The elimination of the city’s Department of Employment — reported at Page 1 of yesterday’s New York Sun by our Benj. Smith — will mean more employed New Yorkers. It may seem counterintuitive, but the agency with the word “employment”in it is the one on the wrong side of the welfare versus work debate that has been hot in Gotham since the beginning of the Giuliani administration. The agency on the side of aggressively moving welfare recipients and others to jobs and keeping them employed, the Human Resources Administration, will now inherit key federal workforce funding that it administered under Mayor Giuliani but had lost to the Department of Employment under Mayor Bloomberg.

The two agencies have taken different approaches in recent years. Whereas the Human Resources Administration has been quite tough with programs it contracts out, paying mostly for results — i.e., former welfare recipients in jobs, and still working after a significant period of time — the employment department has paid mostly for programs to operate, contractors collecting most of their fees regardless of results. According to the founder of one private, for-profit contractor, Peter Cove of America Works, the Human Resources Administration, which got its footing and sense of mission under Mr. Giuliani, has gotten even tougher under Mr. Bloomberg.

That, along with the elimination of the employment department, would seem to be a good reason to hope that Mr. Bloomberg truly grasps the nature of the challenge ahead. Welfare reform has been a huge success at moving people from welfare to work, but now the same naysayers who said it would spell disaster in the early 1990s are insisting that we’re now down to the “hard core” poor who will be almost impossible to rehabilitate without massive amounts of training and education. This, however, would be just the wrong time to deemphasize the primacy of work, and stop paying for results — results being measured as people who have actually made the transition from welfare to work.

Mr. Cove’s program, which he said sees about 3,000 people come through the door each year in New York City and places about 2,000 of them, is one program that this city does well to fund — and is likely to fund more generously now. The fact that America Works is for-profit only means it’s more likely to put its nose to the grindstone. Here’s how the process works: First, it recruits people to get them in the door, like any private employment agency, though with a focus on welfare recipients and ex-offenders. Then, it gives them basic training in the niceties of the job market — how to interview, what to wear, how to behave, what to say, what not to say. Next, it gets them in the door at companies, making cold calls, searching help wanted ads.

What happens after the initial placement, though, is key. The government could simply pay for placement, but it does better when it watches for the new employee to stick, as Mr. Cove advocates. A thousand things can go wrong with the population the HRA, and America Works, serves — people have sick children, they have abusive spouses, they have bad housing, they have spotty daycare. If the daycare falls through, America Works is on it; it has contacts with daycare agencies all over the city and its staff makes alternate arrangements. If there’s an abusive spouse, America Works calls the police or brings in protective services. A lost job means lost money. The same is true for the non-profit firms that work in this area, including Wildcat Services Corporation and Federation Employment and Guidance Service.

The city’s charter reform commission will look at ways that New York can save money by consolidating or eliminating city departments. In zeroing out the employment department’s funding, Mr. Bloomberg is beating the commission to the punch. It’s a bold and welcome move that may eliminate some city jobs in the short run, but that in the long run will mean more New Yorkers at work in the private sector.