>To: Michael Eisenscher >From: Schaffner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: FWD: States Put Limits on Workfare Hiring >Cc: Barry Cohen, Carl Bloice, Carol Lambiase, Charlene Mitchell, Clark Everling, co-Pat Fry, CoC, David Cohen, Harry Targ, Jay Schaffner, Jim Williams, Joy Portugal, Phyllis Willett, Ratner-Merle, Ted Pearson > >Maryland Order Limits Hiring Of People in Workfare Programs >by Louis Uchitelle >New York Times, July 1, 1997, page A-15 > > Responding to protests that people on welfare were being hired to replace regular workers, Gov. Parris N. Glendening of Maryland signed an executive order yesterday to ban the practice. > Two other states, Illinois and Minnesota, have adopted similar rules, but Maryland was the first to act in response to protests from low-wage workers. Some charged that they were being displaced by welfare recipients who were less costly to employers because they still received aid in the form of free child care, subsidized wages and free transportation to their jobs. > *What the Governor responded to,* said Judi Scioli, his press secretary, *was an earnest pleas from low-wage earners that their job security not be jeopardized by our efforts to move people from welfare to work.* > Under recent Federal and state legislation, millions of people are being moved off the welfare rolls and into jobs. Often they pass through a transition stage, called workfare, in which their employment is subsidized or their new employer gets tax credits for hiring them. It is this sort of advantage over the working poor never on welfare that the Maryland executive order and the recently enacted laws in Illinois and Minnesota are intended to ban. > The Maryland order put into effect legislation passed last year, and it applies to public as well as private employers. The Illinois law is the strongest of the three prohibitions - banning not only the displacement of regular workers, but also the hiring of workfare people to fill jobs left vacant because of the resignation of regular employees. > *An example of this is the high level of voluntary turnover among people who clean building or hotel rooms,* said Jonathan Lange, a coordinator in Baltimore for the Industrial Areas Foundation, a community organizing group. > Mr. Lange said his group would seek legislation in Maryland next year banning workfare hiring in that circumstance. > The worker protests that helped to bring about yesterday's executive order had been organized by the Industrial Areas Foundation, along with a coalition of black churches in Baltimore and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. > The protesters' main concern was that workfare would undermine the *living wage* ordinance that Baltimore had enacted at the insistence of the three organizations. The measure requires companies that perform services for the city to pay the employees who actually did the work a wage now set at $7.10 an hour. That is well above the national minimum wage of $4.75 an hour. > In rallies and protests in recent months, workers contracted to clean public schools, for example, asserted that the schools were replacing them with people on workfare. And aides on privately operated buses that transport public school children had said they were being forced to train workfare people to fill their jobs. > >--------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- > >
