Designing and Administering a Wage-Paying Community Service Employment Program Under TANF: Some Considerations and Choices

This paper was inspired by major changes in the structure of the U.S. welfare system, as called for by the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, and the important groundwork of two organizations that have examined the concept of wage-based community service employment (CSE). The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) in Washington, D.C., led by Cliff Johnson, and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), also in Washington, D.C., led by Steve Savner, have produced extensive written material on this welfare-to-work program approach, much of which is summarized in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to supplement the ideas that have already been developed and to flesh out how wage-based CSE might work from the perspective of the local agencies participating in the implementation of welfare reform. The paper begins with a discussion of the differences between wage-based CSE and other types of community service work. Topics addressed in the subsequent sections are:

The paper concludes with observations about the potential of wage-based CSE and the foundation for it that already exists in many communities.

Wage-based CSE is an idea about how to provide jobs under a reformed welfare system for some welfare recipients who are not able to find jobs in the regular, or "competitive," labor market. It is not defined in law or regulation and has been implemented only in a few locations. In actual operation, wage-based CSE might take a variety of forms, built around the concept’s two essential parts: (1) that jobholders earn wages in a standard employer-employee relationship and (2) that the work performed somehow benefits the wider community or society at large.

Compared to options available in the past, wage-based CSE is a hybrid form of work for public assistance recipients, combining elements of community service — work that would otherwise go undone by paid employees of government agencies and nonprofit or charitable organizations — and subsidized work or on-the-job training, which have used public funds to induce employers to hire and train disadvantaged workers. Wage-based CSE can also take the form of a publicly funded job creation program, including one that helps finance new enterprises (by paying the wages); these enterprises resemble the "affirmative businesses" that employ disabled people nationwide.

The Community Work Experience Programs for welfare recipients (abbreviated as CWEP) that were prevalent in the mid-1980s also had an element of community service. CWEP participants were intended to supplement the workforces of government and nonprofit agencies, performing work that would not otherwise get done; "displacement" of regular workers was forbidden. CWEPs were most often structured as mandatory work in exchange for cash benefits, however, and the government and nonprofit worksite employers provided supervision for the program participants and monitored and reported on their attendance and performance to the welfare agency. In contrast, participants in wage-based CSE are paid wages, rather than given a welfare check; the wages are based on actual hours of work; participants receive all the benefits and protections of regular employees; and they are required to pay taxes on their earnings. In these ways, wage-based CSE looks like "real work" to participants. Participants in wage-based CSE are expected to adhere to the workplace standards of their worksites, which was the case in most CWEP positions as well, but — to complete the "real work" picture — wage-based CSE can be structured so that worksite employers are responsible for hiring and firing participants.

Wage-based CSE is also reminiscent of subsidized work or publicly funded jobs programs, like those operated during the Depression under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and in the 1970s under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). This is because the money used by employers to pay participants’ wages comes from a public source, in this case the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program,¹ federal Welfare-to-Work grants, or state and local funds.

Finally, wage-based CSE can look like on-the-job training (OJT) for disadvantaged workers. There is a long-standing practice in the publicly funded job training system of giving financial incentives to employers who will take on disadvantaged (untrained) workers and upgrade their skills to entry level or higher for the industry. In the case of wage-based CSE for public assistance recipients, the incentive to the employer is that the welfare system covers the cost of the wages of these employees for a defined placement period.

One open question about the wage-based CSE concept is whether there are circumstances in which private, for-profit companies should be allowed to be worksite employers. In the past, private employers were excluded from CWEP, and their role in subsidized employment and OJT programs entailed an exchange for the free or discounted labor of program participants they received. In order to ensure that the workers and taxpayers benefitted as well, private employers were expected to commit to hiring participants into permanent, unsubsidized jobs at the end of their training or subsidized tryout.

Under TANF, the never-very-distinct lines between subsidized employment, on-the-job training, and paid community service — as implemented in publicly funded programs for low-income and disadvantaged persons — are even more blurred. States and localities have a great deal of flexibility under TANF to structure work programs and to mix and match elements of past programs. Theoretically, then, private sector employers could be included in a wage-based CSE program. If they are able to commit to permanent jobs in exchange for temporary free labor in a wage-based CSE program, or if they offer some other long-term social benefit, a public/private approach might be even more attractive than a program limited to public agency and nonprofit worksites. By including private employers, wage-based CSE might, for example, gain flexibility, a wider range of worksites, and a larger scale.

Another reason to consider a role for private employers in wage-based CSE programs is that distinctions among nonprofit, for-profit, and public organizations are increasingly unclear in this era of downsized government and privatization of public services. For example, large cities have hospitals and all types of health care facilities of each type. Is a job in a hospital "community service" if the hospital is public or nonprofit, but not if it is a private institution? If private, for-profit contractors to public agencies are delivering services to benefit communities or needy populations, should these organizations be considered for placements of workers in a wage-based CSE program? If program participants provide free, publicly funded labor to private organizations through wage-based CSE but receive job skills training, supervision, and "real work" experience in exchange, does the value received by participants make this an acceptable arrangement?

For state and local administrators of TANF, the central question about extending wage-based CSE to for-profit employers is: Should "community service" be defined by the nature of the work or the nature of the organization providing the service? This question can probably be answered only on a case-by-case basis, in the context of local politics and the image of any particular for-profit provider of public services. Thus, state and local administrators of TANF might approach answering the question about for-profit employers by establishing qualifying criteria that cover community benefits (What is the service to the community?); benefits to participants (such as training, commitments to hire, wage and fringe benefit packages offered at hiring); and the employer’s record on compliance with laws and rules governing its business, including labor practices. TANF officials might also consider setting a fixed length of time for a wage-based CSE placement with private employers that is shorter than placements with public and nonprofit employers.

Wage-based CSE programs for TANF recipients may be operated by many different types of organizations, and the programs are not required by the federal statute or regulations to provide the same basic services, target the same populations, or do anything else in the same ways except with regard to the fundamentals of TANF and labor law. Unlike previous programs that required welfare recipients to work in nonprofit or public agencies in exchange for their welfare benefits, the number of hours a participant works per week under wage-based CSE is not tied to the amount of her TANF assistance. There are, however, rules governing when recipients may be required to work under TANF:

The rules governing employers of participants in wage-based CSE are similar to those in other employer-employee relationships:²

Wage-based CSE holds out the promise of achieving multiple goals of the newly reformed welfare system. It can serve as a mechanism for welfare recipients to satisfy the societal obligation of work and family support that initially motivated the reforms, and at the same time provide a measure of income security for families with children when parents are not ready for work in the competitive labor market or when and where the competitive labor market is not able to absorb the number of welfare recipients needing jobs under the new TANF rules. Like previous forms of community service for welfare recipients, wage-based CSE offers a pool of labor for getting valuable work done in the community that is not otherwise being accomplished, but with greater benefits and protections than in the past for those who are doing the work. There may also be ways to design wage-based CSE so that it serves as a training ground for unsubsidized employment in the private sector and as a real transitional step toward self-sufficiency.

With all this potential, states and localities may have trouble deciding who should participate in wage-based CSE and/or building and financing a program large enough to serve everyone who could benefit. Given the limited real-world experience with the concept, and limited resources, TANF-implementing organizations might start experimenting by focusing on a fairly narrowly defined population, such as TANF recipients who have participated in work-related activities in the past and have reached the 24-month limit for assistance without work. This group will certainly grow quickly, and a subset will quickly become the group approaching the 60-month lifetime TANF assistance limit established by PRWORA.³ Trying out wage-based CSE on this bellwether group may offer valuable lessons for how to use wage-based CSE as a stepping-stone to unsubsidized work. (The current continuing decreases in TANF cases give states and localities some time to plan and test work options like wage-based CSE before the need for them is critical — which may be in FY 2001 or 2002, when the TANF participation standards are 45 percent and 50 percent, respectively, of the single-parent caseload.)

In an untargeted program, everyone potentially eligible for a particular service or activity has an equal chance of being assigned and participating. Selections might be made on a first- come/first-served basis or some sort of lottery. This strategy can make sense when nothing is known about who benefits from the service and how much. It does not make sense for wage-based CSE, however, given that the program resources are likely to be limited and that a great deal is known about what works in helping welfare recipients find work and become self-sufficient. Although there are no specific research findings about the results of wage-based CSE, and there have been only a few studies of work programs operated in the context of time limits on the receipt of public assistance, many other work options for welfare recipients have been studied, including some that are similar to wage-based CSE. Taking that accumulated knowledge together with some overall TANF goals, it is possible to derive some broad principles for targeting wage-based CSE and to draw from them inferences about program design.

First, to use program resources most efficiently and avoid wasting any TANF recipient’s lifetime reserve of assistance, those who can get a job in the competitive labor market should not be given wage-based CSE jobs. The widely used and documented test of recipients’ job-getting ability is a supervised, assisted job search activity. Typically, group job search is run as a "workshop" that lasts for two to four weeks and provides classroom training in presenting oneself to employers, practice in interviewing, help with résumé preparation, supervision and resources for making telephone calls to potential employers, and job development by workshop staff, who try to sell employers on the benefits of hiring from the workshop, or who market the qualifications of individual participants. Thus, in order to be considered for a wage-based CSE position, most TANF recipients should have participated in a job search activity recently, have a usable résumé, but have been unsuccessful in landing a job with job search assistance.

Second, to use wage-based CSE worksites most effectively, program staff need to try to understand why candidates have not succeeded in finding unsubsidized work. Lack of work experience, or lack of recent work experience, are employability problems for which wage-based CSE is a particularly good solution, and recipients who need better résumés and job references can be helped by such placements. However, poor communication skills; poor reading, writing, and computational skills; or hostile attitudes are not employability problems that can be solved in a typical wage-based CSE job. In fact, it is as unlikely that recipients with these problems will work out in a CSE worksite as in a competitive labor market job unless they are being provided other services simultaneously. This suggests that some sort of assessment is necessary in order to develop a pool of candidates for wage-based CSE.

Third, under TANF’s time limits, some subgroups of the recipient caseload are going to be "needier" than others and might be given priority for wage-based CSE, consistent with the welfare reform intention of providing work, not cash, as the fallback for recipients who cannot find their own jobs. The neediest group of all, under TANF rules, will be those who use up their lifetime limit of cash assistance and still have no job prospects. Recipients who have been out of the job market for many years and are closing in on the lifetime limit might be targeted for wage-based CSE in order to help them make the transition from cash assistance to self-support deliberately, rather than precipitously.

Fourth, in localities where openings for entry-level or slightly above entry-level jobs are scarce and the TANF population eventually needing to work is larger than the local economy can absorb, wage-based CSE should be used as a business development strategy, targeting participants who can be matched with employers to create or expand enterprises that will sustain them after a wage-based CSE position ends. For example, three or four TANF recipients with sewing skills matched to an employer with the ability to produce and market a mail-order line of sewn products could generate enough demand during the wage-based CSE placement period to build a business able to employ them as regular workers.⁴

Fifth, states and localities might want to experiment with the potential of wage-based CSE as a skills upgrading approach. If a wide range of worksites were available in a wage-based CSE program, the program could be used as a kind of apprenticeship training for occupations that require previous work experience in the occupation. This suggests selecting some candidates who have specific occupational goals that they cannot fulfill without more preparation.

The Challenge of TANF Goals

The 1/3 - 1/3 - 1/3 "Reality" Versus the 20 Percent Rule

"Practice wisdom" about the employability of welfare recipients during the last two decades holds that about one-third of people receiving cash welfare can go to work with a little assistance and "push," about one-third need moderate to intensive assistance in order to work, and the remaining one-third have so many problems that even if they land jobs, they cannot stay in the workforce. This view contrasts with new TANF rules, which allow exemptions from the lifetime limit of 60 months set on cash assistance for only 20 percent of the caseload. As a result, TANF work programs will need to identify, assist, and succeed with people who were previously assumed to be too disabled, too difficult, and too expensive to rehabilitate.

Research supports the existence of a gap between the TANF goals and the real employability of welfare recipients. One estimate is that from 52 to 59 percent of current TANF recipients will stay on welfare without jobs long enough to be subject to work requirements (within 24 months) and that about 40 percent will reach the 60-month time limit within eight years of its imposition.* Not surprisingly, the latter group has characteristics indicative of very limited job prospects. A majority of those who will "max out" their TANF benefits (based on data from the AFDC program) began receiving welfare when they were under age 22 and had very young children resulting from out-of-wedlock births; also, the majority had no previous labor market experience, did not complete high school, and had poor basic skills.

Program Experience: The Best Is Not Good Enough

TANF goals have never been achieved before. Researchers have also examined the results of welfare-to-work programs of the past in the context of the new TANF requirements and have concluded that even if states and localities achieve results that match the best "work first" programs of the past — in terms of participation, employment rates, and welfare savings — such performance will not be good enough for TANF.†

For example, it has been demonstrated that at least one-quarter of eligible welfare recipients and sometimes more than one-half could be engaged in work or an employment preparation activity in any given month, but this occurred when many mothers of young children were not required to participate, other exemptions were in force, and the countable work activities were defined much more broadly. Even then, many participants did not achieve the current TANF participation standard of 25 hours per week. Under TANF, more recipients will need to be continuously "engaged in work" while they are receiving assistance, more will need to stay in the workforce once they find jobs, more will need to find and keep jobs that pay well above minimum wage, and more will need to leave welfare for good.

_________________________
*Greg J. Duncan, Kathleen Mullan Harris, and Johanne Boisjoly, "Time Limits and Welfare Reform: New Estimates of the Number and Characteristics of Affected Families," April 22, 1997.
†Susan Scrivener, Gayle Hamilton, Mary Farrell, Stephen Freedman, Daniel Friedlander, Marisa Mitchell, Jodi Nudelman, and Christine Schwartz, National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies: Implementation, Participation Patterns, Costs, and Two-Year Impacts of the Portland (Oregon) Welfare-to-Work Program, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/U.S. Department of Education, 1998.

Wage-based CSE is appropriate for recipients of state- and locally funded General Assistance (GA), as demonstrated by New York City’s Parks Career Training (PACT) program, which is described in Section VIII. GA is a last-resort form of welfare for people who do not qualify for TANF or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Unemployment Insurance; it is provided by most, but not all, states and by some localities where there is either not a state program at all or not a statewide program. Most GA recipients are adults not living in families, and many are the noncustodial parents of children receiving TANF benefits in another household. Assistance is more limited than AFDC was or TANF is now — with lower benefits, stricter time limits, and more stringent work requirements — and coverage has been shrinking for about a decade.⁵

GA recipients are likely to have poor literacy skills, uneven work histories and/or extended periods of unemployment, health problems and/or minor disabilities (that is, not severe enough — or not well-documented enough — to qualify them for SSI), and substance abuse problems. They are also likely to have children who are not living with them. Thus, many, if not most, are likely to need and can benefit from the potential transitional, income, and job training benefits of wage-based CSE.

The issues for states and localities about offering wage-based CSE to GA recipients are primarily financial. What funding sources are available? What priority should GA recipients have for wage-based CSE in relation to TANF recipients? What proportion of the GA caseload should states and localities aim to reach with wage-based CSE?

During the 1980s there was considerable debate within the employment and training field about whether welfare-to-work programs should be voluntary or mandatory. Proponents of voluntary programs argued that participants would be more likely to succeed at something they chose, and proponents of mandatory programs argued that many welfare recipients who could be successful at finding and keeping jobs would not initiate the process and thus needed a "push." Examples of both types of programs were shown to be effective in increasing the employment and earnings of participants, although the mandatory programs generally operated at a much larger scale than the voluntary programs. Evaluations of a range of welfare-to-work programs from the 1980s also showed that the distinction between mandatory and voluntary was not clear-cut. Rather, "mandatoriness" could be defined in degrees, depending on the specific activities that recipients were required to participate in, the intensity and duration of their required participation, and the sanctions that were enforced for noncompliance.⁶

For wage-based CSE, a sharp distinction between mandatory and voluntary approaches is not helpful in thinking about program design. A more salient question is: How much choice should candidates for wage-based CSE have about which aspects of their participation? Some choices, for example, depend on whether wage-based CSE is embedded in a system of activities for which there is a clear progression and criteria for "who goes where" or whether the program is intended to be free-standing. In a system with a defined progression, TANF recipients may have little choice about whether to accept an offer of a wage-based CSE job (if they do not find their own jobs) but may be able to select the type of CSE jobs they prefer. Where wage-based CSE is free-standing, the staff may have the most information, control, and choice — resulting in a more directive, if not more mandatory, approach.

Another issue with implications for participant choice is whether the program aims for the best possible match between a worksite and a participant or whether the assumption is that it will operate on the basis of trial-and-error. If an optimal match is desired, participants and worksite employers need to be provided variety, choice, information, and preparation. If a wage-based CSE program operator leans toward the trial-and-error method, then the program must be flexible enough to help participants quickly change worksites and must apply broad criteria for when, why, and how often this will be allowed.

Following are some considerations for wage-based CSE program design that involve more or less choice on the part of participants:

If TANF administrators prefer to serve a varied population in wage-based CSE and to help some participants upgrade their skills — rather than to target the program narrowly to those on the verge of losing their benefits — it will be important to start early on the task of assessing, finding work options for, and managing the group of recipients approaching their lifetime limit on TANF cash assistance. This is because, in order for wage-based CSE to fulfill its potential as a skills upgrading option, the rest of the TANF program must be under control and working smoothly so that the CSE component is not overwhelmed with last-resort cases. In general, to succeed at this, TANF work programs need:

Where state and local TANF administrators decide to reserve wage-based CSE for those recipients who are up against their lifetime cash assistance limits — offering this option as a last resort for people who are likely to have a lot to deal with in their lives — it will be important to plan for extensive support services, staff the program adequately to maintain regular contact (preferably on site about once a week) with all worksite employers, and recruit worksites where the work and the work expectations are somewhat flexible and the regular contact is acceptable. Also, job developers should work with participants throughout their wage-based CSE placements in order to help them move into unsubsidized work as quickly as possible. Worksite employers for these participants should be given notice that the placements may not last the maximum time allowed. (The New Hope initiative in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, followed this policy for all the participants working in community service jobs, with no apparent loss of employer interest.)⁸

The criticisms by participants of workfare or Community Work Experience Programs (CWEPs) of the 1980s centered on the terms and conditions that made CWEP jobs unlike and less desirable than real work. Even though participants believed themselves to be performing jobs very similar to their co-workers’ in terms of the jobs’ value to the organizations where they were placed, and CWEP sponsors agreed that participants’ contributions were meaningful, the participants were not compensated for real work, and in some instances they were not treated by co-workers as real employees.⁹

There is also some evidence that uncompensated community work experience does not provide the best conditions for participants to learn work skills — possibly because the employers, supervisors, and co-workers in these situations do not always set the same standards for an unpaid CSE worker as they have for a trainee who is on their organization’s payroll. In this relationship, no one has the economic stake in the outcome that paid employment presumes: that a worker’s productivity is equal to or greater than the money he/she receives in wages and benefits. Furthermore, community service jobs have often been characterized as "make work" — activity of little economic value designed to keep the worker occupied. Although the "make work" allegation was not substantiated in the CWEPs of the 1980s that were evaluated, the research on these programs showed that participants did not acquire new skills in CWEP jobs. In other contexts, anecdotes abound about unpaid community service and public service jobs in which participants are asked to perform tasks without meaning or value to the employer, intended mainly to keep them busy, and that supervision is inattentive or even hostile, reinforcing a perception that it does not matter to the employer whether the CSE work gets done.¹⁰

A more relaxed attitude toward employee productivity and workplace behavior on the part of employers and supervisors can sometimes be an appropriate on-the-job training approach for people who have little or no work experience if the standards for first-time workers are gradually increased to simulate the conditions of real work. This is a commonplace work adjustment strategy in vocational rehabilitation and has been adapted to welfare-to-work programs. Most often, however, when less-than-standard performance is expected from community service work participants at the beginning of their placements, less is still expected later. It is unusual for a community service work placement to be structured to encourage and reward gradually increasing capabilities of participants; when this happens, it is most often because an individual supervisor is a "natural" teacher and/or is personally interested in the success of his/her charges.¹¹

The main advantage that an expectation of "real work for real wages" brings to CSE is that a successful paid CSE placement generally constitutes a better reference on a résumé than an unpaid placement. Employers recognize the terms of the labor-for-cash relationship in work; previous paid work signals to someone looking to hire that a job seeker met a certain standard of performance because he/she was good enough to get paid.¹² There are immediate advantages to paid CSE participants as well. In this country, welfare recipients who attain the status of worker tend to experience others as being more respectful of them as individuals, feel better about themselves, gain confidence, and view their prospects with more optimism, which in turn can help land their next job. Whether the psychological benefits to participants of getting paid for their work outweigh the well-documented stresses of low-wage work is an open question.¹³

To succeed in providing real work in a CSE program, administrators need to select worksite sponsors carefully and to be prepared to compensate for some sponsors’ shortcomings. At a minimum, worksite sponsors need to be able to devote enough supervisor time to the tasks of incorporating assigned CSE workers into the routines, culture, and procedures of the workplace and of eliminating any barriers to treating assigned workers like regular workers. Very thinly staffed organizations are not recommended as worksite sponsors; neither are those with a "sink or swim" culture for new employees, or those with very entrepreneurial or competitive cultures (except for the unusual few TANF recipients able to handle little structure and information and lots of discretion). The placing agency for the wage-based CSE program needs to have the capacity to provide everything the worksite sponsor cannot in the way of orientation, information, connections/mentors, etc. As noted above, another condition of "real work" is that employers or worksite sponsors (which may not be the same organization) should have the ability to hire and fire CSE workers.

Administrators also need to attend to the broader TANF context in which wage-based CSE programs will operate. If wage-based CSE is intended as a step in a progression of welfare-to-work activities and/or is reserved for TANF recipients who seem to be ready for the conditions of real work but cannot find a job, a system must be in place in the broader TANF work program for determining who is ready for "real work." How will it be determined that a recipient is ready for wage-based CSE? For example, will participants need a reference or an indication of having successfully completed another work activity? What assessment procedures will apply? What degree of accuracy is necessary in predictions of readiness for real work, and what amount of risk is acceptable?¹⁴

One approach to handling the problems of risk and unpredictability is for CSE programs to develop an array of worksites with a range of workplace expectations — some more flexible than others, some supervisors more patient than others, some kinds of work more demanding than others — and with part-time to full-time schedules and varying wage rates. Such variation is possible, especially in large communities, because "community service" is not necessarily less demanding than unsubsidized private sector employment across all type of jobs. For example, "real work" in office environments and customer service depends on employees showing up on time, being at their work stations, attending carefully to their tasks, and being able to interact with co-workers and customers pleasantly. Inventory work and a variety of back-office jobs, on the other hand, often have more flexibility in terms of when the work needs to start and end (if not in terms of accuracy). Many kinds of jobs involving outdoor work require less concentration and attention to detail.

If wage-based CSE programs are designed to accommodate a range of real work opportunities, a system for matching job candidates with positions will be needed. Because job placement has not received much attention in past community service/work experience programs, there are few lessons from this field. (In fact, workfare participants were often placed in the jobs closest to their homes or the jobs that suited their children’s school schedules.)¹⁵ The simplest and most beneficial approach for everyone involved may be for the program to make a market. As recommended above, potential worksite employers should be empowered to hire and fire participants. In a market, participants would likewise be empowered to select which employers to interview with, based on job descriptions (which the CSE program should help employers develop).

Real working conditions for CSE participants may be more difficult to achieve in public sector agencies than in nonprofit organizations because of Civil Service hiring procedures. Unless public agencies have a noncompetitive classification for temporary workers that can accommodate paid CSE workers, it will be difficult for these agencies to treat CSE participants like real workers, at least in terms of the methods needed to get them started working.

CSE participants who pass worksite employer screens but are not truly ready for the expectations and conditions of real work may miss days, be late, lose pay, receive reprimands, and get fired. Wage-based CSE programs need to have in place monitoring systems and counselors who can work with participants to try to avert the final unsuccessful outcome of real working conditions. Programs also need policies and procedures to deal with participants who do not do well in wage-based CSE assignments. Under what circumstances should they be placed in another wage-based CSE position? What is the fallback work activity for people who do not do well in wage-based CSE? Should the program do anything about income lost when participants miss work? Should there be wage-based CSE jobs with different levels of expectations (perhaps signaled by the wage rates) in order to have more options?

In designing wage-based CSE, it is important to take into account TANF recipients’ perceptions of the "comfort level" or desirability of different jobs and job settings. For example, entry-level work in the public sector and in nonprofit organizations is sometimes believed to be less demanding than entry-level work in for-profit companies. Before the mid-1970s, job security and fringe benefits for entry-level workers were attractive in many large manufacturing and transportation companies; then, government began to be seen as a source of more "good jobs" from the perspective of security and benefits, although the private sector continues to be seen as the best environment for opportunities to move up quickly. Similar generalizations can be found in popular culture about the working conditions and desirability of jobs in different industries — "fast food" being a frequently disparaged industry, whereas any "high tech" or computer-based industry is frequently believed to be lucrative.

For wage-based CSE, the implication of such perceptions of economic sectors and industries is that participants might have weaker or stronger incentives to move from CSE jobs into the competitive labor market depending on how their experiences of their specific CSE jobs compare with their perceptions of their opportunities in the market. There are circumstances in which wage-based CSE might be more attractive in the short run than the unsubsidized job a TANF recipient might be able to land at a particular point in time. In addition to job security, fringe benefits, and advancement opportunities, like other workers, CSE participants may be equally or even more concerned about work hours, supervision, location, job strenuousness or stress, and the social environment of a job. In fact, to some recipients as to some other workers, these may matter more than the job’s auspices and more than the pay.

As a result, operators of wage-based CSE programs may need to be creative in adjusting incentives (and reducing disincentives) among the varieties of work available locally — for example, by offering cash bonuses to participants who take regular jobs, perhaps varying the bonus according to the type of job, and by working with employers in high-turnover industries to make their jobs more attractive to TANF participants. Also, without some entry criteria for wage-based CSE — such as having failed the job search test — or fixed-length CSE work assignments, participants who are able to find regular jobs but perceive CSE jobs as more desirable might resist moving on to the competitive labor market when they are ready. (The New Hope initiative in Milwaukee set a policy of allowing participants to work in paid community service jobs for six months; a participant could be placed in another community service job for a second six-month stint during the demonstration if she/he was unable to find unsubsidized work.)¹⁶

The Community Work Experience Programs (CWEPs) of the 1980s were clearly not either a route out of welfare or a route out of poverty, and there is little evidence from past unpaid work experience programs for welfare recipients that transferable occupation-specific skills were taught.¹⁷ But in the wider field of publicly funded jobs, there is evidence that supports the prospect of wage-based CSE serving as a transitional step for TANF recipients into unsubsidized employment. Cliff Johnson and Ana Carricchi Lopez reviewed the record of public job creation initiatives and found many examples from the 1970s and 1980s, and even before, that reduced unemployment and increased the income of those who participated, both while they took part in the initiatives and subsequently.¹⁸ Also, a significant proportion of the people who were provided first jobs through publicly funded jobs programs like CETA went on to work regularly in other jobs.¹⁹

The minimal regulatory direction in PRWORA for job programs for TANF recipients provides new opportunities for CSE to take advantage of the best concepts in employment and training for disadvantaged workers, as implemented by the most successful employment and training organizations. Thus, wage-based CSE could be structured to provide occupation-specific skills training based on publicly financed wage subsidy models, such as the AFDC Homemaker-Home Health Aide Demonstrations operated between 1983 and 1986 to provide "job ready" welfare recipients four to eight weeks of training and up to 12 months of subsidized employment.²⁰ Alternatively, it could be structured like apprenticeship models in the private sector, such as those used for centuries to train new workers in the skilled trades. Another model is the combination public-private approach, such as America Works, which uses an intermediary job training organization to screen, recruit, train, and place workers in private sector jobs.

Work that is performed in crews is particularly amenable to worksite teaching and management approaches, including work in construction, building maintenance, parks maintenance, and other unskilled or semi-skilled labor. YouthBuild uses such an approach for building or renovating affordable housing in low-income communities and also provides education and leadership development activities for the young adult participants (most of whom are high school dropouts) in order to increase their employability and help the young people see and appreciate the value of sustained effort as they learn specific skills and provide tangible benefits to communities.²¹ The New York City Parks Career Training (PACT) program is a rare example of a community work experience program for welfare recipients that did teach job skills (although not uniformly).²²

To build occupational skills training into wage-based CSE, program designers first need to know something about the range of career aspirations of the whole TANF population early in the program implementation period. This can be accomplished in a superficial way through a survey, in a somewhat more complete way through one-on-one counseling and assessment sessions, or, most comprehensively and accurately, during the course of career education classes in which potential trainees are exposed to information about types of work and careers they may not be familiar with or have not considered for themselves. Other essential elements of a wage-based CSE program that offers occupational skills training are:

Additional incentives — beyond the free labor — for worksite sponsors to take on the job skills training role in wage-based CSE are useful, but not always essential. For some worksite sponsors, payments in recognition of their increased supervision, mentoring, teaching, and other efforts will matter. For others, it will be more helpful to have an on-site supervisor from the program. Extra outside training (such as driver education) or other supplies and equipment for the participants that will make them more effective employees will be most appreciated by other employers.

As work program options are redefined under TANF, there is no reason why a wage-based CSE job could not be used as a tryout for a "competitive" job either with the worksite employer or with other employers in the same field. For example, even though CSE (or CWEP) in the welfare context has not been based on the expectation that participants will be hired into regular jobs with their worksite organizations at the end of their assignments, this does occasionally occur because the community service/unpaid work experience situation offers employers the opportunity to look over a worker for several weeks to several months without risk — not unlike the circumstances in the temporary worker industry. If the employer likes the participant’s performance and a position becomes available, the community service/work experience assignment might result in a regular job. The chances that a temporary, fixed-duration assignment in wage-based CSE will turn into a permanent job can be increased if the program:

A key benefit of transitional jobs is the opportunity they provide for people who have not been in the labor force to become accustomed to the routine and discipline of getting to work every day. This includes planning for and handling the situations in their lives that make it difficult to be reliable, such as health issues, children’s needs and schedules, transportation, adult household members who are demanding, concerns about personal safety, and lack of pocket money. Welfare recipients who have little work experience or who have been out of the workforce for a long time are likely to need at least a six-month transitional job. This is long enough for their child care and/or transportation arrangements to fall apart at least once and, ideally, to be repaired in a way that will support