Welfare-to-Work Effort on Fast Track

Striding through the cavernous warehouse of the Franklin Brass company with its personnel director, Frank Mora does not waste the opportunity, honing in with the instincts of a born salesman: “Clerical sales, you guys do clerical sales? We have quite a few people with a sales background.

“What about drivers? You guys do delivery? I got someone in mind right now.”

On this occasion, Mora is batting 0 for 2. “No and no,” responds Ileidis Martinez, director of human resources for the Rancho Dominguez-based firm, which assembles and finishes bath-ware fixtures.

Mora, with the air of an ardent suitor and the physique of a bear, is determined to take his last at-bat: “You need a maintenance man? He’s got 10 years experience.”

If he sounds like a particularly persistent advance man for an employment agency, he is--but with a difference. His employer is the county of Los Angeles; his clients, mothers on public assistance.

Mora works full time to pinpoint and cultivate businesses willing to hire welfare recipients, one of a team of 33 job developers whose sole task is to find employment for women, and the few men, enrolled in the state’s welfare-to-work program called GAIN--Greater Avenues for Independent Living.

The Los Angeles County program is in the vanguard of an unprecedented national effort to move millions of aid recipients into jobs, the outgrowth of landmark federal welfare legislation that refocuses 60 years of social policy away from entitlements and toward mandatory work.

In the emerging national laboratory of welfare-to-work, Los Angeles County has become a shining example of success--placing more than 29,000 aid recipients into jobs last year and attracting curious welfare administrators from around the country to study the dramatic improvements firsthand.

The turnaround follows a radical restructuring of the GAIN program four years ago to emphasize employment over education and training--a shift in philosophy that previewed the current national trend.

GAIN is aimed at mothers who receive cash assistance from Aid to Families With Dependent Children. The job program is mandatory for the 112,500 adults in the county’s mammoth AFDC caseload with children over the age of 3. However, because of budgetary constraints, only 39% of those required to participate are being served.

Those fiscal restraints, combined with new impulses in welfare policy, have forged innovations, including a new emphasis on accountability. The performance of managers is now judged on how many people they get to work, said GAIN administrator John Martinelli, although he would not say what kinds of quotas are in place.

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Another big part of the upsurge is based on the careful nurturing that clients now receive. Most are eligible to enroll in Work Pays, a program that allows recipients to keep more than one-third of their earnings while continuing to collect at least a partial grant, food stamps, Medi-Cal and child-care payments, making low-wage or part-time work attractive.

Even after recipients get jobs, Mora and his colleagues continue jockeying to find them better positions with more pay, either within the same company or at a different firm.

It can require delicate maneuvering: during one busy day recently, Mora got a late-afternoon call from the Long Beach Marriott hotel, a regular employer, looking for a bilingual forklift operator, someone who could start right away.

Mora thought he knew of a perfect candidate: a client he had placed recently at Franklin Brass, another regular employer.

“It’s sensitive ‘cause you don’t want to [anger] the current employer,” he said with a twinkle. “With Marriott, the way the [personnel director] approached me was like, ‘I know you’ve got somebody out there in entry level who’s ready to move up.’ See, we’ll put people in the swing shift at Franklin Brass and two weeks later they’ve got some seasoning and experience and they’re ready to give notice.”

But, not to fear, Mora adds: “Ileidis will call me back up saying they need someone else.”

A few minutes later comes another operation requiring the skills of a surgeon. The Larson Training Center, a Carson company that trains people in medical services, is looking for a graduate--one of Mora’s clients--to hire in a full-time position. Mora puts out an all-points bulletin with his colleagues to find the woman. It is determined that she now has a good job at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center--but she might make more at Larson.

“Quality jobs like these, we do about 30 a month,” Mora said. “That is welfare reform in my book, seeing somebody go from $5 an hour to $10 an hour. A job like that might eliminate [reliance on] welfare for that person.”

With the economy on the rebound and a flurry of proselytizing by President Clinton and top business leaders on the necessity of hiring public aid recipients if reform is ever to work, Mora says the time is ripe for hustling.

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The county welfare department has added 50 case managers to funnel welfare recipients into the GAIN program, and since April, many are voluntarily working six-day weeks.

Such doggedness has produced striking numbers. Annual GAIN job placements in the county barely topped 5,000 in 1992-93 and rose to more than 10,000 the next year. Now, more than 4,000 people a month enter the job market, about 70% of them through the efforts of the job developers.

As job placements increase, caseworkers express satisfaction that they finally have something more to offer recipients than lectures and more papers to sign.

Mora and his crew act as equal parts cheerleader and counselor, encouraging recipients to improve their attitudes toward work and boost their abilities through education. One-third of recipients lack such basics as a high school diploma, he said. He has some of them work in his own office for a few weeks to check out their motivation and attendance before sending them out into the world of demanding bosses. Failure is not a part of his lexicon.

As he walks through the vast 240,000-square-foot warehouse of Franklin Brass, it echoes with hellos from workers who found their jobs through Mora, whose personality encompasses a joshing older brother as easily as it does father confessor. He tries to maintain contact with his clients until they are off welfare, and frequently beyond.

The company has been operating for 50 years, says Martinez, and has 425 employees. Of the 61 who work the entry-level swing shift, most are from GAIN.

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“We’ve been working with the county for about a year and we were pretty open to the situation,” said Martinez. “The problems we encounter with this group are the same we encounter with everybody else. They need transportation and child care. Attendance is discussed with all employees and watched very closely.”

Mora’s south region office, which recently added eight job developers, encompasses South-Central Los Angeles, Compton, Watts, Inglewood and Long Beach. In April, the office, which now has a total of 11 job developers, placed 870 clients in jobs. Mora’s goal is to achieve 1,000 placements a month.

Many employers hiring GAIN participants are small and mid-size companies--mom-and-pop restaurants, beauty shops, auto mechanics. But several large companies have also begun to hire them in substantial numbers, including United Airlines, AirTouch Cellular, Pitney Bowes, Microdyne, Hilton Hotels, Great Western Bank and PepsiCo.

If a company has GAIN workers finishing its brass, assembling its computer chips or making its beds, it probably first has been paid a visit by Mora or someone like him.

The job developers employ time-honored sales techniques, cold-calling personnel directors listed in the voluminous Los Angeles Job Bank, 1996 edition, relying on a network of friends and acquaintances for referrals and literally knocking on doors of businesses small and large to hawk their product.

This day, about 15 welfare recipients recommended by Mora have descended on the offices of Adecco, a North Long Beach employment agency that is administering jobs skills tests.

Mora and colleague Lazaro Inguanzo arrive after the testing is completed and take the opportunity to chat up the Adecco managers, a quartet of crisply efficient businesswomen who greet their visitors warmly.

Mora says that about 30% of those hired from his caseload of 8,000 to 10,000 public aid recipients get their jobs through temp agencies.

Arranging job placements through temp agencies has the advantage of masking the fact that the prospective employees are welfare recipients, said Leslie Ann Merrow, vice president and general manager of the Adecco office. Using a temp agency can also be profitable for employers of large numbers of low-wage workers: Someone else has vetted the potential hires and bosses can more easily dismiss them if they don’t work out.

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Much evidence indicates that persistent stereotyping of welfare recipients as lazy and unwilling to work can hamper employment opportunities. Indeed, studies have shown that some employers will pass up tax credits, subsidies and other incentives when they are associated with those on aid.

Of course, gaps in a job history might cause a prospective employer to ask questions that might reveal a disadvantaged past.

A serious and unresolved criticism is that many of the jobs found by the county are of short duration and pay minimum wage. County officials concede that most work involves low pay but say that 65% of the recipients are still working after a year.

“I would venture to say that is better than the general public, although that does not mean we don’t need to work on retention,” said GAIN administrator Martinelli recently.

And for public aid recipients with little or no work history, even short-term work can provide valuable job experience and a source of references, he noted. And most recipients are eager to work when they realize that they can keep child-care and medical benefits for up to a year after becoming employed.

After leaving the Adecco offices, Mora points out that although they work closely together, the county and private employment agencies are frequently in competition. But he asserts, with sly amusement, the county has a big edge.

“They don’t have enough people to fill their openings. They don’t want us to go to their employers, which we do,” he said, and added:

“We explain to [employers] that it is a free service, this is your taxpayer dollars at work. We can mobilize a work force of thousands of people within hours who have been screened.”

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Mora is a good diplomat. At Christmas, he says, the job developers throw a party for all the employers who work with the county to keep the goodwill flowing.

It is a long way from selling soap, which Mora did for 12 years back in St. Louis. Before that, he was a linebacker at St. Louis University, and one wonders that Mora wasn’t able to persuade all his opponents of the benefits of giving up ahead of time.

“Football reinforces the discipline part,” said Mora, taking a quick lunch break with Inguanzo at their favorite restaurant, Cirivello’s Sports Stop. The spot was a natural. They walked in one day two years ago and realized it was a meeting place for area business people. Since then, they have struck many a deal with probably surprised business owners who walked away promising to hire county welfare recipients.

A string of recipients have been hired by the restaurant’s owner to keep bar and wait tables.

“Hard-nosed, a grinder,” Mora continues. “I like to see my people with that kind of positive attitude. The idea that you’ve got to cross the goal line no matter what.”