Statement of Sharon M. Dietrich, Community Legal Services, Inc., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Many Welfare Recipients Could Not Meet TANF Proposals for 40 Hours of Work
Introduction
TANF Reauthorization proposals put forward by the Bush Administration and others would require the states to engage a high percentage of their welfare recipients in work activities for an average of 40 hours every week for the states to continue to receive their full TANF block grant.1 Based on our experience and those of other Pennsylvanians familiar with welfare-to-work implementation in our state, Community Legal Services, Inc. (CLS) believes that the 40 hour requirement is not attainable and is the most problematic feature of the Administration proposal.
The notion that TANF recipients are only being asked to match the number of hours routinely worked by other workers is superficial and erroneous. Many workers, even those who are considered "full-time," work fewer than 40 hours. Full-time workers typically are credited for paid time during which they do not work, including breaks, holidays, vacations, sick days and personal days — accommodations that do not appear in the 40 hour proposals for welfare recipients. Workers of all types miss work for a wide variety of reasons, resulting in far fewer than 40 hours worked. Research shows, and our experiences have been, that TANF recipients (and other low wage workers) are particularly likely to miss work, because they face more family and other demands that conflict with work and have fewer resources to deal with these demands. In our experience, many TANF recipients who are working to capacity cannot meet even the current 30 hour goal.
The consequences of requiring TANF recipients to average 40 hours of work activities every week would be severe and counter-productive. Even a person averaging 39 hours a week of work activities would count against the state’s compliance with its work participation rates if the one missed hour was in "work." People doing their best to work would nevertheless be sanctioned off the caseload by states struggling to meet the unrealistic goals. The costs to the states of providing 40 hours of work activities would be staggering, especially in providing child care subsidies. The work participation rate regime would not focus on good employment outcomes. Even policymakers who are "pro-work" for TANF recipients should not support such a problematic proposal.
The 40-Hour Requirement Is Not Realistic
The justification advanced for the 40-hour requirement for TANF recipients is that they should be expected to work no less than their counterparts who do not receive cash assistance. This rationale is flawed, because many workers considered full-time do not work 40 hours every week. There are many legitimate reasons why workers of all sorts work fewer than 40 hours and must miss work.
American Workers Do Not Regularly Work 40 Hours Every Week
"Full-time" workers may work 35 hours per week. Of course, some full-time employees do work 40 hours or more in a typical week. However, many workers considered full-time work fewer than 40 hours. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) considers 35 hours the benchmark of full-time work.2
These hours include paid time not worked. When measuring hours worked, BLS includes hours paid for holidays, vacations, sick leave, and other compensated leave.3 From what is known of the Administration proposal and from TANF implementation to date, there is no reason to expect that TANF recipients expected to meet the 40 hour requirement will receive credit comparable to paid leave days when they miss work.
A substantial number of employees work fewer than 35 hours per week. According to BLS’s annual data for 2001, 24.1% of employees work fewer than 35 hours. 16.5% work fewer than 30 hours.4 Among single women, 37.3% work fewer than 35 hours.5
Hours worked vary between sectors. According to BLS data, average weekly hours vary depending on the sector of the labor economy. For instance, in manufacturing, average weekly hours have exceeded 40 hours every month since January 1992. By contrast, the service sector typically averages below 33 hours per week, and the retail sector averages 28-29 hours per week. Former welfare recipients are much more like to find work in the service and retail sectors than the manufacturing sector.
Workers Miss Time for Many Reasons, and TANF Recipients
Are Especially Likely To Have Legitimate Reasons to Miss Work
Workers do not perform their jobs in a vacuum. They have family and personal needs that frequently require them to miss work. TANF recipients have the same needs to miss work as other workers. Additionally, their absences from work are exacerbated by their typical status as single parents, their lack of resources to deal with non-work-related problems, and demands disproportionate or unique to poor people (such as dealing with bureaucracies).
Caregiving obligations. In a ground-breaking study based on interview of more than 7,500 caregivers, Dr. Jody Heymann examined the obligations of American workers to provide for the health, educational and other needs of children, parents, and other adults in their care.6 Her national findings were that in the week of the interviews, 30% missed at least one day of work to meet the needs of family members, 12% missed two or more days, and 5% missed three or more.7
Dr. Heymann learned that children were not the only family members for whom caregivers were required to cut back their working hours. While 42% of absences were to care for children, 15% were for parents, 12% were for spouses or other partners, 7% were for grandchildren, and 24% were for other family members.8
Moreover, Dr. Heymann discovered that the reasons that care is needed are varied.9 They included:
Child care problems 22%
Elder care 5%
Children’s school needs 3%
Transportation for family members 10%
Cope with a death 3%
Other support 31%
Dr. Heymann found that the situation is particularly bleak for low income workers, because "they have both the most substantial problems and the most limited resources."10 She characterized low income parents as being in "multiple jeopardy: single, with limited support, and without job benefits," a profile which fit 38% of low-income working parents in her national study.11 Among the challenges to low income workers that she identified were greater likelihood of child care problems;12 higher incidence of sickness and chronic health conditions among low income children;13 evening and night work and irregular schedules;14 under-resourced schools;15 and lack of money to pay for substitute care when needed (such as days a child is sick or school is closed).16
The demands on low income workers of providing care for disabled family members are particularly noteworthy. Dr. Heymann found that 41% of mothers on welfare for more than two years and 32% of mothers on welfare for two years or fewer had a least one child with a chronic health condition.17 With fewer financial resources for help, the working poor must provide the care themselves. Among those with a disabled child, 49% spent more than one working day a month providing care; 15% spent more than a 40 hour workweek per month. Caregiving demands for other disabled family members are similar.18 Moreover, a disabled child may have special educational needs as well as caregiving needs, requiring additional parental time at school and with homework.19
Sickness or disability of the worker. In addition to providing care for sick or disabled family members, the adult’s own sickness or disability may require absences from work.20 Most higher income workers receive paid sick days in acknowledgment of this reality. But under an inflexible 40 hour a week standard, TANF recipients might be required to make up any missed days, extending their workweek beyond 40 hours in a later period.21
Ironically, under Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act, an employer must allow an employee with a disability to work a modified or part-time schedule as a reasonable accommodation, absent undue hardship.22 If the 40 hour work requirement were to be enacted, that could create the incongruous situation where an employer would be legally required to modify its attendance requirements, but the TANF recipient could be found in non-compliance with the requirements of the TANF program. Moreover, under Title II of the ADA, the state TANF agencies have obligations to ensure that their policies do not discriminate against people with disabilities.23 Thus, an inflexible 40 hour rule could also place the states in a legal quandary.
The worksite is closed. A typical reason for closing is a holiday. At CLS, where we host "transitional workers" who are TANF recipients, our offices are closed for holidays at least once every month from September through February. Under a strict 40-hour policy, our transitional workers would not only not get paid for these holidays, but would have to find a way to add hours (at a time that our office is not open for business) to make them up, to avoid losing their cash assistance.
Mandatory court appearances and jury duty. In our experience, low income clients are particularly likely to have court involvement, such as child welfare system cases, domestic violence hearings (to obtain and enforce protection from abuse orders), and support matters (particularly because child support cooperation is a TANF requirement). These court appearances will conflict with day-time work schedules.
The Philadelphia Unemployment Project (one of our group clients) assisted a participant in the Work Opportunities paid work experience program who was expelled for attending mandatory jury duty to which she was summoned. This is an example of the consequences of rigid work attendance policies.
"Poor people’s shuffle." In addition to court appearances, low income workers often deal with bureaucracies that demand their attendance during work hours and often require them to wait for hours, such as public housing authorities and the welfare office itself. In her study, Dr. Heymann relates the story of a low wage father who decided to go with less food for his family rather than missing work to go to the welfare office to fill out papers for food stamps.24
Family tragedies. For low income people to experience tragedies — children being incarcerated, houses burning down, deaths — is not unusual. The director of Philadelphia’s Transitional Work Corporation reports that a number of participants in his program have had children who committed suicide. Parents living through these tragedies cannot be expected to keep up with a relentless 40 hour a week work schedule.
Other typical reasons people miss work. Like other workers, low income workers are late to work or miss it because of transportation problems. Because they are more likely to use unreliable cars or public transportation, low wage workers have less control over these transportation problems.25 Like other workers, low wage workers occasionally must stay home to await the plumber or a public utility worker. But the 40 hour requirement would provide no flexibility to deal with such emergencies.
Experiences in Pennsylvania in Hours Worked
Among Current and Former TANF Recipients
Our experience has been that our clients have been unable to meet a standard of 30 hours per week, much less forty hours. The Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (DPW) has tried to maximize hours worked by current and former TANF recipients by structuring its programs to require the hours benchmarks established by the TANF work participation rates. But in the face of the reality that many workers were unable to achieve these hours goals on a regular basis, DPW has modified its policies to build in flexibility.
For instance, in February 1999, DPW established a 25 hour per week eligibility standard for persons not receiving TANF (many of them former TANF recipients) to receive subsidized child care. As a result of repeated incidents of parents not qualifying for the subsidies because of missed worked that dropped them below 25 hours pers week, DPW agreed to a policy change that recognized a limited number of temporary exceptions from the 25 hour requirement, for work missed because of disability, medical appointments, employer closings or domestic violence. Nevertheless, many parents continue to have difficulty meeting the 25 hour goal, leading advocates to press for reduction of the hours requirement back to the original goal of 20 hours per week.26
Another manifestation has been attendance at the Transitional Work Corporation program (TWC), Philadelphia’s highly regarded paid work experience program for TANF recipients. TWC was designed to require 25 hours per week of paid work experience at work sites in government and non-profit jobs and 10 hours per week of "professional development" (training and career advising) at TWC’s offices. TWC has consistently insisted that its participants, who have been screened as being among the "hardest to serve," meet these attendance requirements, but many have been unable to do so on a regular basis. In a recent DPW audit of the hours of 20 TWC participants, only 80% of work site hours and 50% of professional development hours were met, despite the high quality of services offered at TWC..
In conjunction with the DPW audit, TWC examined the reasons why its participants fell short of the 25/10 hours goals. Among its conclusions were the following.
During the summer of 2001, DPW announced a program called "Time Out," pursuant to which TANF recipients who are engaged in work activities for 30 hours per week would be taken off the TANF 60-month time clock. Based on the DPW audit, not a one of the 20 participants whose time records were reviewed would qualify for Time Out if their actual hours were counted on a weekly basis, even though TWC provides 35 hours per week of work activities. Along with complaints from advocates that too few persons in 30 hour per week work programs were qualifying for Time Out, the sharp focus brought to this issue by the TWC participants led to clarification by DPW that general compliance with the attendance requirements of a work program of 30 or more hours would qualify a TANF recipient for a Time Out. The reasoning is that a person without good cause would be sanctioned; so if a person below the hours goals remains in the program, they must have good cause for their absences.
What our experiences in Pennsylvania show are that even the current 30 hour goal is unrealistic for many — possibly the majority — of working TANF recipients. If the hours goals are to be adjusted from current law, the adjustment should be downward, not upward. Alternatively, the work participation rate regime must be flexible. Currently, the caseload adjustment credit provides states breathing room to not penalize their working TANF recipients who are doing their best. As in the case of Pennsylvania, it allows them to recognize "good cause" for not meeting the hours goal.
The Consequences of a Requirement that TANF Recipients Work an Average of 40 Hours Per Week Are Counter-Productive.
If an inflexible 40 hour work activity standard were incorporated into the TANF work participation rates, a de facto three-tiered system would be created for dealing with family and personal needs that are in conflict with work.
The irony is that a TANF recipient may have the least capacity to adhere to a 40 hour per week schedule. As noted above, TANF recipients are primarily single parents, with few or no resources to deal with their caregiving and other problems. They may have the most barriers to employment (particularly those remaining on the caseload five years after welfare reform), and they need help to address their barriers, not an inflexible 40 hour requirement.
The broader consequences of a 40 hour standard to the welfare system include the following.
No flexibility for states to work with TANF recipients facing barriers. Given the structure of the work participation rate proposal, a person who does not average 24 hours per week of work would count against the state’s compliance, even if engaged in 40 (or more) hours of work activities. Additionally, even a person meeting the 24 hours of work would not count fully for the state if his or her overall average of work activities were 39 hour or fewer. This rigid and demanding formula may be the worst possible manifestation of a "one size fits all" approach to welfare reform.
People who are doing their best to work will be sanctioned. To meet their work participation rates, states will have no choice but to sanction off people who cannot work 40 hours per week, even if those persons are working to the best of their ability. If the states were to keep such people on their caseloads, their work participation rate compliance would be adversely affected.29
No connection to good outcomes. The goal of the work requirements should be to help TANF recipients to move towards self-sufficiency. However, the 40 hour requirement is a rigid "work for work’s sake" requirement that is not connected to this goal.
Providing 40 hours of activities is costly and difficult. Creating both work and other work activities will be very costly and time consuming for the states. Many states will need to develop a large scale work program that does not currently exist. Costly work supports, such as child care and transportation allowances, also must be provided. For both work programs and work supports, existing programs will need to be expanded by 25% capacity (to cover the jump from 30 to 40 hours per week). These financial costs will be hard for states to meet with flat TANF funding. Moreover, they will divert resources from other priorities, such as helping former TANF recipients move towards self-sufficiency.
Availability of work is ignored. There are no provisions for more lenient goals during period of high unemployment, such as the current recession, or in areas of high unemployment, such as Southwestern Pennsylvania.
The TANF Statute Currently Provides Enough Penalties and Incentives to Maximize Work Activities.
Pennsylvania’s number of participants meeting the work participation rate for Fiscal Year 2000 — 11.2% — may be cited as evidence that the state has not been motivated to make its TANF recipients work. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Pennsylvania dealt with the work participation rates by adopting an aggressive "work first" approach, in which TANF recipients were encouraged to become employed in unsubsidized employment and leave the cash assistance rolls as soon as possible. As a result, it has achieved a large caseload reduction credit. The state’s caseload decline statistics are very revealing in this regard. Of almost 170,000 families on the TANF caseload in February, 1997, when TANF implementation began, only around 9,000, or 5.3%, were on target to hit the five year time limit by the summer of 2001.
Moreover, as has been noted, DPW designed several of its programs to have hours requirements that mirrored the hours required to meet its work participation rates. These include its work programs and its Time Out program, both of which require 30 hours a week of work activities.
Finally, in addition to being pushed by DPW to maximize their work, TANF recipients in Pennsylvania have had positive incentives to increase work hours. The more time worked, the higher the person’s wages and Earned Income Tax Credit, as well as the likelihood of participating in the Time Out program. Like other workers, TANF recipients are likely to want to maximize their income, to the extent possible.
Conclusion
The work participation rate formula proposed by the Bush Administration and others is severely flawed. Many TANF recipients doing their best to work, given their competing non-work obligations, will not be able to meet the hours benchmarks. The states will face daunting challenges in both adequately serving their TANF populations and in complying with the work participation rates. More flexibility, not less, is needed in the TANF work participation rates.
1 The work participation rate would increase from 50% to 70% by FY 2007. Meanwhile, the caseload reduction credit would be completely phased out, except for a very limited credit in which persons leaving welfare for work would count for three months. The upshot of these changes would be that 70% of TANF recipients would have to engage in work activities 40 hours a week by FY 2007. Twenty-four of the 40 hours would be in "work"; the other 16 could be in other specified activities. States would receive pro-rata credit for persons who met the 24 hour work benchmark but did not the 40 hour goal.
2 See, e.g., Annual Average Table from the January 2001 Issue of Employment and Earnings, Tables 19-23, from the Monthly Labor Review Online, December, 2001, Vol. 124, No. 12, available at http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaatab.htm.
3 BLS Handbook of Methods, Chapter 2, available at http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch2_b.htm.
4 Annual Average Table from the January 2001 Issue of Employment and Earnings, supra note 2, at Table 19.
5 Id. at Table 22.
6 Jody Heymann, The Widening Gap: Why America’s Working Families Are in Jeopardy and What Can Be Done About It (Basic Books 2000). Jody Heymann, M.D., Ph.D, is on the faculty of Harvard University and Director of Policy for the Harvard University Center for Society and Health. Among the principal sources of data for her book are the Urban Working Families Study, a national Daily Diaries Study, the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and the Survey of Midlife in the United States. Combined, the studies involved interviews of more than 7,500 caregivers across the country and included multiyear follow-ups. Id. at 7.
7 Id. at 24.
8 Id. at 27.
9 Id. at 24. BLS data show that 20.7% of people working fewer than 35 hours per week, or 6.44 million adults, did so because of child care or other family or personal obligations. Annual Average Table from the January 2001 Issue of Employment and Earnings, supra note 2, Table 20.
10 Id. at 117.
11 Id. at 134.
12 Dr. Heymann found that 33% of caregivers with income below 125% of poverty had to miss hours from work because of child care, compared to 21% of middle and upper income persons. Id. at 28.
13 Id. at 166.
14 Id. at 166.
15 Id. at 131.
16 Id. at 132.
17 Id. at 124.
18 Id. at 124-25.
19 Id. at 74-87.
20 BLS data shows that 759,000 adults working fewer than 35 hours per week did so because of health or medical limitations. Annual Average Table from the January 2001 Issue of Employment and Earnings, supra note 2, Table 20.
21 We assume that making up time missed in one week in another week would be allowed and encouraged, because the Bush proposal (which is not in the form of a bill at the time of this writing) requires that families "average" 40 hours per week of work activities and 24 hours per week of work. However, the proposal is not explicit on whether hours can be made up in another week.
22 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Enforcement Guidance on Reasonable Accommodation (eff. March 1, 1999), Q&A 22, available at http://www.eeoc.gov/docs/accommodation.html#12 (citing Ralph v. Lucent Technologies, Inc., 135 F.3d 166, 172 (1st Cir. 1998)).
23 See, e.g., Prohibition Against Discrimination on the Basis of Disability in the Administration of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, January, 2001 ("the OCR ADA guidance"). It can be found at http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/prohibition.html.
24 Heymann, supra note 6, at 120.
25 Our Philadelphia clients often travel to suburban jobs by public transportation. These commutes, which may require several connections, can easily take three hours a day. The commutes add to the time crunch that our clients experience, even when they work less than full-time.
26 A common reason that clients miss the 25 hour goal is that they are in jobs providing 20 hours per week of work, and they are unable to have their employer increase the hours.
27 29 U.S.C. § 2601 et seq. (providing for up to 12 weeks of leave per year for parental leave and leave because of the worker’s own serious health condition or that of a parent, child or spouse).
28 This is in contrast to the unemployment insurance (UI) program. In Pennsylvania, a worker who is fired for attendance reasons receives UI benefits if there was good cause for the absence.
29 Conversely, the proposed formula creates a perverse incentive for states to keep on the caseload the people who are most able to work (and perhaps least needing of cash assistance), because they will count in the states favor. If the TANF time limit provisions do not change, this will harm working TANF recipients by using up their 60 months of benefits unnecessarily.