Can welfare rolls help ease labor shortage?

Can welfare reform help low-income people find gainful employment and also provide new pools of skilled laborers in labor-short areas such as the Front Range?The answer appears to be yes, in some instances. But whether welfare reform can supply the large numbers of skilled workers needed for today’s high-tech firms is still open to question, and most agree the key will be strong employer involvement in the process.
While innovative training programs like those of Blackfox Training Institute LLC and Celestial Seasonings Inc. in Boulder County have been successful and show great promise, their number must swell to provide enough new skilled workers to put a dent in the Front Range labor shortage.
Employer involvement is the key, said Garth Massey, a University of Wyoming sociology professor who just finished a study of welfare reform and believes the various state and federal welfare-reform efforts have “in some ways missed the boat because they haven’t worked with employers.”
“They’ve tended to concentrate on the workers or potential workers themselves. Work-force development really means working as well with employers,” he said. “If you look at all this welfare legislation, there really is almost no recognition of the significance of the employers and the significance of working with them in work-force development.”
Massey’s study suggests that welfare case managers need a better grasp on how to use employment information to help their clients get and keep jobs. But he also concludes there is a strong need to work with communities to ensure that economic-development programs create more than minimum-wage jobs and to develop long-term relationships with employers to make welfare reform work.
“If these people are ever actually going to become sustaining, they’ve got to get into a job that’s going to pay them a living wage,” Massey said. “Most of the hard-to-employ go to work for the minimum wage, or lower. The emphasis really needs to be on training these people so they can be productive enough to make a living wage.”
Specific programs like those at Celestial Seasonings in Boulder and Blackfox Training Institute in Longmont are demonstrating how partnerships between welfare agencies and private companies can help move people off welfare and into the work force.
Blackfox, which trains an average of 40 electronics assemblers a month, recently certified its first class of five welfare recipients, and Vice President Jerry Ward says the institute is expanding its focus on moving people off welfare and into jobs that are in high demand.
“We’re looking forward to being a real contributor to helping these folks get to work,” Ward said. “We get calls here on a daily basis looking for employees, so we’re pretty confident that if we can get those folks in here and through a training program, we can find jobs for them.”
Celestial Seasonings formed a partnership with Boulder County three years ago to train former welfare recipients in administrative skills, and the company’s vice president for people, Marie Gambon, credits Toya Speckman, executive director of Workforce Boulder County, for “trying so hard to build these partnerships with companies so they can be training people to fill skill gaps that the companies may have.”
“I really believe Boulder County is far ahead of many other counties in the state and should use Toya’s model as their model to get moving,” Gambon said.
Similar anecdotal success stories can be found in Wyoming, which launched its own welfare-reform pilot program in 1992 and subsequently expanded statewide more than a year before federal welfare reform. But while there has been a demonstrable drop in enrollment in Aid to Families With Dependent Children, there has been no corresponding drop in Medicaid enrollments nor a jump in total employment.
Frank Galeotos, who heads Wyoming’s Department of Employment, says the future “looks bright” but more detailed studies are needed to determine how former welfare recipients are faring in the job market.
“There’s anecdotal evidence that welfare reform is working,” Galeotos said. “A number (of former recipients) have gone into occupations that would provide them with solid earnings. Many of them clearly can have skill development that would improve their economic self-sufficiency.
“On the other hand, Wyoming’s economy has only so many high-paying jobs,” he added. “I think we can do the job, but like every other state, there’s limitations in terms of the number and types of jobs available.”
Colorado’s situation may be a bit different, where the most serious labor shortages occur in skilled positions in demand in new high-tech industries as opposed to entry-level or support positions most commonly filled by those with fewer job skills.
“I’m sure it will help somewhat, but a lot of them won’t have the background or education or training for a lot of these jobs,” observed Bill Argo, president of the Greeley-Weld Economic Development Action Partnership Inc. “It’s not easy, but then what in life is anymore?”
Weld County alone will have about 1,300 welfare recipients looking for jobs over the next two years, and most of the demand is for skilled workers. “We still have a pretty high-tech area here in Northern Colorado, and I’m not sure how many in that welfare reform group of 1,300 will fit those type jobs,” Argo said.
And Massey cautions that not all welfare recipients are going to be able to move into high-paying, high-skill jobs no matter how much training they get, if for no other reason than a lack of educational background and work skills and competition from people already employed but looking for better jobs.
“Quite frankly, we’re talking a lot of people who are going to be very difficult to employ over the long haul,” he said. “Getting a job is a good start, but for many of these people, all kinds of things get in the way of their keeping a job.”
Massey estimates that a third of all welfare recipients are very employable, another third are employable but will need a lot of help, and the bottom third “are just not going to make it.”
“I hate to be pessimistic, but I’m not very hopeful” that welfare-reform workers will have a big impact on the high-skill job market, Massey said. “The bottom line is we’re just beginning to know what the problems are … and the problems are really huge. It’s not something that can happen overnight. It’s going to take a lot of work and coordination between those who serve welfare clients and those that can provide jobs and work with these people in the long haul.”