortest way to do so is to dismantle the "welfare" system, to replace forced unemployment with forced labor and to press down the level of wages. In turning to religious and other nonprofit agencies to help capitalism "solve" the poverty problem, capitalism's political agencies--the various levels of government--have tried to recruit these eleemosynary institutions to place upon them a major part of the burden of making poverty disappear. What these groups can do is merely make a minute dent in the problem by helping a handful of welfare recipients advance out of welfare into a more meaningful life. It should not be overlooked that much of the help they provide comes from and is made possible by the contributions they receive from workers. What this amounts to is a reduction in wages for all those who contribute out of compassion. It spreads the burden within the working class and reduces it for the ruling class. But the poverty problem is an ongoing one that will never be solved by such spotty reform measures and tinkering. The spokespersons for those agencies that are aware of the injustice of workfare still do not carry their analysis of its inadequacies far enough, but instead blame a local governmental structure for caring more about its budget than about its people. They must recognize that it is capitalism that has created poverty and is now embarrassed by it--that it is the structure of the economy that needs to be changed, not just finagled with. These well-meaning people must not deceive themselves. The unjust capitalistic system must be replaced by a sane socialist society to abolish poverty permanently. --B.G. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytlab-10.26.97-10:34:30-1240