[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 34 (Tuesday, March 24, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E457-E458]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     COMMENTS ON WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT BY EDWARD RENDELL, MAYOR OF 
                              PHILADELPHIA

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. CHAKA FATTAH

                            of pennsylvania

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, March 24, 1998

  Mr. FATTAH. Mr. Speaker, at a Town Meeting I convened in Philadelphia 
on March 10, the Mayor, Edward Rendell made the following remarks which 
I commend to my colleagues.

       Mayor Rendell: Good morning. Congressman. Good morning, 
     members of the Panel. Let me just start out by saying that 
     there is no issue as important to the future of the City as 
     workforce development. We are a City that has currently 
     66,000 families on AFDC. We are a City that will face an 
     enormously difficult problem because as those families begin 
     to phase off of welfare, it will be required by the Welfare 
     Reform Act of 1996 to have jobs or lose any support 
     whatsoever beginning in March of '99 and going through the 
     year 2000.
       We will find that with what is essentially a labor surplus 
     market, we will not be able to accommodate, in my judgment, 
     somewhere between 35 and 40,000 of those families. So by the 
     year 2000, we will have in Philadelphia, a situation that 
     hasn't occurred, in my judgment, since the Great Depression. 
     It will not just be in Philadelphia. It will be Detroit. It 
     will be in Newark, Baltimore, even cities like Seattle that 
     are considered to be cities that are economically viable and 
     not labor surplus markets.
       The U.S. Conference of Mayors did a press conference and a 
     report based on a survey in 17 cities and each city reported, 
     in differing degrees, the same problem that I'm going to 
     address. And it is a shocking problem that nobody is paying 
     any attention to. I don't say nobody because you are all 
     here, but very few people are paying any attention to it in 
     Washington, D.C. When I had the press conference, myself and 
     Mayor Archer had this press conference on how we viewed 
     welfare reform and where it was going. Only CNN showed up.
       About a month and-a-half later, I was in Washington at the 
     U.S. Conference of Mayors, and myself and four other mayors 
     were chosen to speak after our visit to the White House, and 
     I noted that the CBA Network had 33 camera crews in 
     Washington that week all covering various aspects of the 
     Monica Lewinsky problem. To me, one of the greatest problems 
     we have as a nation is that we can't get our news media to 
     concentrate on serious issues that affect the bread and 
     butter and really not only the quality of life but the very 
     lives and survival of people themselves.
       Now, let me tell you how I get to the 35 to 40,000 range. 
     We believe the normal evident flow for the private sector, 
     and the normal entry an coming off welfare, will cause 10,000 
     of that 66,000 to come off the rolls before the year 2000 is 
     done.
       Additionally, as you know, Congressman, myself, Mayor 
     Archer, and Mayor Rice of Seattle were an integral part of 
     persuading both the Administration and the Congress to 
     appropriate additional dollars for a jobs bill for welfare 
     recipients. As you will recall, you appropriated $3.1 billion 
     to be administered over a two-year period. And that was 
     certainly positive news, but one of the things that I want to 
     recommend to you again is that you go back an tell your 
     colleagues that that is not nearly enough money to do this 
     job correctly, and that if we really care about welfare 
     reform and putting former recipients of welfare on the work 
     rolls, that we have to spend more than $3 billion.
       I would reference in 1996, the Congressional Budget Office 
     did a study which said that the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 
     was $12 billion short in the necessary funds to adequately 
     transition people from welfare to work. Unfortunately, no one 
     listened at that time. The President said he would try to 
     cure those defects afterwards and in part, he did with his 
     $3.1 billion jobs bill, but my experience leads me to believe 
     that the $12 billion estimate made by the CBO in the summer 
     of 1996 is probably 50 percent less than is needed.
       I think if we are really serious about welfare reform, if 
     we were really serious about ending welfare as we know it, we 
     have to spend money. If you look at the individual states 
     that have had the most success in workforce development and 
     transitioning people from welfare to work and doing all the 
     things that are necessary components of that, training, job 
     skills, literacy in many cases, adequate child care, 
     transportation, addressing all of the needs, those states 
     spent actually more money in the first several years of 
     their reform effort than they did in their traditional 
     welfare systems. They spent the money up front so that 
     down the road, they would spend less money because people 
     would be successfully transitioned from welfare to work.
       So I think we will find that the money that's been 
     appropriated by Congress at the President's request is far 
     too little. For example, in the next month, we will release 
     our plans for using that federal money. That federal money, 
     with the state match, and the state did in fact give us the 
     necessary match, that will make somewhere between $51 and $55 
     million available for the next two years in Philadelphia. We 
     are going to release our plans on how we are going to spend 
     that money but the bottom line is that if we are successful, 
     if we reach our goals, that will give 15,000 people the type 
     of employment necessary, either full-term employment, 40 
     hours a week plus, or the 20-hour a week employment that's 
     necessary to keep them receiving benefits at the same time.
       So if you take our 15, the 10 that will come from the 
     normal evident flow, we're down somewhere in the high 30's, 
     35, 38 thousand families, heads of households with children, 
     will not find jobs in Philadelphia. And I don't know what is 
     going to happen to those individuals. You have to realize 
     that that's not a surprising outcome because we are truly a 
     labor surplus area.
       As you know, Congressman, Philadelphia was losing jobs at a 
     debilitating rate. For the last nine years, we averaged a 
     loss of 10,000 jobs a year from Philadelphia. Over a course 
     of 11 years, we lost over 100,000 jobs from our job base. It 
     is only in the last year and three-quarters we've now had 
     seven-quarters straight of job gain, but those job gains are 
     modest probably cumulatively less than 4,000, less than 
     4,000. While it is true that there has been some job growth 
     in our suburban corridors, there are maybe 15 job growth 
     centers that we've identified in the suburbs. They've added 
     another 20,000 jobs into the mix. So we've created 25,000 new 
     jobs.
       The problem is that in addition to the 38,000 families that 
     are going to be unaccounted for that I mentioned, we have 
     45,000 displaced workers on the unemployment rolls here in 
     Philadelphia. Those are the workers from the Navy yard. Those 
     are the workers from Breyers. Those are the workers from the 
     Meridian/CoreStates merger, soon to be the CoreStates/First 
     Union merger. Those are workers with job skills and job 
     experience. So our 38,000, or to be honest, our 66,000 are 
     competing against those 45,000 who are better skilled, better 
     trained, better experienced.
       Additionally, there are some 40,000, single males that are 
     out there looking for jobs as a result of state changes in 
     welfare. On top of that, each and every year, we have a new 
     class of high school graduates that come into the job place. 
     And the numbers don't add up. They don't add up in 
     Philadelphia. They don't add up in Detroit. They don't add up 
     in Atlanta. And they don't even add up in Seattle because 
     when you put all those people into the mix looking for jobs, 
     almost all of them were better educated, better trained, and 
     have more work experience than the AFDC heads of households. 
     You can see the problem we have created.
       I heard a little bit of your earlier panel and I know that 
     it is easy in Washington to say

[[Page E458]]

     that welfare reform is a success, that in the 13 or 14 months 
     since welfare reform has been the law, we've knocked 15 
     percent of the people off the rolls. Well, of course as we 
     know, a good hunk of that 15 percent are people who were 
     smoked out who really didn't belong on the welfare rolls. 
     Then my guess is the other half of that 15 percent were the 
     cream of the crop, were people that were on the welfare rolls 
     but had recent job experience who had some skills, who were 
     totally and functionally literate.
       You go deep within the mix of our 66,000 heads of 
     households here in Philadelphia and you will find people 
     shockingly, and it's the reason why we all agreed that 
     there had to be change, but shockingly who have never 
     worked in their life, who don't have one day's worth of 
     work experience. You will find people, when you go deep 
     into the rolls, who are functionally illiterate. As we all 
     know, the necessary job skills in the moderate economy 
     simply won't accommodate those type of people.
       It used to be, not very long ago, ten years ago, you could 
     be a cashier in most retail stores if you could learn to 
     punch one button on the cash register and make change, but 
     now, go into any retail store, small, or large, and you 
     virtually have to run a mini computer to be a retail clerk, 
     to be a cashier.
       The necessary job skills are changing so quickly that we 
     are kidding ourselves to think that we can change a system 
     that has been in existence for decades and that simply 
     doesn't work to fit the needs of Welfare-to-Work. For 
     example, let's take child care. We basically have a child 
     care system that is 8:30 to 5:30 because that's been the 
     needs of the working parents, 8:30 to 5:30. But if you look 
     at the jobs wanted in the entry level or the type of jobs our 
     welfare recipients can hold, many of them are for weekend and 
     night work. And there's virtually no child care available in 
     the evenings or weekends in Philadelphia.
       Now, let's talk for a second about these suburban growth 
     centers. There are 15 of them and only two are near public 
     transportation, traditional public transportation where 
     someone from Philadelphia can take the subway down to 
     Suburban Station and get on a commuter train and go out and 
     wind up close enough that they can walk to the job centers. 
     Thirteen of them are far enough away that you simply can't 
     get there from here if you don't have a car. And of course, 
     almost none of our current AFDC welfare recipients have 
     vehicles. So not only are we going to spend a chunk of that 
     $51 million creating van pools and things like that to get 
     our people to suburban job centers, but I heard you, and I 
     know this isn't the main thrust of this hearing, but to not 
     re-enact ISTEA without significant funds in there for 
     Welfare-to-Work transportation programs.
       As you know, Senator Specter and Senator Santorum have 
     combined to put an amendment to the ISTEA reorganization bill 
     in the Senate upping those dollars from $100 million that the 
     Administration has put in their budget, to $250 million, and 
     I would urge that is an absolutely essential step. If we're 
     serious about what we're trying to do there, and in all due 
     respect, this is not a reflection on Congressman Fattah or 
     any of the Congressmen who are represented here, but if we're 
     serious about trying to get people from welfare to work, we 
     can't do it cheap. We have to spend money for transportation. 
     We have to spend money for child care. We have to spend money 
     for job training. And most of all, we have to spend money to 
     help create jobs whether they be transitional jobs in the 
     public sector whether they'll be subsidizing job growth in 
     the private sector. Whatever it is, we have to touch every 
     element of that, and we better do it fast.
       In sum, if we do all of our jobs well, we're going to fail 
     to be able to place well over 50 percent of our current 
     caseload of welfare recipients and that is a pattern that you 
     are going to find is going to happen all over the country. It 
     is a freight train coming down the tracks going to hit us 
     right smack in the forehead.
       I would make two long-term recommendations, and I make them 
     with the full knowledge that these may be difficult for you, 
     Congressman, or the Congressmen represented here, may be 
     difficult for us to get enacted, but number one, I would urge 
     legislation to extend the deadline. I think the two-year 
     deadline is just going to prove to be unworkable. We're not 
     going to be ready to have job opportunities, child care, 
     transportation to meet the needs of most of those AFDC 
     families. So I would urge a year or two or three-year 
     extension in the cutoff.

     

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