Enhancing parental power and flexibility in the transition from welfare to work

Recent welfare reforms in the United States shifted the emphasis from income maintenance to preparation for employment. Many families receiving welfare benefits have members with disabilities, which can complicate the process of transition into the workforce. Rehabilitation professionals have a unique set of skills, expertise and experiences which could enhance work transition outcomes for welfare recipients. This purpose of this article is to (a) familiarize rehabilitation professionals with welfare reform changes in the United States, (b) summarize the experiences of families affected by those changes who participated in a recent study, and (c) present a service delivery model to enhance parental power and flexibility based on rehabilitation principles.     

Social support and interdependency in transition to adulthood from child welfare services

This qualitative study explores the need for social support in transition to adulthood for youths in the child welfare service, focusing on what support they need and from whom they can get such support. We have conducted individual and focus group interviews with in all 43 adolescents that are, or have been, in contact with the child welfare service in adolescence/young adulthood. The interviews are transcribed and analyzed by doing initial longitudinal analysis, and thematic analysis inspired by the main structure in Systematic Text Condensation (STC).Through the analyses we have highlighted four different categories of social support that the youths need; practical support, emotional support, affirmational guidance support and participation support. Our findings indicates that such support is necessary, but not always available for youths transitioning out from the Child Welfare System, as many of them lack an informal network of adults that can support them in their transition to adulthood. Several of them consequently need continued support from employees in the Child Welfare Service, which for many of these youths seems to represent a crucial source of social support. One of the challenges seems to be that the youths urge of independency together with the expectations of independency from the Child Welfare Services, makes youths end the contact with the Child Welfare Service too early. The simultaneously need for social support and urge for independency makes it relevant to discuss this in light of the concept of interdependency; which emphasizes the importance of connections and social relations as not only normal but also necessary. This underlines the need for more flexibility and a gradual independency; in contrast to the “sudden adulthood” that many youths transitioning out of child welfare seem to experience.     

Instability in patchworks of child care when moving from welfare to work

We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare‐reliant women in Cleveland, Ohio to examine the factors driving instability in child‐care arrangements when women transitioned from welfare to work. Grounded theory analysis revealed that decisions about care were circumscribed by scarce social and economic resources, women went to extraordinary lengths to patch together arrangements that typically involved multiple providers, relative care was central to patchworks of care, and patchworks of child care were often highly unstable. These complex arrangements and their instability were influenced by mothers’ desires to find the most suitable arrangements for their children within resource and job constraints, dissatisfaction with providers, difficulties accessing subsidies, and changes in provider availability. Findings suggest that policymakers must consider instability in patchworks of multiple child‐care providers as they consider alternatives for meeting low‐wage working women's and children's needs for safe, affordable, accessible, and enriching nonmaternal child care.     

Policies for a smoother transition from work to retirement

Japan has maintained a relatively high labor-force participation rate among older people. Although the rate had declined steadily until the mid-1980s, the trend has since reversed and the participation rate is expected to rise in the future. In contrast, the labor-force participation of older people has sharply declined in the United States and European countries, especially since the 1970s. This article explores why Japan's experience differs markedly from other advanced countries. Improved pensions have a strong influence toward early retirement, even in Japan. However, other factors such as a low replacement ratio, improved health, and several loopholes in the income test of the pension systems push up the participation rate of older people. The government also encourages active labor-force participation of senior citizens by introducing reformed partial working pensions and wage subsidies for workers in their second and third careers.     

Poverty persistence among the elderly in the transition from work to retirement

On the basis of matched Income Tax/Census data, the majority of the elderly poor in Belgium appear to be persistently poor. The question arises as to why this might be so. To the extent that individual characteristics such as abilities or tastes persist over time, these may also be the reason that individuals persist in poverty over time. In that case, one expects that once individual characteristics are controlled for, duration dependence in poverty becomes spurious. The alternative possibility is that the poverty experience itself has a causal impact on future poverty. This may be because of work disincentives, lack of investment in human capital and/or loss of motivation during the period of job search. The reasons for dependence in poverty are of interest for developing effective poverty-reducing policies. The estimation of a multiple-spell hazard model of transitions in and out of poverty, that allows for unobserved heterogeneity and a significant initial condition problem, supports the suggestion of true duration dependence in poverty. In Belgium the elderly unemployed are exempted from job search and lack any training or counselling from government agencies, while workers above 50 are given strong financial incentives to leave the labour market as soon as possible through different kinds of early retirement schemes.     

Occupational stress and social work

This article describes a research project exploring occupational stress within social work. This includes a literature search and an empirical study via a questionnaire within a Social Services department in South Wales in 1998. The results indicate that the majority of the respondents were experiencing differing levels of stress. Demographic details, support received, job satisfaction, effects on service provision and strategies to combat stress are identified. Implications from the results are used to indicate recommendations for further development of support and help for social workers, including, pointers for social work educators. Ideas for future research are included.     

Job matching and return to work: Occupational rehabilitation as the link

Return to work after injury or illness is important for the worker and the employer. Medical providers manage and treat the worker with the illness or injury. Except in cases of focused specialists, the medical professional's role is to take care of a patient, rather than empower a worker. As much as there is promotion of the workers compensation health care system to be similar to sports medicine, there are significant dissimilarities. One major barrier is that the medical caregivers do not know the demands of jobs as they would know the details of sports. Thus, there is a gap in returning a worker to function as the medical professional cannot accurately match the worker to specific jobs. A new model of job function matching, based on research and skills of occupational rehabilitation professionals, is proposed to bridge the gap between the medical community, the employers and the workers.     

Making freedom work: the long transition from slavery to freedom during the Haitian Revolution

The 1791 slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the first French abolition of slavery in 1793–1794 are generally seen as epochal events that redefined labor relations in the French Caribbean. But a close analysis of the labor codes promulgated during and after the Haitian Revolution indicates that elites were eager to reconcile the ideal of universal freedom with the needs of plantation agriculture, resulting in a succession of oppressive labor systems that subsisted until the 1820s.     

Globalization,social work,and social welfare

This paper presents a critical review of globalization as explicated in the social work literature. It argues that writers about globalization and social work have so far accepted an unprolematized and undifferentiated construction of the theory of globalization which does not engage with the significant differences that exist between different accounts of globalization. In doing so they implicitly reproduce neo-liberal assumptions about the role of the state and its relationship to global forces. This results in a reductionist and pessimistic analysis of the fragmentation and deprofessionalization of welfare and social work which is often at variance with empirical evidence. Specifically, the acceptance of a narrow and economically over-deterministic reading of globalization unwittingly depoliticizes debates about social work and undermines resistance to the challenges to welfare.     

Can work and training programs reform welfare?

Over the past thirty years the number of Americans on welfare has increased by 460 percent, generating concern about both the monetary and social costs involved. Long-term welfare dependence produces adverse outcomes for many families by distorting incentives for work and marriage. Government programs to reduce welfare have focused on work and training programs to raise the skills of welfare recipients, but these programs have not significantly reduced welfare participation. Policies to scale back welfare are essential for reducing welfare disincentives. New approaches to the delivery of education are viewed as an important preventive strategy.     

Occupational concentration in work establishments

The failure of sociological and economic models premised on individual decision-making to account for persistent patterns of occupational concentration by race and gender has been a matter of considerable recent interest and debate. One response to this debate has been to explore the impact of various organizational dimensions on the social division of labor as experienced by males and females and/or blacks and whites. The importance of the work place as a locus of occupational restrictions has been widely acknowledged, but empirical research on this topic has been limited by the availability of establishment-level data. This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of occupational concentration by race and gender through analysis of 1980 EEOC data on business establishments. The first phase of analysis examines the importance of the work place for occupational concentration by race and gender and places the EEOC data within the context of the 1980 U.S. economy. The second phase of analysis explores the impact of several organizational characteristics on occupational concentration within work establishments.     

Potential barriers to work for substance-abusing women on welfare. Findings from the CASAWORKS for Families pilot demonstration

AIM: To assess the prevalence and relationship to later employment of potential barriers to work for substance-abusing women on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) enrolled in a multiservice welfare-to-work program. DESIGN: A field study with repeated measures and intent-to-treat sampling. INTERVENTION: The CASAWORKS for Families (CWF) was delivered in 11 sites in nine states across the nation and featured integration of substance-abuse treatment and employment and work readiness services. MEASUREMENT: The Addiction Severity Index, supplemented with subject-appropriate questions. SAMPLE: A total of 366 CWF women who completed interviews at program enrollment, and at 6 and 12 months later. FINDINGS: Substance-abusing women on TANF in the CWF program exhibited multiple potential barriers to work at enrollment, averaging 6 out of 14 potential barriers assessed. They reported significantly more obstacles than a general welfare sample of women from the same locales. Few single barriers were significantly related to employment at 12 months. However, the total number of potential barriers to work experienced, particularly at 6 months, was related to employment at 12 months.     

Gender,work and childbearing: couple analysis of work adjustments after the transition to parenthood

This study focuses on Swedish couples' work adjustments following the transition to parenthood. Specifically, we ask whether couples' gender role attitudes influence whether they make adjustments to their work situations after the end of the parental leave. Using couple data from the Young Adult Panel Study, we find that both partners are more likely to make work adjustments when both partners hold egalitarian attitudes. It is also more likely that only the male partner will make work changes when both partners are egalitarian. When one partner holds more egalitarian attitudes than the other partner, it tends to have a stronger impact on the work adjustments of the more egalitarian partner. For example, couples with egalitarian male partners are more than three times as likely to have the male partner change his work situation as couples in which neither partner holds egalitarian attitudes. While less consistent, there is some evidence that female egalitarian attitudes increase the likelihood of female work changes.     

Childhood abuse and psychiatric impairment in a sample of welfare to work women

Since 1996, individuals who participate in welfare programs are mandated to find employment. Welfare recipients may have difficulty transitioning to the work force due to impairments in psychosocial functioning. Examples include mental health and substance use disorders, medical problems, academic and learning difficulties, and lack of resources such as childcare and transportation. In addition, many welfare recipients have histories of abuse and violence, which further complicate their job finding efforts given the documented relationship between past maltreatment and psychiatric impairment. An area unexplored is the relationship between a history of childhood abuse and psychiatric impairment in Welfare to Work (WtW) recipients. We evaluated the relationships among demographics, personality pathology, substance abuse, cognitive functioning, and histories of childhood abuse in a group of 158 WtW recipients in order to assess predictors of psychiatric impairment. Results suggest that participants with higher levels of psychiatric impairment also had higher levels of interpersonal problems related to personality pathology, higher drug and alcohol use impairment, and endorsed more severe histories of childhood abuse. Personality pathology, alcohol use severity, and self-reported childhood abuse emerged as the best predictor of psychiatric impairment in this WtW sample. These results have implications for identifying individuals at risk for unsuccessful transition into the work force and for the development of effective rehabilitation strategies that considers the unique needs of women in WtW programs.     

The transition of the mentally retarded from school to work: The implications of structural unemployment

The recent federal policy initiative placing a national priority on the transition of individuals with disabilities from school to working life has focused a great deal of attention on issues of employment of the disabled. However, most of the discussion and activities have concentrated on the supply side of the equation: training for employment, job design, and the social and economic value of work. Relatively little attention has been paid to the question of demand for workers with disabilities or the nature of the labor market they face. This paper examines the question of employment for one group of disabled, those with mental retardation. We analyze the factors influencing the ability of the economy to absorb these new workers and make a series of recommendations for policy research needed to facilitate the success of the transition policy.