For five years Maria Unzueta's sole source of income was a monthly welfare check. Separated from her husband, the San Diego mother of four made do on benefits totaling $7,920 a year. But now Unzueta, 39, is part of a local job- training program for welfare recipients in which she works 40 hours a week as a hospital file clerk and makes roughly the same amount of money she was getting on the dole. Under the workfare program, she still receives child- care benefits worth about $130 a month, but she hopes to be completely self- sufficient soon. "For me it's important to try and make it on my own," says Unzueta, "and provide an example for my children."
Requiring welfare recipients to work for their checks is not a new concept. Nor are the programs, which usually affect poor mothers with children to raise, as simple in practice as they are in theory. But workfare, which has slowly evolved from a somewhat cranky conservative notion to one with broad support, seems to be an idea whose time has come. Able-bodied welfare beneficiaries must accept occupational training and jobs in more than 20 states, and the number is growing.
In Washington, legislators are mired in trying to find ways to cut spending in accordance with the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction bill (see Essay). Confronted with severe cutbacks in revenue sharing, states are searching for innovative ways to make their social programs more effective. Workfare could prove to be an important example for future experiments.
The idea has enjoyed an unusual bipartisan harmony: in statehouses around the country, Democrats and Republicans have joined forces to support legislation that combines the job programs traditionally favored by liberals with efforts to pare the welfare rolls advocated by conservatives. Jo Anne Ross, a Reagan appointee at the Social Security Administration, describes workfare as the "top priority of the Department of Health and Human Services." Says Joseph Califano, Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter Administration: "If the kids are in school, then the mother can be working. Nearly everyone accepts that concept now."
Welfare has been a political battleground since federally financed public assistance was made law under the Social Security Act of 1935. Traditionally, conservatives have viewed welfare programs as handouts to the poor and an | insult to the American work ethic. Liberals generally have considered it compassionate compensation for victims of economic and social circumstances beyond their control. But with the startling growth in the number of children being born to unwed mothers from the underclass, many of welfare's long- standing supporters have begun to question whether Aid to Families with Dependent Children programs may be exacerbating the problems they were designed to alleviate. Even some civil rights leaders and welfare recipients in the nation's inner cities are criticizing the system for helping perpetuate dependency from one disadvantaged generation to the next and for unintentionally encouraging the breakdown of the underclass's family structure.