Special Report

After 12 weeks of unsuccessful job hunting, she heard that the catfish plant over in Greensboro needed fish cleaners and was filling the jobs fast. Other women had gone to Southern Pride and worked their way off the dole; with a steady job, Ms. Simpson thought, she could, too.

“My mother’s car broke down about 10 miles out of Eutaw the morning I went to apply,” she said, sitting on the sagging front porch of her home in southern Greene County and swatting mosquitoes with the classified advertising section of a newspaper from two counties away. “I couldn’t get a ride to the plant and had to come on home. The car sat there for a week. Next thing I know, the jobs are filled, and they don’t know when they’ll need someone.”

Half a year later, Ms. Simpson is still waiting for the job that people told her would appear when she got her General Equivalency Diploma and started looking for work — really looking. She and her three children are still living on public assistance and wondering when work will come to this rural area, where jobs have always been scarce.

It’s likely they’ll have a long wait.

Ms. Simpson’s situation illustrates why the recent welfare-reform package will do little — if anything — to reduce the number of people living by the government’s largesse in rural areas, says Jack Shelton, director of the Rural Services and Research program at the University of Alabama. He’s spent more than 30 years studying the state’s rural areas and the reasons their economies have slowly but surely shriveled.

“Welfare is not just the problem,” said Shelton, who has preached for years about the death of the state’s rural culture and rural people’s ability to take care of themselves. “It’s a whole set of problems no one is set to address.

“And welfare won’t go away until we do.”

‘Nothing but mosquitoes’

Shelton said he’s tired of seeing leaders and residents of rural counties walking around with cricks in their necks. It’s a long-standing joke with him that the sore necks come from looking to the clouds and waiting for them to drop a plant laden with jobs, not unlike the goose that laid the golden egg.

After all, he said, any time people talk about getting folks in rural areas off welfare, they spout the same line about being helpless to combat poverty and end welfare without industrial jobs. These same areas, however, have seen their employment pools shrink by as much as 1,100 jobs a year in some counties, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of the 47 counties in Alabama that are not metropolitan, only 19 of them saw a gain in nonagricultural wage and salary employment from July 1995 to July 1996. While solid figures on the net number of jobs lost or gained were not available, “cut and sew, come and go,” is the mantra describing factories in rural areas.

“There’s been a lot of rain dancing for factories in Alabama,” said Shelton, whose department has worked with school systems to develop an entrepreneurial spirit and mentality in rural areas. “What they don’t realize is that the factories won’t always come.

“And no matter how many damned factories come in here, the people in rural Alabama are always going to be at the bottom of the money scale in that kind of system.”

When Ms. Simpson and her friends started thinking about getting jobs, they, too, thought the answer to their money problems would be found on a factory line. Each week they worked the local gossip chains to see which plants were hiring and if any were planning on moving to the area.

Now Greenetrack, a nearby greyhound racing track, has closed, taking jobs with it.

Greene County commissioners — as well as their counterparts in neighboring counties — say they don’t see any major manufacturer coming in anytime soon.

“Don’t know why I’m surprised,” said Annie Parsons, Ms. Simpson’s nearest neighbor and a welfare recipient for seven years. “Nothing ever comes in here. Nothing but mosquitoes.” Instead of praying for a factory, Shelton said, rural leaders and residents should be working to create their own job opportunities.

They should take advantage of the resources in their areas and make money from them before corporations from other states and countries do.

In Cedar Bluff, one of the programs Shelton’s department helped start has grown into a $300,000-a-year business. The high school’s computer class has evolved into a computer-assembly business, and in the process, turned into an economic incubator for the area.

“It had to be something entrepreneurial in nature,” said Rick Clifton, computer science teacher at Cedar Bluff High School and director of the student-run computer-assembly business. “We had no idea that it would work or that it would work so well.” The business, which Shelton said is a good example of how rural people can make their own opportunities and still keep pace with the high-tech job arena, started five years ago in a small room in back of the computer science department. Clifton and the students rounded up some customers, applied for grants and eked out $10,000 in business their first year.

Now they have clients in states as far away as Oregon, employ about 25 students and are a major training facility for people who want local jobs working with computers.

“This is not about money,” said Clifton, who is originally from Anniston. “It’s about educational and job opportunities these areas need.”

‘They’ll just move’

Shelton predicts that rural communities will have to make use of their schools if the welfare-reform programs have a chance of succeeding. The schools — if used properly — can provide information and an infrastructure that will reduce barriers to welfare mothers getting jobs.

Some schools have toyed with the idea of setting up day-care centers to help with the expected child-care crunch that will hit rural areas when work requirements kick in three years from now.

Shelton also would like to see an increased emphasis on gardening so rural people can grow and preserve some of their own food to stave off hunger during lean times as they once did. Other school systems have talked about being information clearinghouses for job-seekers who don’t have telephones, cars or access to news about employment prospects. Some may consider letting poor workers ride on school buses to get to jobs since reliable transportation is unheard of for most of them.

People should remember that this undeveloped infrastructure is in counties with already high unemployment rates, Shelton said. In Greene County, unemployment tops 18 percent. Sumter County’s rate is 11 percent and Perry County’s is 13 percent. People such as Ms. Simpson and Ms. Parsons whisper about being able to find work in Tuscaloosa, but the 120-mile round trip is one they could never make regularly. It would be a struggle to make it to Greensboro, about 15 miles away.

In those rural counties, public-service employment may be the only answer, said Joel Sanders, director of the state’s welfare-reform unit at the Department of Human Resources. Even if jobs were to appear magically in each of those counties, connecting workers to them would be a monumental — if not impossible — task given the information and transportation problems.

Rep. Jim Carns, D-Mountain Brook and chairman of the state’s welfare-reform commission, said he doesn’t expect jobs to come to the state’s Black Belt. He said the answer for people in those areas, where the unemployment rate hovers near 15 percent, is to go to Birmingham, where it’s 5 percent.

“They’ll just move,” said Carns, who believes the reform package as a whole can work. “We have to face the reality of putting people in a permanent welfare state or putting them in an environment where they can work and survive.”

Ms. Simpson said she’d love to be in an environment where she can get a job. The five years she’s been on welfare haven’t been easy, and she knows her life isn’t as good as that of the women who gut fish for a living in Hale County.

If she could, she’d move to Birmingham, where her sister went three years ago to take a job. Now her sister has a car and a Habitat for Humanity home.

“If they want to come down here and load all my stuff up, yeah, I’ll be glad to go to Birmingham and work,” she said. She smiled softly, then looked down a drive pockmarked with potholes and occupied by two lounging dogs. Her gaze carried a little farther to a grove of pine trees that flank the road that eventually leads north. “But I don’t see anyone coming. Do you?”