State Law Change Modifies City's Workfare Rules

A little-noticed change in the state law has modified the city's workfare rules to allow a larger group of welfare recipients to use education and training against "work" requirements they must meet to continue receiving welfare benefits.

Last year, the city's Human Resources Administration drafted a proposal for a state law that changed the participation rules for the state's so-called Safety Net Program. That program gives welfare assistance to residents who don't qualify for federal payments because they have no children and residents who surpassed the five-year time limit on federal welfare benefits.

The federal program for families, known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF, requires 30 hours a week of work. For most of the TANF clients, 20 hours of that minimum requirement must be on a job. Now, with the change in the state law, the balance of that time can be education, training, or job-searching, for both TANF clients and those in the Safety Net Program.

"Previously, clients in the state program who did not have children were not permitted to participate in education and training - the requirement was to have it all be work," the spokesman for the city agency, Robert McHugh, told The New York Sun. "Now, when we do our assessment of clients we have the option to assign them to education and training for part of their work requirement."

The change in the program, first reported in City Limits, is an about-face for the Bloomberg administration. The mayor had vetoed a City Council bill for Access to Training and Education last year that would have done much the same thing as the change the administration proposed and got passed by the Legislature. The Council proposal cast the net a little wider and would have included four-year colleges as part of the work requirement.

Council Speaker Gifford Miller, who is running for mayor, said the change in the law was about election-year politics.

"While this is better late than never, it shouldn't take an election year for the administration to do the right thing," a spokesman for Mr. Miller said.

A Manhattan Institute fellow who has written extensively on welfare policy, Heather MacDonald, was critical of the change.

"To stress education and training first is clearly a regressive move into a regime that has proven to fail," she said. "The record is clear that the most important skill you can give a welfare recipient is a work ethic - showing up on time and showing up at a workplace. Many of the city's education programs aren't notable for high expectations and stiff regulation of students."