WCCF: W-2 has now existed for 10 years. This is a very sweeping question, but based on the data you’ve studied, do you think the state’s low-income families are better off or worse off than they were a decade ago?

	JN: I want to answer that question two different ways. First, there are macro issues around W-2, in terms of the policy shift it represented, with the focus on work.
Jennifer Noyes

W-2 on the macro level resulted in child care support, with the consolidation of four programs into one; what we had in terms of the child support pass-through, which allowed for 100 percent of the payments made by noncustodial parents to be passed through to custodial parents; it provided continued support for the state EITC; it fed into the development of BadgerCare.

So if you look at the overall context rather than just the W-2 program itself, but the whole package of things that surrounded it, it definitely resulted in a better situation for low-income people in Wisconsin. The change in the overall environment has definitely been positive.

Then if you look at W-2 in particular, I think you have to look at different segments of the population. If you look at the population of people who want to work and can work, the program is very successful in supporting that, in making sure that the “temporary” part of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families is really temporary, and they’re able to get attached to the workforce fairly quickly. I think there’s a second part of the population that can work but might not want to work, or have barriers that are not significant barriers to employment, and that’s a more difficult question to answer. The program seeks behavioral changes that may be difficult to come by, and that can be a difficult adjustment. The third population we really ought to be concerned about are those who are neither connected to work nor connected to W-2. I don’t think we know a lot about what’s happening with them, and so for that segment of the population there’s a big question mark about how they’re doing, and we need to learn more about that population.

What aspects of W-2 do you think have been most successful?

I think one of the things that gets overlooked in talking about W-2 is that when you think about its predecessor program AFDC, it was so focused on processing the check and getting people the check, and not necessarily about the possibility of getting off the system and into employment. One of the good things about W-2 when it works is the case management aspect…it isn’t just about “Here’s a check, come back next month.” It’s supposed to be about “What we can do to help you move forward in realizing what you want for your family in terms of self-sufficiency?” So I think that’s a very successful component of W-2. When it works, it meets the needs of the specific family.

The need to address barriers to work and to make connections to work resulted in this push to think outside the boundaries of what has been traditionally thought of as welfare and to work cooperatively with other systems, such as the technical college system.  W-2 cannot—and does not—function as a stand-alone program.  Without W-2 and welfare reform, it is not clear that these important connections would have been made in relation to the low-income population.

What aspects of W-2 do you think have been least successful?

One of the biggest challenges over time has always been taking the ideas that were on paper and actually implementing them. People have often not had a quarrel with the policy that was on paper, but they had a quarrel with the policy as it was implemented. So one of the greatest challenges is to ensure that the concepts are being followed through on the ground. There have been a lot of challenges with implementation. A lot of people don’t remember, but what happened was…if you go around the country, a lot of places didn’t really change anything. We tried to change a lot of things at once, and that created a lot of challenges. A lot of people got distracted from the work that needed to be done.

A concrete example would be that people would be placed in a tier, say W-2T, which is supposed to be for people with significant barriers to work, so you would expect a lot of tailored efforts around that tier. But what was happening was that a lot of people were placed in that tier and would just sit there. And the 24-month clock would start to come up, and maybe they’d be moved up to CSJ, but they weren’t getting the services they needed. In terms of the oversight, looking at individual cases to see what was happening, the implementation wasn’t there. That finally got instituted out in the regional offices, but for a while people were being “parked.” That was an implementation problem.

Knowing what we know now, what do think could have been done differently or better in terms of implementation?

I actually think that given the circumstances, I don’t know what else you could have expected. The initial concern really was that people wouldn’t convert from AFDC and JOBS to W-2. It was a huge effort to make people aware. So there’s the whole question of when the switch was flipped, was enough done to make that transfer happen. There are always questions that remain about the signaling. Was enough done to get the right message out? I don’t think there’s any way to know if it could have been done differently. I think one of the opportunities that was missed was to better integrate W-2 with the other workforce programs. I don’t think we ever built a good theory around if they attach to work, and then something happens where they get disconnected from work, and we basically have said, and continue to say, that their solution is to come back to W-2. Better integration with the rest of the workforce system could have helped with improving connections with employers.

This is not so much about better implementing the program but about potentially missing components or supplements.  I do think we should have started to think about the role of the noncustodial parent in relation to the family earlier than we did.  Yes, we had the full pass-through of child support payments, but what we really needed to do earlier—and still need to do, I believe—is to think about the role of fathers and how to better enable their financial and nonfinancial support of their children.

What research has not been conducted that you think would have been helpful?

On the academic level, we still don’t really understand completely the cascading effects of the declining caseload initially. Researchers are really good at looking at individual policy changes and their effects, but the entire package in Wisconsin, what really happened with that massive caseload decline? What happened with those people? That’s the question I think really hasn’t been answered yet.

I think over the years, what would have really helped would be to do a lot more to understand, whether through case studies or some other way, those people who made a connection to the workforce, that we learn more about what worked. We tend to ask questions that are big and broad, or to focus on the negative cases that show what doesn’t work. We haven’t really tried to figure out what specific things really worked well. We can import ideas from other places, but what’s working in our agencies that can be exported to other agencies and locations?

If there was a single change you could make in W-2 that would improve outcomes for families, what would it be?

I see W-2 being disconnected from the mainstream work conversation. If we’re going to continue to have a policy around work, then we should have the conversation more integrated with workforce development and economic development. It’s not about a policy; it’s about a way of thinking about workforce development. The way we’re doing it today, it feels more like welfare than like part of a comprehensive workforce system.

WCCF: W-2 has now existed for 10 years. I realize this is a pretty sweeping question, but based on the data you’ve studied, do you think Wisconsin’s low-income families are better off or worse off than they were a decade ago?

PF: I would have to say worse. There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that I think we’ve effectively destroyed any government-supported social safety net. When you look at the drastic decrease in the number of people who receive cash assistance, it shows that there’s no longer anywhere for people to turn.
	Pam Fendt

When you couple that with the reams and reams of research that have been done on W-2, the research shows that people in fact did not leave the rolls of AFDC or W-2 for greener pastures, for better economic circumstances. That’s what would lead me to say they’re worse off.

What, if any, aspects of the program were successful, or were the most successful?

I think that what was mostly achieved was an ideological victory. The positive spin on that would be to say that what it achieved was to say that the only legitimate way for parents to support their children is through work in the job market. And I think that is true, to the extent that it’s the most common way people support their children. But it ignores some realities about people who have children who can’t work full time, and it ignores a lot of child development research and a lot of work-family balance research that has led to the proliferation of kinder and gentler policies in most of the rest of the developed world, especially Europe, where they have paid maternity leave, time off for both the father and mother to have time for the child, free universal pre-school, things like that. We’ve done it on a much more piecemeal basis. We’ve stressed the going to work part without putting the other policies into place that would make that a little more of a give-and-take for families. We were heavy on the stick and a little light on the carrot. Does the social contract for low-income people have to be full-time work? Is there something where some limited state aid could be coupled with part-time work, and would that be enough of an effort on their part to not feel like we were supporting freeloaders? Isn’t there some middle ground? With W-2, it became an all-or-nothing program. Either you’re so disabled that you can qualify for SSI, or if you show any ability to work in the labor market, you’re pretty much cut off from W-2.

What aspects of W-2 do you think have been least successful?

The Legislative Audit Bureau report and some other reports as well showed that there were a couple of fallacies about the job market that propelled W-2 policy into being, and when those were found to not be true, the policy was not changed to adjust. The brunt of dealing with that fell on the low-income families themselves. The first one is that any job is a good job, and as long as you get a job, you move up the ladder. The research showed some movement up the pay scale over time, but many, many families five years off welfare are still living below the poverty line. When you look at the types of jobs that were obtained by participants in the W-2 program, they’re identical to the jobs they could have obtained without this multi-million dollar social experiment. They went to retail, they went to restaurants, they went to temp agencies-- overwhelmingly that’s the largest placement entity—and they went to light manufacturing. Those were all jobs that were available to women before, but now they had no choice but to take them.

Beyond LAB reports, etc. there’s some great research from places like the Institute for Research on Poverty, especially Maria Cancian’s work, and there’s a very clear graph in one of her reports that shows, yes, they had increased earnings, but their overall income decreased because of the other supports that they lost. So more people lost total income than gained it as a result of this. The labor market was not really ready to absorb them and move them up the ladder. It was ready to absorb them and just keep them at the same level. And then there’s the Census. Between 2000 and 2006, child poverty increased in the City of Milwaukee and the County of Milwaukee and in the state.

Knowing what we now know about what became of people and what problems did arise, what in hindsight could have been done differently or better in terms of implementing the program?

I think figuring out what to do with the marginally employable wasn’t well thought-out. Setting time limits on things like W-2 Transitions… and I think the Council did a good job of highlighting these things…if you have a child in a wheelchair with a tracheotomy tube, that doesn’t clear up in 24 months. So what can we do to make sure these families, where the parent really isn’t going to be able to work outside the home, can get by. And that’s an extreme case; there are other less extreme cases…people who are in application for SSI, but it may be years before they get it and they have to come back and keep reapplying for the program. And in a family structure where money is so tight that missing one check means possible eviction, we did not do enough to make sure there was a financial safety net for the most vulnerable families in the state.

And at the other extreme, you have the people who were deemed job ready…

I still have the tape from a meeting held at the MPS central office of a W-2 summit subcommittee. There was bipartisan agreement among the members of that committee that they never meant that there would be a non-cash category. And they basically ordered Jean Rogers to stop it in 1998, and the department never implemented those changes. And all of those senators said we thought that if they didn’t get a job they would get cash. So the fact that even existed was not legislative intent. When I say the program was long on sticks and short on carrots, that’s another thing I would point to.

W-2 has been described as the most studied program in the history of social welfare. What research has NOT been conducted that you think would have been helpful over the years?

I’ve been told that when Sec. Gassman wanted the W-2 agencies in Milwaukee to convene a group of employers so that she could come and talk to them about the need to keep doing the good work of hiring welfare recipients, among the agencies they couldn’t come up with a sizeable enough group to make it worth her while to drive from Madison for a meeting. I really don’t think that what the agencies are doing for job development has been well documented. And when you see the LAB audit and see the most prevalent placement is with temp agencies, it does make one wonder why we’re spending millions of taxpayer dollars on a program that is basically just a second-rate conduit to existing job opportunities. And so what is the real value added of the W-2 structure? I don’t think that’s really been researched. And the audit tried to dig into some of the “Where did the money go?” question…it was billed as a taxpayer savings, and I’m not sure we could prove that with any of the research that’s out there now. A lot of state and federal money gets spent on the program, just less of it goes to actual poor families, and the rest of it goes somewhere else now, to a middleman. I don't think the whole cost-benefit question has ever really been circled back on in a thorough way.

If there was a single change you could make in W-2 that you think would improve outcomes for low-income families, what would it be?

Guaranteed jobs. If a parent is wiling to work some specified hours of work, if she’s actually not able to get a standard job in the labor market, if she’s wiling to do work activities, like a community service job or W-2T placement, that should continue on until she’s able to get work in the paid labor market. If somebody’s willing to do their part and there’s no place to slot them, that’s not what we intended in this program, and that should be fixed. That would really create financial stability for a lot of marginalized families.