Something’s not working.
That’s the simple takeaway from my reading of a 191-page report released last month by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission on “Virginia’s Self-Sufficiency Programs and the Availability and Affordability of Child Care.” The main news coverage of the report dealt with the child care portion of the report; you can read what I wrote about that on Monday.
Today, I’ll deal, Paul Harvey-style, with the rest of the report, which I’m surprised hasn’t gotten more attention because its findings are so bleak. The short version: Our welfare programs — “self-sufficiency programs” is the preferred term — aren’t really working, but it’s not for the reasons you might think.
It’s not that people don’t want to work; it’s that the jobs they’re taking don’t get them out of poverty — or sometimes even out of those self-sufficiency programs.
JLARC examined the numbers for 265,000 participants in the three main self-sufficiency programs: Virginia Initiative for Education and Work (VIEW), in which most adult participants in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are required to participate; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); and the SNAP Employment and Training program. JLARC found that those programs “have limited impact on participants’ employment and wages. Employment rates for these VIEW and SNAP E&T participants did not increase over time, and while half experienced wage increases by 2022, the median wage for the group remained below the federal poverty threshold. By 2022, very few participants earned wages that would allow them to be self-sufficient (2 percent of TANF-VIEW clients and 7 percent of SNAP E&T clients).”
That raises the obvious question: Why? Why aren’t these programs helping move people out of poverty?
JLARC doesn’t blame the poor. It blames the rules: “VIEW policies encourage activities that will lead to relatively lowpaying, dead-end, unstable jobs.”
More specifically: “In general, VIEW clients are not encouraged to pursue employment with advancement opportunities. Virginia’s VIEW policy dictates that clients who are not already working full time should be assigned job search as their first VIEW activity. Clients assigned to job search are required to make job contacts and must accept an offer of full-time employment that pays at least minimum wage. This policy encourages clients to quickly obtain employment, regardless of the quality or wage potential of the job. While obtaining any full-time job may be an improvement to the clients’ immediate economic situation, these jobs generally do not lead to selfsufficiency in the long term. Most of the VIEW clients examined by JLARC staff became employed in industries and jobs with low wages. The majority of these clients did not work full time (40 hours per week), did not work consistently, or did not make at least the minimum wage.”
Let’s repeat that for emphasis: Most of the people in the program took jobs — but those jobs didn’t get them out of poverty.
One obvious solution would be to better connect these “self-sufficiency clients” with various workforce training programs so they can be trained for better-paying jobs that would lift them out of poverty. The report says that’s not really happening — partly because the VIEW rules encourage quick turnarounds into those low-paying, unstable, dead-end jobs, and partly because workforce programs often aren’t set up in ways that are convenient.
This connects to something I’ve often heard in discussions about community colleges, the main delivery mechanism for many of those workforce training programs: Imagine you’re poor. You don’t have a car — so how do you get to the community college? If you live in an urban area, such as Roanoke, there’s a bus system, but bus routes may not mesh well with class schedules. If you’re in a rural area, you’re basically out of luck — there’s no bus that will get you to, say, Mountain Gateway Community College in Clifton Forge.
There’s also the problem of child care: Can you find it? Can you afford it?
Community colleges have in recent years begun emphasizing “wraparound services” — setting up food pantries and even child care centers — but that presumes students can get to the school first.
What we have here is a major disconnect: We have businesses clamoring for workers, we have government pushing to get workers trained for those jobs, and we have a population of people who need work. We just have trouble lining them up with the training programs they need.
“Few (less than 2 percent) self-sufficiency clients enrolled in the state’s workforce development system each year from FY18 to FY22,” JLARC reports. Those numbers have also been declining as the worker shortage has become more severe.
JLARC identified multiple structural problems that contribute to this disconnect.
First, case workers are overwhelmed: “State law and federal regulations require that clients receive intensive case management throughout their participation in self-sufficiency programs, but local department staff reported being unable to meet this standard because of high caseloads. The median number of VIEW clients per worker was 32 as of August 2023; however, some workers’ VIEW caseloads were as large as 169 clients. Many VIEW and SNAP E&T workers reported carrying caseloads for other benefit programs, such as SNAP or Medicaid, increasing the median total number of clients per worker to 77.”
The report quotes one unnamed case worker as saying “we are just trying to get by” given the volume of clients: “Clients will not be successful if [I] meet with them, give them [an] activity for six weeks, and don’t do anything with them. We’re generally not checking back with the client until the end of the activity. Current caseloads prevent us from doing much engagement and follow-up with clients.”
Second, the social service system isn’t always well-coordinated with the workforce development system. In some places, it’s quite good. In other places, not so much. JLARC points out that social service offices and workforce development centers are often in different places — a special problem for those without transportation. “Without formal mechanisms requiring coordination, state and local staff across both local departments and workforce development agencies described collaboration as being highly dependent on the personalities and relationships of individual staff working in local offices,” the report said. “This informal approach does not ensure coordination when there is frequent turnover, which occurs often, especially with local social services workers.”
That turnover, by the way, is often north of 25% per year. Is there any wonder? JLARC tells us: “In March 2023, the average wage of all benefit workers, excluding supervisors and managers, in Virginia was $36,400, which is below the self-sufficiency standard for a one adult/one child household in many parts of Virginia.”
The report also pointed out that because of that high turnover, many social services workers are inexperienced and often don’t know what workforce development options are available. If they don’t know, their clients won’t, either.
The report spends maybe a hundred more pages detailing other bureaucratic shortcomings but you get the idea: The system isn’t working well at moving people toward self-sufficiency, and it’s not necessarily their fault.
Social service programs are one of the easiest things to stereotype. We saw that this summer with Oliver Anthony’s viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which jabbed at “the obese milkin’ welfare.”
There’s probably somebody milking welfare somewhere, because there’s always somebody milking something somewhere, but this JLARC report suggests the problem is a lot more complicated than that. If only someone could write a catchy song about this report, maybe it would get more attention.