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Policy Framework
Between 1993 and 1995, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services (DPSS) shifted the focus of its welfare-to-work program, Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN), from providing basic education to moving people into employment as quickly as possible. With the largest welfare caseload of any county in the nation, Los Angeles targeted its new mandatory program, Jobs-First GAIN, at a broad range of welfare recipients and, by doing so, presaged the philosophy and goals of the dramatic federal welfare reforms of 1996. In 1998, the program was replaced by CalWORKs, a statewide initiative that shares many of Jobs-First GAIN’s key characteristics but also puts time limits on adults’ welfare eligibility and offers new features including extended transitional benefits and additional services for the hard-to-employ. MDRC’s random assignment evaluation of Jobs-First GAIN was contracted and funded by DPSS, with additional support from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ford Foundation.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
Los Angeles’s early experiment with a work-first approach was viewed as a bellwether for other big cities because of the size and diversity of the county's population. Designed to raise welfare recipients’ income higher and to save more taxpayer dollars than did its basic education-focused predecessor, the Jobs-First GAIN program:
- Imparted a strong work-first message through an unusually time-intensive program orientation and alerts about impending welfare reforms
- Emphasized the financial benefits of combining work and welfare in the short term under California’s generous rules for disregarding earnings in its welfare benefit calculations
- Assigned most people to a job club as a first activity, providing high-quality job search assistance that included the services of job developers, who cultivated relationships with local employers and tried to match recipients to available jobs
- Strictly enforced work participation requirements and frequently imposed financial sanctions for nonparticipation
The Jobs-First GAIN Evaluation tested the effectiveness of this work-first approach for a wide range of welfare recipients, examining employment, earnings, job stability and wage growth, income and economic self-sufficiency, medical coverage, child care use, household structure, food insecurity, and children’s academic and behavioral adjustment. It also measured Jobs-First GAIN’s cost-effectiveness.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The evaluation included nearly 21,000 welfare recipients and applicants in Los Angeles County, most of them single parents with a three- to five-year history of welfare receipt. Single parents whose youngest child was under 3 were exempt from the program.
In 1996, each member of the evaluation sample was randomly assigned to the Jobs-First GAIN group, which was subject to the program’s participation mandate, exposed to its work-first message, and eligible for its services; or to the control group, which was not. Like members of the Jobs-First GAIN group, control group members remained eligible for cash welfare assistance, food stamps, and child care benefits. Because the two groups did not differ at the outset, any differences between them that emerged over the study’s two-year follow-up period can be attributed to Jobs-First GAIN.
The study’s findings are based on data from unemployment insurance wage records, public assistance records, and client surveys.
Findings
Findings from MDRC’s Evaluation of the Los Angeles Jobs-First GAIN Project can be found in The Los Angeles Jobs-First GAIN Project: Final Report on a Work First Program in a Major Urban Center.
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