What's the problem with the city's welfare-to-work program? If you ask L. Daneek Miller, chair of the New York City Council's civil service task force, it's that people got jobs.
"It's a broken system that placed low-skilled workers in low-wage jobs," he thundered at a recent hearing.
Instead, Miller supports Mayor de Blasio's plan to shift low-skill workers into higher paying jobs, through the magic of municipal statism for social services. Wall Street, Madison Avenue and the city's growing tech sector will foot the bill.
It all sounds perfectly reasonable — if it wasn't so wrong.
Experience shows us that more government training does not guarantee better jobs, and it increases the number of people living off taxpayers while they look for the "right" employment.
That hasn't stopped de Blasio from turning the city's massive aid agency over to Stephen Banks, a leading "welfare-rights" advocate who plans to undo welfare-to-work.
De Blasio can be more aggressively liberal on welfare because most New Yorkers are barely aware of the policies that reduced welfare rolls from 1.1 million, when Rudy Giuliani took over from de Blasio mentor David Dinkins, to the current 350,000. Giuliani's program was more aggressive about getting people back to work, reforms that were so successful that 75 percent of those placed into jobs remained off welfare a year later.
From 1994–2009, work rates for single mothers rose from 43 percent to 63 percent. Overall labor force participation rose from under 55 percent to more than 60 percent (during a period when labor force participation nationwide declined). In 2011, even after the Great Recession, child poverty in NYC was almost 10 percentage points lower than in 1993, the year before welfare reform started.
Mayor Bill de BlasioPhoto: David McGlynn
Now de Blasio is proposing to replace these successes. Reviving the hoary notion of entry-level work as representing "dead-end jobs," de Blasio suggests that, from the get-go, welfare recipients are owed more than an opportunity to work.
Enter job training and classroom learning, goodbye rapid placement into the workforce — with the Office of Workforce Development, a new layer of city bureaucracy, to implement it all.
More training and education admittedly sounds nice but has a dismal record of advancing the interests of the poor. De Blasio's plan, notes former Giuliani welfare commissioner Jason Turner, "acknowledges that welfare skills training does not work . . . then goes on to recommend a 'new and improved' version."
And while some may still remember New York's bad old welfare heyday of the late '80s and early '90s, the mayor's inspiration extends back further still, to 1933 and FDR's ill-fated National Industrial Recovery Act.
The historical lesson the "reformers" fail to note is that experience matters more than training.
In de Blasio's updated 2014 version, NYC will use its considerable purchasing power, contracts, subsidies, tax breaks and regulatory powers to remedy the "mismatch" between demand for skilled workers and the almost 25 percent of its total labor force earning less than $20,000 annually.
De Blasio's team intends to end this mismatch by creating NIRA-style "Industry Partnerships" that "will work to determine the skills and qualifications that employers need." Low-skill workers will be prepared for skilled work through better evergreen training and education.
If that fails, the city will use its "leverage" to impose "penalties" for noncompliance. Those who do comply (or perhaps contribute sufficiently to de Blasio's political coffers) will be awarded a "NYC Good Business Seal," reminiscent of FDR's NRA Blue Eagles placards. (Workforce agencies, in turn, will be reimbursed on the basis of job quality, not placement quantity.)
Nevertheless, as Mayor de Blasio's task force acknowledges, "There is very little data that can be used to validate good job quality and business practices." Hardly reassuring.
Commissioner Jason Turner at City Hall in 2000.Photo: Michael Norcia
The historical lesson the "reformers" fail to note is that experience matters more than training. Former welfare commissioner Turner explained to the City Council that, in the real world, businesses tend to hire, say, $18-an-hour workers from existing $12-an-hour employees with proven records of reliability and effort. Low-skill workers, noted Turner, need good work habits before acquiring new skills to enhance earnings.
Still, with the exception of Councilman Dan Garodnick, the Council politely ignored Turner's effective deflation of the task force's proposal. To the man who helped implement the wildly successful reforms the Council now proposes to discard, not a single question was posed.
In 1935, the NIRA was dismantled when the Supreme Court struck it down as an unconstitutional extension of federal government powers. De Blasio's gimcrack proposals may last longer but have no better chance of success.
Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is scholar in residence at St. Francis College. Robert Doar is Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. From 2007–2013, he served as Commissioner of the Human Resources Administration, NYC's principle social-services agency.
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