There's a peeling "welcome" billboard on the outskirts of Anna in southern Illinois, surrounded by a handful of new fast-food joints, a busy Wal-Mart and a mound of pushed earth soon to be another Citgo. But farther into the heart of town, the buildings age.

Soon, Highway 146 coasts to the four-way stop that is Anna's crossroads in more ways than one.

A typical southern Illinois town, Anna is rich in history, not industry. Its neighbor, Jonesboro, was a Lincoln-Douglas debate site. There is an attempt to capitalize on that and the natural beauty of the area to lure tourists and their money, but most important, the jobs that follow them.

The need for jobs in this traditionally job-poor region has never been greater. Now, the same is true statewide. On July 1, the welfare-to-work slogan that has graced headlines for months and become practically every caseworker's mantra goes into effect.

Roughly 127, 000 welfare recipients will begin pounding the pavement with the rest of Illinois' 333, 969 unemployed.

The new federal welfare rules are very clear. Two years to find work. Five years of help total. The ifs, ands

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and buts are few.

Simple, straightforward and very scary for some. The stumbling block to success is equally so: There are not enough jobs for everyone. Worse, jobs suited for most welfare recipients are even scarcer.

Illinois needs more low-skill jobs that pay a livable wage if state officials expect to make welfare-to-work a reality, says Paul Kleppner. And there is no chance of that happening. Not in two years. Not in five.

Kleppner, director of the Office for Social Policy Research at Northern Illinois University, is in the midst of proving his point with a six-state job survey encompassing Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

So far, he says, the numbers are bearing out the grim conclusion of his 1995 study of Illinois: There are four workers in need of entry-level jobs for every job opening. The job gap is twice that in East St. Louis at 9-to-l. In southern Illinois and Chicago, it's 6-to-1.

In fact, the study says a job gap of at least 2-to-l exists in every part of the state except job-rich DuPage County.

Specifically, according to Kleppner's 1995 study, there are 285, 459 job seekers statewide for 68, 645 entry-level job openings—leaving 216, 814 Illinoisans jobless or roughly the number of people living in Peoria and Champaign- Urbana combined.

Illinois has already met a September 1997 deadline requiring that at least 25 percent of all single-parent families work at least 20 hours a week. But by 2002, at least 50 percent of that caseload must be working 30 hours a week.

From Chicago to Cairo, the pressure to find work for those on welfare is building. Southern Illinois, however, faces some of the highest hurdles. High unemployment — 13.1 percent in Union County in January compared to 5.5 percent statewide — and welfare rolls are as much a part of history as the few stately southern mansions that remain. Transportation and child care — again, statewide problems — are exacerbated here, a place where 70, 000 people are spread out over the seven southernmost counties.

Anna's four corners is representative of southern Illinois' future — the two paths available and the road it's obviously striving to take.

It's a busy intersection where Main and Vienna streets meet. Semis pause at the stop signs on their way to Cape Girardeau, Mo., Carbondale, Marion or Paducah, Ky.

A turn to the left leads past a thriving business district — well-kept, older brick buildings lining each side of Main Street. Not a single empty building.

But north on Vienna Street is the Anna Loan and Pawn Co. and a row of vacant storefronts, including Rodger's Theatre, which just recently closed.

Catty-corner to the pawn shop is a large, gleaming sign proclaiming Anna winner of the Governor's Home Town Award and a squat tan shed for the Union County Economic Development Corp., which local business leaders formed when two of the town's main employers pulled out.

With an average of four people competing for every low-skill job, Illinois is hard-pressed to make welfare-to-work a reality.

In November 1992, the Florsheim shoe factory in Anna announced it was closing. About 325 employees got notices. About a month later, Bunny Bread, a regional bakery just up the road employing about 125 of Anna's 4, 800 residents, also decided to close. The town went into a tailspin and is still trying to recover.

"Yes, we are going to need to create more jobs. If I took all the jobs in Cape Girardeau and Paducah and everywhere else around here, it's not enough for all the people looking," says Joanne Chezem, executive director of the Federation of Community United Services or FoCUS, one of five welfare reform pilot programs statewide.

In the nine months Chezem's group has been in place, FoCUS has found work for 19 of 38 families.

Don Brimm was working days making about $8 an hour after 21 years at Florsheim when he was laid off. His wife had been fired from her $5 an hour nursing home caregiver job about three months before.

They went from two stable jobs with benefits to welfare. Now they live in public housing with their 9-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter and Don commutes 80 miles round-trip to a $5.55 an hour job packing diapers and maxipads on the midnight shift.

"It's not so bad," says Brimm over coffee the morning after one of his shifts. He doesn't mind the drive most days, and the work is easy. His wife laments the lack of benefits, thankful for the medical card that covers her medications, including painkillers for her back and high blood pressure pills.

He had a better job before this one as a barge deckhand "clearing $500 every two weeks and good benefits," but he quit.

"I saw two men die, and I got scared."

He looked for something else around town, even considered getting on at Transcraft Corp., a local flatbed trailer manufacturer.

Transcraft, the Clyde L. Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center, the schools and Union County Hospital are the town's top employers, providing an estimated 1, 200 jobs total. Ensign-Bickford Industries, an explosives manufacturer in nearby Wolf Lake, is another with 255 jobs.

Of those, however, only Transcraft and Ensign-Bickford offer jobs that most welfare recipients could qualify for — in other words, ones that don't require college degrees or some sort of specialized training.

Sometime before the end of this year, the state's new Supermax prison in Tamms with its coveted 445 jobs will be added to the list. Prison jobs are considered plum here. No one else offers a $26, 300 starting salary and benefits to high school graduates.

Still, even if every job at the Supermax could be filled with Union County welfare recipients, more than 3,000 of them would remain jobless. The prison represents the exception that proves the rule: There aren't enough

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That's Kleppner's conclusion.

The job gap "may be slightly less because the unemployment rate is lower now," he says, "but the fact remains that there are not enough jobs. Period. Not here or in any of the other states we're looking at."

Kleppner stresses his report focuses on the number of available low-skill jobs. If you also consider the number of low-skill jobs that pay a livable wage, the gap grows much larger.

Allison's job is a good example.

A soft-spoken woman, she asks that her full name not be used as she tries to shield her two children from the stigma of growing up poor in a small town.

Allison is taking classes to become a certified nursing assistant, a job in which she can expect to earn about $5 an hour. She held such a job when the state's certification requirements changed, forcing her back to school and back on public aid. "I've been off and on. There were times I worked two jobs, worked 21 days without a day off. I'm trying to do what I can do, but I don't see that the outcome is going to be that beneficial."

That's easy to say when your future has been your past.

When Allison worked full time as a CNA, her family still needed welfare to make ends meet. Even then, they sometimes came up short. "There were a lot of times that I didn't have enough to pay the utility bills."

Poor people competing against poor people for the dregs. That's what Kleppner foresees as the employment outlook for welfare recipients. "One of the great anecdotes politicians like to use when they say there are jobs for people who want them is to hold up the want ads. They wouldn't if they bothered to read them. Most of those jobs are highly skilled, and, by and large, the majority of [welfare recipients] are qualified only for low-skilled work."

Only about a third of the jobs created in Illinois are jobs most welfare recipients could get hired for, he adds.

Jim dark knows this.

As an administrator at the Union County Public Aid office, he readily agrees that there are not enough full- time jobs for his clients. And while the job board in his front office under the "Work Pays" sign is filled, not everything there is suitable. More than a dozen pages of area health care jobs hang there, but the majority require licenses or medical training or, at the least, some knowledge of medical terminology.

"I view this as a long process," says dark of welfare-to-work. "It's going to take real hard work, but I see it moving forward one job at a time."

This spring, the state began looking closer at its welfare caseload, trying "to find the reality in terms of employability," says Illinois Department of Public Aid Director Robert Wright. Wright, by the way, doesn't dispute Kleppner's study. Instead, he calls it "one view of reality," talks about 3 1/2 years of declining caseloads and stresses that states aren't required to put everyone to work — just 50 percent.

But for Peter Edelman, real welfare reform, any "real fix would involve, first, jobs, jobs, jobs — preferably and as a first priority in the private sector, but also in the public sector, where there is real work to be done." So he says in March's Atlantic Monthly.

Edelman was President Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for planning and evaluation until he resigned in protest last year over the new welfare law.

"Even given effective advocacy, relatively responsive legislatures and welfare administrators, and serious efforts to find private-sector jobs, the deck is stacked against success, especially in states that have high concentrations of poverty and large welfare caseloads," writes Edelman. "The basic issue is jobs. There simply are not enough jobs now."

Getting Welfare to-Work to Shawnee Community College is stepping in to help To hear Jean Ellen Boyd tell it, it's simple: Shawnee Community College in southern Illinois saw welfare reform on the horizon and asked how it could help. Now, the small Pulaski County college offers an eight-week program teaching welfare recipients to be barge deckhands. Two more — clerical and food service — should be offered soon, says Boyd, Shawnee Community College's director of instructional program development. Since it started in February 1996, the deckhand program has had a 100 percent placement rate. And, while not specifically for welfare recipients, Boyd is sure many of them have taken the college's correctional officer class, a three-hour workshop priming people for the state test. Since 1994 when that class started, 208 of the 1,358 who attended have been hired into the state's prison system. "We saw the changes coming for Public Aid so we went to them and asked what Shawnee College could do to help. When we see a need, we're small enough it was easy for us to step forward." Jennifer Davis

So, where are the jobs?
According to Kleppner's study, DuPage County is the only job-rich area of Illinois.

Not much consolation to Don Brimm. Even if he were willing to

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move his family north to Chicago Heights where one of his stepdaughters lives and commute, it's unlikely his high school diploma would qualify him for most of those jobs.

As of 1993 figures, the majority, 44.3 percent, of Illinois' clients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children had some secondary schooling. Slightly less, 38.6 percent, had a high school diploma. Less than 1 percent had a college degree. Yet forecasted job growth for Illinois is in areas that require education: computer services, software and business services.

"Rapid changes in and development of telecommunications and information technology will continue to fuel strong growth here," according to the state's fourth quarter 1996 economic forecast.

Overall, the report states, job growth "will slow markedly" this year and next. Through 1998, job growth is expected to average just 1.2 percent, less than half the rate of 1994-95, ranking 40th nationwide.

Despite general trends of a growing economy — a lower statewide unemployment rate, increased retail sales, more housing starts — Illinois' jobless claims were 718, 944 last year, a continued increase since 1994.

Not a rosy forecast for a state forced to find work for some 127, 000 people, many of them undereducated and faced with transportation and child care hurdles.

Especially in southern Illinois. "Southern Illinois is still the economic stepchild of Illinois," says Raymond Lindsay, executive director of the Office of Economic and Regional Development at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. "Per capita income is lower, unemployment is higher, growth is slower."

Since the 1970s, the number of manufacturing jobs (read low-skill, livable wage jobs) has "significantly declined," according to the state comptroller's office.

Manufacturing jobs last year tied with retail trade jobs for second place in rankings of total employment. Jobs in the service sector (read low-skill, low-pay jobs like car wash attendant or high-skill, high-pay computer jobs) now rank number one.

Jerry Reppert has tried, without success, to lure factories back to his hometown.

"Transcraft built a second plant in Kentucky rather than here," says Reppert, a lifelong Anna resident and president of the Union County Economic Development Corp., chairman of the Southernmost Illinois Prison Committee and owner of the Union County Gazette-Democrat. Still, Reppert and Lindsay do their best to focus on the "bright spots."

One of those, again, is the Supermax prison coming to Alexander County. In Massac County, it's the riverboat casino in Metropolis. Across the southern counties, there's tourism.

Several wineries have sprung up over the last few years as have more antique and craft shops, but the crown jewel of southern Illinois remains the Shawnee National Forest, Illinois' only national forest. The nearly 270, 000 acres spread across six of the seven counties with miles of trails, rivers and streams.

This fall the first "Tour de Shawnee" is planned, a combination of cycling competitions and events throughout Alexander, Johnson, Massac, Pulaski and Union counties.

But while tourism will bring people, money and some jobs to the area, the jobs — at restaurants, gas stations, hotels — aren't the ones you can support two kids on.

"Yeah, McDonald's and Hardee's hiring part-time. No benefits. Minimum wage," scoffs Matthew Bible of Anna.

He, his wife Karen and their two sons depend on her meager weekly check as a telemarketer, their food stamps and a $60 monthly public aid check to get by.

Bible, who was permanently disabled when his employer's produce truck had a blowout and flipped three times, can't work. But even if he could, the family is still better off with him at home watching their 21-month-old rather than paying for day care.

Statewide, the lack of jobs is a problem compounded by transportation and day-care woes. But, for this area, it is even more severe.

It's not unusual to drive 30 to 40 miles one-way to work, a major hassle if your day care isn't on the way.

"We have 2, 000 square miles in seven counties and about 70, 000 people. No city over 8, 000 people. You may have to look within a 60-mile radius for a job. Transportation is a major problem," says Chezem of FoCUS.

As one welfare recipient so aptly put it: "It's hard to look for a job when you don't have gas money or a car."

When this woman's car gave out on her she walked to work — 16 miles round-trip.

"I had two young children at home and I was on the verge of having my utilities shut off so I walked 16 miles a day to work for $77 a week. My rent was $150 a month."

And Chezem points out, "A lot of people who work on the riverboat [in Metropolis] work second and third shift. There's no public transportation and no child care during these hours."

More than 21, 000 parents in Illinois are still on waiting lists for subsidized day care, according to the Day Care Action Council of Illinois. About 4, 000 of them are in southern Illinois.

Further, the council estimates the number of families on welfare who will work and need child care will more than double during the next six years. It also cites a 1991 Illinois Department of Public Aid study which found child care problems forced 20 percent of welfare parents to quit school or work. Another 20 percent who had left welfare for work were forced to return to public assistance.

Clark and those on the front lines of the welfare-to-work movement know that without child care and transportation, the client they sent to work yesterday will be back in their office tomorrow.

If there is work to send them to.

No matter what welfare-to-work promoters say, Karen Bible and Don Brimm don't believe many jobs exist — not good ones, not in southern Illinois, not for high school graduates on welfare like themselves.

It's like Anna's four corners. You can put up a pretty white sign and point to prosperity, but you still can't ignore the empty buildings on North Vienna Street.

Illinois Issues May 1997 ¦ 19