It took Mary Lou Rockwell, a job counselor and social worker at the Metro South/West Regional Employment Board’s Framingham office, three days to get through what is usually a one-hour introductory session. But Jenifer Lang, her new client, was nervous, and she couldn’t look Rockwell in the eye.
However much she hid it, Lang was proud of having graduated from a substance-abuse treatment program–she had been clean for 18 months–where she also earned her GED. She was also proud of her two children. But that was about it. Her son was in a residential home in Fall River; since she had no driver’s license and no car, it took Lang two trains and a bus–four hours one way–to visit him. She had been on welfare all her adult life, just like her mother and grandmother before her. And there was an abusive ex-partner she was trying to avoid.
That was three years ago. Ever since then, Rockwell has been helping Lang along the road to independence. She helped Lang develop a household budget, then sent her to a doctor and dentist for her first checkups in years. After a while, Lang got her first job, a subsidized position at a human-services agency that gave her days off to see her son. Soon she advanced to an unsubsidized receptionist post for $7.65 an hour. For Lang, it was a breakthrough.
“After working six months, she said, ‘I didn’t know I would be able to do this,'” Rockwell remembers. Lang took courses in personal grooming and got used to dressing up for work. She took driving lessons, then bought a car. “That was probably the biggest issue,” Rockwell says. Having a car “really frees her up.”
Lang is now earning $11 an hour and her son has come home. Her case is officially closed, but she still sees Rockwell every week or so for support. And Rockwell isn’t done yet. She’s now encouraging Lang to think about getting more training. Lang’s current wages don’t quite cover her expenses–she still relies on a federal housing subsidy and fuel assistance–but she’s close.
The difficulties Jenifer Lang has faced in getting ahead in the job market are not unusual, according to Sylvia Beville, Rockwell’s boss and director of the Metro South/West Regional Employment Board. “It’s not like people come in, train for two weeks, and get an $18-an-hour job,” she says. But until recently, most job-training programs would have left Lang with that first work placement–no help getting her driver’s license, her car, her job promotion, or further education. Lang could get more help, over time, thanks to changes in federal job-training rules. But one of the reasons she did get more help was that Metro South/West adopted a new benchmark for program success called the “Self-Sufficiency Standard.”
The Self-Sufficiency Standard refers to the income a working adult must earn in order to cover essential costs such as housing, transportation, and child care. In contrast to the more rigid “poverty line” set by the federal government, the newer benchmark takes into account variables such as family size and the cost of living in particular areas, right down to the county. The standard was created in the early 1990s by Diana Pearce, then the director of the Women and Poverty Project at Wider Opportunities for Women, a national advocacy group; Pearce’s real-world poverty line has been calculated for 14 states and the District of Columbia. The Self-Sufficiency Standard for an adult with two children in Berkshire County is $23,856 a year, $35,616 in Boston.
In Massachusetts, the standard has been championed by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, a Boston-based service and advocacy group. WEIU is pushing the standard as a means of setting higher goals for the Commonwealth’s education and training programs, which could translate into higher wages, especially for women.
“This is a reality-based measure of what it costs to live in the 21st century,” says Laura Russell, director of the Work and Family Resource Center at WEIU. “The poverty standard is nearly 40 years out of date.”
Staying flexible
The federal Workforce Investment Act of 1998 gives local agencies, such as Metro South/West, more latitude to set their own goals, allowing them to serve workers earning wages above destitution levels and to continue training and counseling after clients have initially found jobs. The idea was to streamline the delivery of services, offer more consumer choice, and hold local agencies accountable for results, not compliance with restrictive regulations.
This new flexibility is helpful, Rockwell says, because first-time job holders often run into problems soon after placement. “We can help if their car breaks, or they need a wardrobe,” Rockwell notes. “I’ve even gone to the point of buying laundry detergent for people. It’s unbelievable, the problems people have.”
Having meaningful goals helps people get through the rough spots, too, and that’s where the Self-Sufficiency Standard comes in. Metro South/West adopted the standard as a programmatic goal two years ago, so that clients and agencies alike would have a more realistic sense of what success looks like.
It’s not that most low-income people don’t know they have trouble making ends meet, or that most counselors don’t know that the career-advancement programs they have available to them won’t get clients onto Easy Street. But the Self-Sufficiency Standard makes “good enough” concrete, encouraging struggling individuals to keep their eyes on the economic prize. With self-sufficiency as a real-world goal, counselors can push workers to apply for promotions, get additional training, and even change industries so they eventually earn wages high enough to live and pay their bills without government subsidy.
In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New York, where the Self-Sufficiency Standard has been put into operation by many agencies, counselors use computer-based worksheets to figure out self-sufficiency wages and calculate when clients are fully able to pay their own way. Massachusetts agencies do not yet have such precise tools, but WEIU is lobbying the Legislature for a bill that would give counselors software for the Self-Sufficiency Standard –and make self-sufficiency the programmatic gold standard for work force boards like Metro South/West. WEIU would cover half the $200,000 cost of developing the software and updating it every two years, with the state matching that sum. But in the midst of the burgeoning fiscal crisis, efforts to get that $100,000 out of Beacon Hill have failed so far.
In the meantime, some agencies have given their counselors rough estimations of the self-sufficiency standard in their area, but advocates say that’s only a stop-gap solution. “We want to make it happen formally,” says Elizabeth Zarrella of WEIU. “We need an accurate benchmark of what it is a family needs to make ends meet.
It isn’t just families that need to know what success means. Employment and training programs are coming to recognize that their clients face high hurdles to economic success. According to the 2000 MassINC report New Skills for a New Economy, 1.1 million Bay State residents–one in three adult workers–lack the necessary language and skill knowledge to compete in the modern job market. About half this group holds high-school diplomas but still cannot perform tasks necessary to succeed in today’s knowledge-intensive workplace; nearly 200,000 are not fluent in English. It is these people who show up on the doorstep of job-training agencies looking for a way off welfare or unemployment.
But these agencies have no quick fix, at least not by self-sufficiency standards. A report released in November by WEIU and Commonwealth Corp., a quasi-public agency that administers work force initiatives for the state, revealed that many job-training programs are not getting clients into jobs that cover their costs. Reviewing three federally funded programs, WEIU found that programs for economically disadvantaged adults, former welfare recipients, and displaced workers moved clients into jobs, but in most cases (99 percent in the case of welfare-to-work) left them earning less than self-sufficiency wages.
These results shocked no one in the job-training world, since it’s well known that for most clients, particularly those with low skill levels, the first job is just an initial step in a long march for economic advancement. But initial press reports made it sound as if the programs were useless. TRAINING PROGRAMS FAILING TO HELP, blared The Boston Globe. (Commonwealth Corp. had its name taken off later press releases on the report, though vice president Paul Neidzwicki denies that his organization was running for political cover.)
The reaction points up an inherent problem in setting such a high standard of success: It makes any more modest improvement look like failure. “This was one of the worst things imaginable to do, to evaluate a moderately funded effort by whether it can raise someone’s income by $30,000,” says Andrew Sum, an economics professor and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. “No program in the history of mankind could meet that. They did job training a great disservice. People need to rethink how they use this standard.”
For Sum, the WEIU standard sets the bar misleadingly high. “Everyone agrees that the poverty statistics for Massachusetts don’t reflect the cost of a non-poor standard of living,” he says, but he would prefer a three-tier measurement system that would set one level under which no family should fall, an intermediate low-income level, and a high low-income level to reflect different standards of living. The self-sufficiency standard could be used as “a counseling tool” to set a goal to work toward, says Sum.”There’s nothing wrong with that, but we also need a minimum standard of living.”
But Ralph Whitehead Jr., public-service professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a former advisor to the US secretary of labor, argues that the self-sufficiency standard, highlights a true dilemma in the work force development system, which generally consists of short-term programs that lead directly to readily obtainable jobs. “One of the difficulties revealed by the standard is that the amount of money you would have to earn to meet the standard [for a Boston single-parent family with two kids] is roughly the amount earned by a typical woman with a four-year college degree,” he says. “Either we have to [upgrade] education and training to lead to more four-year degrees or cut the price of housing.”
Beville acknowledges that the Metro South/West board hesitated about adopting the self-sufficiency standard precisely because it could make all of their programs seem as if they were falling short. “But the board said, the standard is a measure of our impact on lower-income people,” she adds.
And it’s important to know what that impact is–and isn’t. “Obviously, a program can’t be expected to help someone go from $12,000 to $32,000 [annual salary] in a few months,” says Russell of WEIU. “But if help to a worker ends with a $14,000 placement, that family will continue to face hardship and require deep subsidies for years.”
Up the job ladder
But there are ways to put the Self-Sufficiency Standard to work that go beyond revealing the shortcomings of job-training programs. It can also be used to encourage–and shape–other job advancement efforts. Laurie Sheridan, head of the Boston Workforce Development Coalition, has been talking with several Boston nursing homes about their staffing problems: shortage of nursing aides, high employee turnover, and workers who won’t work overtime because they have another job to go to. Sheridan used the Self-Sufficiency Standard to show these employers that their workers needed to hold down two or even three jobs to make ends meet because of low wages that do not rise with skill or experience. That left them with no time to put in overtime–and little incentive to stay put.
“There was no reflection of a worker’s experience, skills, or patience in the scheduling or pay,” says Sheridan, whose nonprofit coalition of training providers received a grant from the Commonwealth Corp. for the nursing home project. “People would leave after a couple of months, because they were not rewarded.”
Sheridan worked with the homes to create career pathways, mentoring programs, and training schedules for employees who were willing to take on greater responsibilities in order to earn more money. In some facilities, she says, employee retention rates have increased dramatically, allowing the nursing homes to save enough money through increased productivity and reduced expenses (such as help-wanted ads) to recoup their investments. “It was a hard sell at first,” she says, “but they began to see it was revenue neutral.”
Even with such improvements, nursing-home wages remain below self-sufficiency levels for most families. Mary Sarris, director of the Southern Essex Workforce Investment Board, in Salem, says that nursing-home workers can’t really get their financial heads above water until they move on to higher-paying positions in hospitals, which are also facing staff shortages. And her organization is prepared to help them get there.
The Southern Essex board has used the Self-Sufficiency Standard and the greater latitude of the Workforce Investment Act to loosen eligibility for its training courses. “We have people above the [federal] low-income standard who are getting training because they fall under the Self-Sufficiency Standard,” Sarris says. When the board used the poverty line as the chief criterion for eligibility, she notes, working adults were shut out, even though an $8,000 salary for a single person “barely buys you groceries for a year.” But as of last November, Southern Essex opened its counseling and training programs to anyone in its region who is eligible for public housing (around $36,000 for a family of four) or federal fuel assistance.
Sarris says Southern Essex counselors show people making entry-level wages how they can prepare themselves for positions that will pay them better. Unfortunately, she says, “you have to be incredibly persistent to work your way through successfully [to self-sufficiency].”
That understanding is percolating through to program administrators, as well. At Metro South/West, the work force board realized that many low-wage workers who needed more skills to move up to jobs that could support their families couldn’t afford to get training, even short-term, if it meant they couldn’t work at the same time. So the agency is looking to set up in-house training programs in workplaces, for which there is federal grant money. It’s more convenient for workers, boosts attendance, and fits in with the idea that a self-sufficiency job is not one 12-week training program away.
“We have to stop thinking sequentially–that you work, then train, then work–and think about working and training in tandem,” says Sylvia Beville, director of the board. “We need delivery models within work.”
Sarris, of the Southern Essex board, agrees. “One thing you come to realize in this business is that it’s really, really hard as an adult to be doing things you usually do between the ages of 6 and 21,” like going to school full-time, she notes. “The responsibilities of the adult world come down on you–children, paying for food, rent.”
Up to self-sufficiency
The Self-Sufficiency Standard is a far cry from the 1980s slogan, “Up to Poverty.” That rhetorical device used the gap between welfare checks and the poverty line to try to embarrass state officials into increasing cash support for poor families. Although the Self-Sufficiency Standard can cause embarrassment as well when it reveals gaps between the stated goal of education-and-training programs–moving the destitute into the economic mainstream–and their short-term results, it can also be used to encourage clients and agency administrators alike to think long-term, to plan and provide support for a slow, steady climb toward higher skills and higher incomes.
But the Self-Sufficiency Standard has its utility in advocacy, as well. In Brockton, Salvador Pina, director of the Brockton Area Workforce Investment Board, has been using the concept to lobby state legislators for more money in English as a Second Language and Adult Basic Education programs to give the least skilled a fighting chance to get started on their rise to self-sufficiency.
Pina has also invoked the standard in meetings with the local economic development office, pointing out that when the city is recruiting new industries to Brockton officials needed to take into account whether they pay wages sufficient to pave the way to self-sufficiency. “I told them $8 an hour is okay as a starting wage, but we want a career path so people can exceed that,” he says. “People making that would need more than one job.”
Perhaps the most daunting problem facing proponents of this new higher benchmark is that job-training programs don’t have enough funds to meet needs under the old poverty standard. John Donahue, a faculty member of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who worked on reforming the education-and-training system during the Clinton administration, calls work force development “the poor stepchild of the human capital system.”
Nationwide, Donahue says, the amount of job training money available for each eligible worker is less than $6.50 per year. Given such limited resources, he says, “Either you put serious money on a trivial number of workers, or you spread it out beyond what’s helpful.”
Last summer, there seemed to be hope that skill building for working adults would no longer be the poor stepchild of government, at least on the state level. Acting Gov. Jane Swift recommended an increase of $22 million for such programs, including high-school equivalency classes and instruction in ESL, and set in motion a review of the state’s job-training bureaucracy.
But that was before the recession kicked in and the state budget became a battleground. In the much-delayed budget passed in December, the Legislature cut adult basic education funding nearly in half, from $30 million to $17 million, which would have forced most programs to close mid-year and cost the state more than $10 million in federal funds. An outcry ensued, but only enough to return adult-ed funding to nearly the status quo ante.
In the short run, that left self-sufficiency proponents out in the cold. But in the long run, they say pursuing the standard of self-sufficiency is the only way the needy can succeed, at least if true independence is the goal. “When you think about someone over a lifetime not earning enough–they need other support,” says WEIU’s Russell. “That’s more expensive than having people in the work force who can sustain themselves and [pay] taxes.”
Andreae Downs is a freelance writer in Newton.