Special Report

Everyone – including welfare mothers – agrees the key to getting off the public dole is keeping a job that will pay enough to make employment worthwhile.

In a state with traditionally low wages, finding that job can be hard, especially for people with little or no training, as is the case with most people on welfare.

The Alabama Department of Human Resources has a job-training partnership with at least five corporations willing to provide jobs and on-site services to make the transition from welfare to full-time employment easier. Keeping those partnerships and expanding them to other businesses is expected to be a critical factor in reducing the state’s welfare rolls.

One of those partners is in Hale County, where each week a million pounds of catfish are run through the Southern Pride processing plant. Filleting the fish is a messy, smelly job, but for many of the plant’s 450 employees, it provides a glimmer of hope that they’ll be able to get off welfare for good.

“I knew we had clients who needed jobs, and I knew they had openings,” said Teresa Costanzo. As Hale County’s DHR director, she helped begin the program with Southern Pride about 18 months ago.

“We’ve seen such positive results.”

Southern Pride had a hard time keeping a full-time work force because it is a minimum-wage employer, said corporate controller Garry Smith. Many employees were on food stamps or other forms of public assistance, and they often had to take time off work to go to the office to pick up checks or their food coupons.

The company, which is the nation’s second-largest catfish producer, was studying the possibility of bringing in workers from Mexico to meet demand. Ms. Costanzo went to Smith at Southern Pride to see if there was any way welfare clients could be plugged into the work force and kept there.

The plant set up a mini-service center to offer the agency and its wide range of services to employees who were on welfare. It started with Aid to Families with Dependent Children and has expanded to include food-stamp distribution. In Hale County, 27.7 percent of the county’s 15,399 residents were on food stamps in 1994.

In addition to food stamp distribution, the center offers structured life-skills classes to employees, teaching them how to manage money, deal with co-workers and handle simple problems that stem from having a full-time job. Many welfare employees had no idea what to do if their car broke down on the way to work. Instead of finding alternate transportation, they just didn’t show up. Some didn’t even know they needed identification to apply for jobs or what to do if the baby-sitter didn’t show.

While on the payroll, the welfare employees go to the classes half a day, then fillet fish the rest of the work day for the first week or so. Class attendance tapers off as welfare workers become better equipped to manage their lives.

“It takes more than just giving a person a job,” Smith said. “Some people have come from a household where work ethic wasn’t stressed. Sometimes we have a group where most of them have never really held a job.”

Setting up the partnership has taken time, money and patience. Southern Pride has spent at least $50,000 on its program, Smith said, but the result has been better employees and a more reliable work force.

Such partnerships depend on the stability of the employer and its willingness to take a chance on welfare workers. A Tallapoosa County sewing plant that maintained a partnership with DHR recently closed, leaving 12 women without jobs.

Calhoun County DHR workers have inquired about setting up a similar program, but the effort is in its infancy. The county uses its JOBS program to provide training and contacts for more than 450 people on welfare, but it has yet to forge a direct tie with an employer.

The JOBS program, which was started by the federal government in 1988, has been the main tool DHR uses to get General Equivalency Diploma education and basic skills training for people on welfare. It provides subsidized child care and help with transportation while people are in training or getting their GEDs. After that, it is hoped they will be self-sufficient enough to survive without the subsidies and public assistance.

In 1993, Alabama ranked third in the nation in the percentage of eligible people participating in the program and was first in the Southeast.

That success has a big footnote, though, said Joel Sanders, director of the state’s welfare-reform unit. About 20,000 women on welfare in Alabama are exempt from the JOBS program because they have at least one child 3 years or younger or some other hardship. “So when we talk about doing a good job, we talk about doing a good job with those left over,” he said. It’s hard for a program to make a huge impact when almost half of the welfare recipients don’t have to participate, he noted.

The program started in Alabama in April 1990. Right now, 5,000 to 6,000 people are in JOBS programs, and about 400 go off welfare each month. If participants don’t attend classes, actively work to find a job or meet other similar requirements, their welfare checks can be cut and food stamps reduced under mandatory sanctions. From October to June, an average of 4,700 participants per month lost benefits for not meeting the requirements.

In addition to tough requirements, part of the JOBS success can be attributed to a bustling Alabama economy, Sanders said. Its continued health will depend on the ability — and the will — of the state to pay for those services and on the willingness of employers to hire welfare workers.

Smith, the Southern Pride executive, said he understands many employers won’t spend thousands of dollars to hire and train people on welfare. Many would prefer to bring in immigrant workers, thinking that will solve their labor problem.

“I don’t think we want to do that,” Smith said. “If you talk about immigrant labor, you’re going to make an investment there. If you talk about keeping people on welfare, that’s another investment.

“We’re going to pay for it, one way or the other.”