Making America Work : A WORLD WITHOUT WELFARE? : Elvira Herrera Has Been on and off Heroin, in Prison, in and out of Dozens of Jobs and on Welfare for Years. Now She’s Working and So Is Her Life. Is This the Start of a Workfare Program That Really Works?

The fax machine was a mystery to Elvira Herrera just six months ago. It was her first week at the Land Title Insurance & Escrow Corp., a downtown fixture in the little city of Ontario, Ore., and Herrera had never before sent a fax. It seemed so complicated, all those little buttons. Herrera kept putting the paper in the wrong way. The faxes came out blank.

There was so much to conquer--tax assessors’ maps, land deeds, property titles, all with their own baffling numerical codes. Dressed up in her new work clothes, she felt like an impostor. How could she work at an escrow company, she asked herself, when she didn’t even know what the word escrow meant?

She was sinking; she was sure of it. “I didn’t think I would ever learn any of this stuff,” she now recalls. “I was on the verge of just giving up. I thought I was going nowhere.”

In fact, Herrera had already learned what she needed to hang onto this job, and it had nothing to do with the minutiae of tax records, land titles and the buttons on the fax. She needed to put her life in order before she could get to work, and with a history like hers, that was no small task.

Before, she had no schedule. Now, she has no time. Mornings have become a whirlwind. Herrera awakens at 4:30 to drive her boyfriend to his job at a mobile home factory, and she returns shortly after 6 to exercise and read from a book of daily meditations.

At 7, she wakes her 6- and 8-year-old daughters for school. To save precious minutes, the three of them shower together. If only Delia, the little one, would quit losing her sneakers, maybe they could all get out the door on time.

“Before,” Herrera says, “I could look for things for them, but now they know I’m always in a hurry. We don’t have time to be hunting things down in the morning.”

Before--during the 14 years she lived in what former President Ronald Reagan once called the “spider web of dependency”--Herrera was addicted to heroin and received tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars in food stamps and Aid to Families With Dependent Children. She dabbled in crime, twice spent time in prison and lost her children to foster care. Not once did a welfare social worker send her to drug treatment; indeed, federal rules did not allow it.

Now clean, sober and working, Herrera is finally getting off welfare--welfare circa 1995. A single worker in a simple job in a small town, she is part of a social experiment that Oregon officials believe could offer a model for mending the nation’s system of helping the poor. She and the 6-month-old pilot program that helped her are what policy makers and politicians have in mind when they talk about “welfare reform.”

With nearly 5 million families and nearly 1 in 8 American children receiving AFDC, calls to reform welfare are now the order of the day. Taxpayers spend $16.8 billion a year on AFDC, which liberals and conservatives alike agree is too much. What they cannot agree on is how to bring that number down.

The issue has become so politically pressing that 29 states, including California, have enacted welfare-reform programs. Each seeks to do what the welfare system in nearly 60 years has been unable to accomplish with any consistency--put people to work.

The Oregon program, called JOBS Plus, functions like an aggressive employment agency, matching AFDC recipients with jobs. The government pays their salaries for six months and picks up the cost of health insurance and child care. But the program is expensive, and it is small. Just 200 people in six counties participate. Herrera is among them.

This month, half a year after she started at Land Title, the company was to hire her full time. Thus welfare grant KMC 1765 would be quietly dropped from the rolls, one less burden to the taxpayers of the United States.

“I’m working really hard,” Herrera says, “trying to change my life and mend everything I have done in the past . . . I love my job. We don’t have a lot of extra spending money, but we have a roof over our head, and we have food, and I have my kids with me, and that’s really all that matters. When you live on welfare, you never really have anything.”

It is a nifty little sound bite, the heroin addict who signed on with JOBS Plus and got off the federal dole. If only it were that simple. Herrera’s is a success story, to be sure. But there are forces far more powerful than Oregon’s pilot project that conspired to make this happen. Herrera’s life, and the lives of many others like her, is far more complicated than what one jobs program can fix.

*

It is not as if Herrera does not know how to work. She came from a family of migrant farm laborers who followed the summer harvest from Texas to Oregon. Eventually, they settled in Ontario’s “Treasure Valley,” a land known for its fertile fields of onions, potatoes and sugar beets. Herrera began working this land, where Oregon meets Idaho, when she was 8.

She quit high school and married at 16, mostly, she now says, to escape a strict father. “I thought I was going to get away,” she says. “I didn’t realize that I was going from one dad to another.” She worked with her husband, himself only 18, at the local Ore-Ida potato processing plant, sorting the perfect French fries from the bruised. Thus began a string of jobs--so many she long ago lost count. She has canned green beans, and she’s picked mushrooms in a room so dark she had to wear a lighted miner’s helmet to see. She has managed a radio station, andkept books for Prudential insurance company.

She has cooked short-order, waitressed and washed dishes. She has cleaned motel rooms and taken catalogue orders for Sears. She found she liked office work best; “I liked being clean,” she says, “and I liked having an 8-to-5 job.” Once, she even had a job getting jobs for other people.

None of her jobs paid very well--sometimes taxpayers had to supplement her salary with food stamps, money for child care and occasionally additional cash--and none of them lasted, mostly because of drugs. Hers was heroin, and she discovered it when she was 27.

It was 1981, and Herrera was living in Caldwell, Ida., where she had gone with her three children to escape her husband--who she says had badgered her with late-night visits, even though he was living with another woman. When he followed them to Idaho, he also introduced his wife to heroin.

Herrera was fired from her job at a chemical company for missing work and, for the first time, turned to the government for full support. During the next eight years, she had Naemi and Delia, both born addicted to heroin--and lost all five children to foster care. She began shoplifting to support her habit. Three times a judge ordered her to treatment, but even when she went, she wasn’t interested.

“It was a 28-day program,” Herrera recalls. “I had a plan the whole time I was there. I said, ‘When I get out, I’m gonna get me a fix.’ I didn’t want to quit. I just did what the judge told me to do.”

Bouncing from job to welfare and back, she became what academicians call “a recidivist” or “intermittent user” of public assistance. “I’d work for a while,” Herrera explains, “and then start relapsing.” She was, in the blunt description of one counselor, a woman with “a history of going to work every six months for two weeks.”

The pattern, and the problems that caused it, were not unique to her. “Most of the people who are on welfare work at some point--say about 60% to 70% in the course of a year,” says Demetra Nightingale, a welfare-policy expert at the Urban Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. “It’s not that they can’t get a job. The problem is keeping a job.”

An estimated 40% of AFDC recipients have some underlying problem--drug abuse, illiteracy or physical or mental disabilities--that hampers their ability to work, according to Nicholas Zill, a vice president and study director of the child and family area at Westat Inc., a private research firm that consults for the government. Government surveys suggest that, like Herrera, 16% of AFDC recipients have trouble with substance abuse, but experts agree that this figure, based on self-reported statistics, is probably low.

They say that all too often, the welfare system fails to address these root problems. Financial support, counseling, even job placement proved ineffective in Herrera’s case, as in many others, until she confronted the deeper cause of her poverty. And the task of forcing her to do so was left, finally, to the courts.

*

In 1989, soon to enter prison in Idaho, Herrera showed up in the Ontario office of the Oregon Department of Human Resources, which administers the federal AFDC and food stamps programs for the state. She was pregnant with Delia and out of work.

Thus was Oregon welfare case KMC 176-5 opened, a file that would become several inches thick. Herrera was granted $571 a month in AFDC, plus roughly $400 a month in food stamps and access to Medicaid.

A year later, Kathy Pennington, a kind-faced woman who has been with the department for 10 years, became Herrera’s social worker and encouraged her to get a job. Herrera found work cleaning rooms at the local Holiday Inn, but at $102 a week, it paid much less than her AFDC grant--and it came with no benefits, typical of the low-wage jobs that welfare recipients often land. The state made up the difference.

But the job didn’t last; Herrera was fired. Pennington suspected drugs. “I could see her starting to go down,” the social worker says. “She was very defensive, very angry. And it was maddening, thinking about our tax money.”

This pattern continued for years, and was complicated by illness. In 1990, Herrera learned she had cervical cancer. She gave up heroin while undergoing treatment (the doctors told her the radiation wouldn’t work otherwise) but later took up alcohol and cocaine. Then, she returned to heroin. Pennington watched, immobilized. Addiction, she knew, was the “barrier” that prevented Herrera from getting off welfare. And she felt that the state was “enabling” Herrera by giving her money to pay her rent while she used drugs.

Although Pennington could require her client to look for work in exchange for her welfare check, she couldn’t order Herrera into drug treatment. The federal government, bound by a clause in the Social Security Act that prohibits discrimination in welfare, does not allow it. “Those were the people that we didn’t work with,” Pennington says, referring to Herrera. “We just said, ‘OK, they have too many barriers.’ We just enabled those people by giving them a check and food stamps.”

That is changing, at least in Oregon. In 1992, Oregon became one of two states--the other is Utah--that have received waivers from the federal government to refer welfare recipients for drug treatment. But the benefits of the well well-meaning waiver never trickled down to Herrera.

Instead, there were other innovations to be tested. In January, 1994, Herrera was enlisted in the federal JOBS program--an initiative authorized by Reagan in an earlier stab at welfare reform. She was assigned to life-skills classes, a 20-day course in what Stephen Minnich, Oregon’s administrator of Adult and Family Services, calls “the owner’s manual to life.”

Life skills was supposed to teach Herrera what she would need to know to enter the workplace--how to arrange for child care and negotiate transportation, how to budget money when you have dollars, instead of stamps, to pay for food. The course also included a mental-health evaluation to determine whether participants needed drug or alcohol treatment.

Herrera missed seven of the first 11 days of class, records show. Whether she received the evaluation is unclear. Even if she had, getting help would have been difficult. The nearest Medicaid-approved drug treatment facility is an hour from Ontario, and the waiting list is two to six months long.

Meanwhile, Herrera was busy with a more lucrative endeavor. She was dealing drugs out of her apartment to support what had become a $400-a-day heroin habit.

Pennington had an inkling of this. During a visit to Herrera’s apartment, she found the couch overturned, hiding something--she wasn’t sure what. Herrera was burning a tortilla in the kitchen, she surmised, to cover up the distinctive smell of heroin cooking. The whole place felt steamy. Pennington later learned that she had been under surveillance during that visit; the cops were planning a raid.

The raid took place Jan. 25, 1994. Herrera was charged with delivering and manufacturing a controlled substance. She was later convicted and sentenced to 30 months in prison.

“When I look back at it now,” she says, “getting busted that day was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

*

Deliverance, of a sort, came to Elvira Herrera in the form of a military-style boot camp, which lured her with the promise of shortening her drug sentence to six months. The program consisted of drug and mental-health counseling, education and exercise. Herrera, weakened from her cancer treatment, thought she would never keep up with the camp’s rigorous physical demands, particularly the daily runs. She cried every day for the first three weeks, until a sergeant informed her gently that “the only failure is a failure to participate.”

The inmates built a school playground, cleared a hiking path and tended the prison grounds. Herrera joined the choir and sang in community churches. She lost weight--60 pounds--and learned that she could withstand the exercise. “When I started doing the runs,” she says, “I started getting pride in myself.”

Last November, Herrera showed up in Pennington’s office again, waving the certificates that proclaimed her a boot camp graduate. She had cut her dark hair short and lost the wild-eyed look of her heroin days. She looked older but calmer. Pennington almost didn’t recognize her. “She was really high on feeling good, I think,” she recalls. “She was ready to move on.”

Some might say prison changed Herrera’s life, but Pennington believes otherwise. Prison, she says, “should not take the credit for that.” Herrera should.

Yet it is clear that the behavior modification she learned in prison, not the welfare assistance she received as an addict, was the catalyst for the change. That frustrates some policy experts. “It is a pretty pathetic state of social policy that people who need help don’t seem to get it until they get into the justice system,” says Nightingale of the Urban Institute. “There is something wrong about that. It just seems like there is something mixed up or inside out.”

Pennington sent Herrera to Susan Warner at Training and Employment Consortium in Ontario. TEC is a private nonprofit agency that contracts with the state to help welfare recipients find jobs. Warner, a case manager, had dealt with Herrera before, remembering her as “defensive, abusive and combative.” This new Herrera was someone she did not know--quiet, soft-spoken, eager to please. This was a woman she could help.

*

As luck would have it, TEC was involved with the new welfare-to-work pilot project that was starting up in six Oregon counties, including Malheur County, home to Ontario. To be eligible, a participant needed a graduate equivalency diploma--Herrera had gotten hers years ago--and a Social Security number that ended with an odd digit. Herrera’s ends with 5.

Most welfare-to-work programs focus on training people for jobs; Oregon’s JOBS Plus functions like a headhunting firm. Instead of sending checks and food stamps to welfare recipients, the government gives that money to private businesses, which use it to pay the salaries of people like Herrera for six months. The government also pays for other costs, including workers’ comp insurance.

The welfare recipient gets on-the-job training and a chance at permanent employment. The business gets a free employee for six months, after which the employee is either hired or given three months notice, plus one day a week off to look for another job.

Warner and the five other JOBS Plus coordinators act as brokers. They persuade companies to get on board, then put would-be employers together with would-be employees. It’s labor intensive, Warner says. “I knock on doors and beat the streets.”

In Herrera, Warner saw someone with a strong desire to work but a spotty job history. She knew, as well, that Herrera’s criminal record was a big strike against her. But Herrera was ready to get going. “I told Susan, ‘I’m tired of being on welfare.’ ”

Warner sent Herrera to interview with Ann Caldwell Rupe, owner of Land Title, a company that has been in Rupe’s family for half a century. Warner didn’t tell Rupe about Herrera’s past.

Rupe has experience with inmates; she recently completed a term as chairwoman of an administrative board that hires prisoners to make blue jeans. She describes herself as a “cradle Republican” who signed on to JOBS Plus because she was intrigued by a program that might cut the welfare rolls. She liked Herrera instantly.

“Vira said the right things to me,” Rupe recalls. “She said, ‘I have to disclose to you that I have been convicted of theft, that I spent time in the Oregon state penitentiary system . . . I was a heroin addict and I had to steal to support my addiction.’ She made a real clear statement to me. She took responsibility, and she also had a tremendous desire to work.”

Rupe interviewed six people for two JOBS Plus slots. She hired Herrera for $5 an hour--the $4.75 minimum wage, which the government reimburses, plus 25 cents an hour that she pays herslef. That costs Rupe’s company $10 a week. She says Herrera is worth it.

Rupe put Herrera on the switchboard, encouraging her to use a mirror, to smile, to realize that how you look is how you sound. Smile until your face hurts, Rupe told her. “At first, she was real shy and scared of the phone system,” Rupe recalls. But over time, she noticed subtle changes. Herrera began to dress better. She sounded more confident, more professional.

Since she joined Land Title, Herrera has split her time between that company and a property management business, Rupe Properties, owned by Rupe’s husband, Buddy. Her bosses are complimentary. Herrera has learned to work a computerized scanning machine and a word processor, she’s adept at filing and other clerical tasks--and she’s mastered the once-mysterious fax.

Herrera and the Rupes have agreed that as of July 1, when she was scheduled to start on the Land Title payroll, she would be subcontracted out to Buddy Rupe, becoming his sole employee. It is an especially good deal for him; the state, through JOBS Plus, sent Herrera to Portland for a special training seminar to learn the property management computer program Buddy Rupe uses. That cost taxpayers roughly $1,000--money Rupe says he would not have spent on his own.

Buddy Rupe would not have gotten involved in JOBS Plus had his wife not dragged him into it. In his business, renting apartments, he is a bit tired of welfare mothers. “I see these young girls coming in who have two babies in their arms, and I ask them how much money they make a month, and they tell me as soon as they have this other baby in their belly, they’ll make $600, and I don’t like paying for that. Here,” he says, referring to Herrera, “is a person who says, ‘I won’t do that.’ ”

*

As is often the case with welfare-reform plans, JOBS Plus costs more than simply sending out welfare checks. Oregon officials don’t know how much more, but hope that their analysis will prove that the program eventually pays for itself through a reduction in the rolls. They estimate that for every six months someone spends on JOBS Plus, the state pays out nine months’ worth of welfare grant money.

Statewide, 200 people have been sent to work through JOBS Plus. In Malheur County, where more than 400 people receive AFDC, there are roughly 24 participants in JOBS Plus. Warner says 73 employers have expressed interest in the program. But so far, only 24 people have been placed, among them a bank teller, a law office clerk, a freight truck dispatcher and Herrera.

Sometimes it isn’t easy to make a match.

“They [the employer] might not have workers’ comp insurance, which is required,” Warner says. “Or there is a lifting requirement of 50 pounds, and I don’t have anyone who can do that. Or they might be an employer where you have to travel an hour to get there, and for someone with small children, it just doesn’t make sense to make them travel.”

Warner, a newcomer to the welfare bureaucracy, has been startled, she says, by “the helplessness” of some of her clients. Some seem afraid to work. Others are eager, but inarticulate. To the handful that refuse, Warner says firmly that they can “participate in the opportunity that we give them, or they can choose to do it their own way, without public assistance.”

The majority of JOBS Plus participants--94%--are women with young children. Many, like Herrera, have troubled histories. Oregon officials are busy monitoring their progress, looking for the elements that will help keep them off the federal dole for good.

What they will find, experts say, is that welfare reform can work--but only if the right factors come into play. Herrera’s life may sound complicated, but her problems--addiction, illness, single motherhood--are hardly unusual. With a few factual changes here and there, her tale could be that of any single mother on AFDC. Take out heroin. Plug in illiteracy. Take out cervical cancer. Plug in spousal abuse.

Some surveys show that AFDC recipients have twice the rate of disabilities of other women the same age, says Zill of the consulting firm Westat. About 15% have literacy levels so low they might be classified as mentally disabled.

“There’s no one problem,” says Nightingale of the Urban Institute. “Everybody is different who is on welfare, every situation. And there is no easy solution. There is no silver bullet.”

*

In a ramshackle brown house so close to the railroad tracks that the cupboards rattle when the trains go by, Elvira Herrera is cooking dinner for her two daughters--tortillas and a meat dish. The older girl, Naemi, bounds in the front door. She is cheery and talkative, and she offers this assessment of her life at home with a working mom:

“It’s cool! We used to have to help her with a whole lot of things, like cleaning the house and stuff, but now that she’s got a job she’s really changed. She’s always up. She goes to the track almost every day and walks. She’s always washing dishes and cooking at the same time. My mom’s hyper.

“And she stops me and my little sister from getting into really, really big fights. She used to let us punch and kick. Now, if we scream at each other, we have to go in our room and hold hands.”

Hearing her daughter talk this way brings a faint smile to Herrera’s lips. She knows she was not a good mother to her older children, and she is trying to make up for it with the younger girls. She wants them to know there is another way, a life outside drugs, poverty and welfare.

Money is tight. Herrera still makes $5 an hour and takes home $798 a month from her job at Land Title--she made that much dealing drugs in just one day. Rent is $475; car insurance, $30; phone bill, $50, and what’s left goes for food.

Breakfast cereal, at $4 a box, is too expensive, and Herrera cooks tortillas every day to save money on bread. When she goes shopping, she makes the rounds from one grocery store to another, buying what’s on sale. She puts $10 of every paycheck in a savings account for herself, and $20 for her daughters. “I think about them going to college,” she says, “and having a completely different life.”

She dreams of vacations. She dreams, as well, of a better job--though her goals are unclear. Sometimes she talks of helping kids with backgrounds like hers.

She knows she is always in danger of a relapse, and she works at sobriety, attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings three or four times a week and reading her daily meditations. Her past is never far from her thoughts.

From her back door, Herrera can see a bit of it. There, across the railroad tracks, is the Ore-Ida potato processing plant where, in another life, she worked as a high school dropout. It has been a long, long time since then.