Making America Work : A MAN WHO’S PUTTING HIS STATE TO WORK

A lumber mill on the picturesque shores of Oregon’s Upper Klamath Lake is an unlikely battleground. But here, in a Klamath Falls company so powerful that some people say the town would die without it and so private that the front door is bereft of its name, is where the war over welfare reform in Oregon was fought and won.

The company, JELD-WEN, manufactures wooden doors and windows. At its helm is Dick Wendt, an Iowa native with a conservative bent and a work ethic as solid as the thick pine logs his mill hews into boards. In 1990, he spent an estimated $125,000 to put a welfare-reform ballot initiative before Oregon voters. It would have eliminated welfare and used the money to put recipients to work--at just 90% of minimum wage.

Wendt called it “the Full Employment Program.” When it passed with 58% of the vote, Barbara Roberts, then the Democratic governor of Oregon, had another name for it: “Dead on Arrival.”

Five years later, that ballot initiative has been transformed into the innovative--and, Roberts now says, quite progressive--welfare-to-work pilot project known as JOBS Plus. The man behind it is Wendt.

“It’s an amazing story, and it is something that could only happen at the state level, or the local level,” says John Cogan, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “In Washington, this guy would get quashed.”

Indeed, Wendt occasionally tested his concept on his politician friends, most of whom told him it would never fly. He even tried a version of it at his mill, hiring people on unemployment to work for minimum wage, with no benefits. It flopped, one longtime JELD-WEN employee said, because the special hires couldn’t be counted on to show up.

The Full Employment Program is an idea that Wendt has been kicking around since the mid-’70s. Says Charles Hobbs, a consultant who helped put JOBS Plus together: “Dick has always had this notion that his principal work in life is to put people to work.”

Wendt’s plan called for a pilot program in the six counties that gave it the most votes. (It failed in his home county, Klamath.) Roberts, confident that the federal government would never grant the special waivers necessary to enact the plan, fought it from the start.

“It was a hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners kind of welfare reform,” she said recently. “In my mind, it was a very vindictive, unproductive way to get people to work for employers under the minimum wage.”

Wendt was undeterred. He hired Ted Abram, a former Klamath County Circuit Court judge, and sent him to Washington to get the waivers. Meanwhile, a citizens group sued Roberts, seeking to force her to enact the ballot measure.

What ensued was months of negotiations between Roberts’ office and the Oregon Department of Human Resources--and later the federal departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services. At one point, Vice President Al Gore even stepped in, persuading agriculture officials to allow Oregon to convert food stamps into cash.

Out of that emerged JOBS Plus. The program was launched late last year, and, if Oregon’s new governor approves, will go statewide in August. The average participant receives more benefits than welfare provides, including a minumum-wage salary as well as money for child care and education. But the penalties for opting out are harsh. Those who refuse to work are cut off from welfare, and though the pilot allows their children to remain on the rolls, the statewide plan does not. The statewide subsidy is also less generous, covering four months of work instead of six, with two months’ notice if the employee isn’t hired.

In the lexicon of academia, JOBS Plus is “a grant diversion” program. Previous grant diversions have failed primarily because employers weren’t interested. Oregon officials, however, say their program has something others have not: a root philosophy that everyone who can work, should, and that any job is better than no job.

“You have a single-parent population that has child-care needs, is in poverty and has dropped out of high school and probably has abuse or addiction in their background,” says Stepen Minnich, Oregon’s administrator of Adult and Family Services. “A lot of programs have this philosophy that there’s some mystical training intervention that catapults this population right into their ultimate career path. Our philosophy has been that we’re really looking for the first job, rather than the ultimate job.”

No doubt this concept sits well with Dick Wendt, although no one can say for sure. For all his interest in public policy, the creator of JOBS Plus does not grant interviews. He keeps such a low profile that when the Portland Oregonian published a story about him, it ran a picture of the wrong man.

One can, however, find clues to his thinking on the cover of a JELD-WEN corporate brochure. Its title: “Vision, Planning & Hard Work.”