Work Overload for Welfare Counselors

Aired April 14, 1999

This is April 14th, 1999, and this is INFOhio After Nine, I'm David C. Barnett, welcoming you to the Wednesday edition of our morning news magazine, and our cover story today has to do with the job of finding jobs. We here at 90.3 are conducting a year-long examination into the "Changing Face of Welfare," and how it affects everyone in the system, especially the recipients, the people who are looking for a new start. Trying to work their way off the system. We'll hear about the unusual position Native Americans find themselves in after we get a sense of some statistics. Since federal welfare-to-work reforms were enacted a year-and-a-half ago, the number of people receiving welfare nationwide has dropped dramatically, from 25% to as much as 40% in some states. But, the expansion of Medicaid services and, more importantly, the addition of job training and job placement services have added all sorts of new burdens to welfare caseworkers already swamped in a sea of paperwork and changing regulations. Yesterday, we heard from a group of former caseworkers at the Lorain County Department of Human Services, who say their training didn't prepare them for the demands of the job. Today, 90.3's Lorain County correspondent Karen Schaefer reports that the training and workload of these front-line welfare workers is not just a local, but a state, and even a national, problem.

Karen Schaefer–There's no doubt the job is a tough one. Income maintenance, or case, workers at the Lorain County Department of Human Services are expected to determine client eligibility for a host of welfare benefits, from Medicaid to food stamps, and since the advent of Ohio's Work First, they are also expected, with the help of employment specialist counselors, to oversee their client's entry into the job market. Sally Stark, an administrator with Lorain County Human Services says that welfare changes have created new stresses for administrators and staff.

Sally Stark–The whole thing in Human Services for the past couple years is we've all been swamped. It's not you're swamped, but you're hit with new things, and many of the workers that have been here a long time are finding themselves almost like new workers again, and we can understand the frustration.

KS–Stark says she can also understand the frustration of former caseworkers who say they were fired for failing to meet job requirements because of poor training and unclear expectations. But she says the high turnover of income maintenance workers is typical of most Ohio counties.

SS–Some people can be very good students and be very proficient in what they're doing as a student, but get them into the task and it really isn't for them. This is not a job for everybody. Over the past year we've hired 23 trainees, and 12 remained, and that's about the average for the state. It's a very difficult job, and it didn't start this year, it's been that way for a long time.

KS–Stark says that in addition to new employee training, which costs about $5400 per trainee, all caseworkers attend periodic training workshops. But Dr. Susan Pearlmutter, of Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences says training isn't the only issue.

Susan Pearlmutter–Before the welfare caseloads started going down, it was not unusual for income maintenance workers to have mixed caseloads of two to three hundred people, so a lot of administrators feel that workers now have it "good" because their caseloads are down to 75 or 100. I see as very important for these workers to be supporting clients along the way. If caseloads are over 100, it's really impossible for that to happen, even with a caseload of 75.

KS–In Lorain County, caseloads range from 75 for new employees to as many as 270 for experienced caseworkers. When employees leave, their unfinished cases are redistributed among already overburdened workers. Pearlmutter says that even though Lorain County may be meeting federal and state requirements for accuracy and timeliness of service delivery, chronic understaffing can have a damaging effect on welfare recipients.

SP–Where it does make a difference is in the ongoing work with clients. If you have a client who is supposed to meet a work requirement and that client doesn't get to the work site or doesn't bring the proper documents to show that he or she got to the work site, there's no worker in place. It's going to be a month or two before that gets noticed, and then the person is going to be sanctioned.

Irene Lurry–Besides going to welfare agencies around the country, I would ask them, "what would you do if you had some additional money?", and they all tell me the same thing, that they would hire more staff, and when I ask them why they don't hire more staff, it's because the legislature, whether it's the state legislature or a county legislature, doesn't want to increase the size of the bureaucracy.

KS–Dr. Irene Lurry is a professor of public administration and policy at the State University of New York at Albany. As part of the Rockefeller Institute of Government's twenty-state study of welfare management systems, which will include Ohio, she is coordinating an in-depth look at how front-line workers in four states are dealing with welfare clients. She says the jury is still out on what works and what doesn't, but she hopes that counties and states will begin to share best practices, and to place greater value on their welfare workers.

IL–Many people, especially at the federal level, don't appreciate what it takes to implement the changes that they make, and I hope that we can paint a picture of their work that sufficiently impresses people in a position to do something that they will try to invest in the welfare agencies and in these workers.

KS–For INFOhio, I'm Karen Schaeffer, reporting from Lorain County.