WELFARE can help people in dire need; welfare can hurt people by destroying hope and self-esteem and leaving them in a cage of dependency. Help or hurt, it all depends on how the instrument of welfare is used. The caseworkers whom government employs to handle this instrument have the potential to help many families to self sufficiency, but the limited field of action and responsibility given to caseworkers has seriously hampered this possibility. Like the factory worker with the wit and will but not the opportunity to do things a better way, the caseworker is often frustrated.
It is not just a coincidence that bureaucracies and factories operate in a similar fashion. Both seek efficiency through division of labor and rationalization based on the scientific method. Bureaucracy is social and administrative science in action. Because of its commitment to explanation, science seldom considers its object of study as a whole, be it the moon or a society. Rather, the object is broken into small pieces or functions which are analyzed in terms of action and behavior — density, velocity, chemical reactions, and so on. Bureaucracies function in much the same way. Functional tasks are defined, organized and then managed within bureaucracies. Every unit has its own important but limited task.
For example, the legislature directs the executive branch of government to provide specific kinds of assistance to particular groups of people. Services and people are cut up into standardized pieces, and officials are assigned to manage the parts so that the law is carried out. Depersonalization is not just a fancy word, it is the reality. No longer does the scientist remember that the wave length of 14 millimeters is the violet of a rainbow. Nor does the caseworker know that the referral case of a 12-year-old male subject with hyperactivity and a police record is the son of Mrs. James Doe and that she and he are both a very special part of the rainbow of life. The desire to see life whole rather than in pieces is not just romantic longing. It also results from the recognition that specialization may be efficient in a narrow, cost-benefit sense, but in the long run it can be terribly costly and detrimental to people helped and people taxed.
As Gary Adkins points out in his accompanying article, the complexity and magnitude of the welfare programs in Illinois are beyond easy comprehension. The problems of these programs are myriad, and simple solutions do not exist. Welfare complexities and costs are to a large extent a reflection of the social costs created by a technological society and its obsession with efficiency and comfort and things. This situation will not quickly change.
The caseworker is the personal link between the individual in need and the world of bureaucracy, regulations and assistance. The caseworker plays a crucial role in shaping the expectations and hopes of the person in need. There are approximately 4,500 caseworkers working for the Illinois Department of Public Aid (IDPA). A caseworker oversees an average of $390,000 of welfare payments each year for an average of 645 recipients. Some caseworkers determine eligibility for people who request assistance; others are responsible for the continuing checks to ensure that recipients remain eligible for assistance, while still others work with people receiving food stamps and those eligible for Medicaid. Still others, classed as services caseworkers, seek ways to obtain social services such as day care, counseling, etc. Workers in the Department of Labor are charged with obtaining job training and finding jobs for recipients under the Work Incentive Program (WIN). Back in the 1950's all of these functions were under the single umbrella of IDPA, and a single caseworker managed all aspects of helping and checking for a recipient. Today things are different. Generally, caseworkers are functionally specialized by type of welfare assistance. In some instances, a single caseworker may oversee two or three kinds of aid for a recipient or family, but no one caseworker ever oversees continuing eligibility, services, training and job placement for a person or family.
What is life like for the recipient who has several casework managers and doesn't always know which one to contact? What is life like for the caseworker who feels like an assembly line worker?
A caseworker today, particularly in the urban areas, seldom knows recipients as individuals or as part of a family or as members of a community. The caseworker sees income reports, Medicaid reports and day care requests. The people and the parts of their lives the caseworker sees come and go in a whirl of paper. The caseworker cannot know or feel responsible for what happens to most recipients.
There are several reasons for this change to specialized caseworkers "responsible" for many recipients. First, the number of recipients has increased much faster than the number of caseworkers employed by the department. As a result each caseworker now has supervision over a very large number of recipients and families, ranging from
8 / May 1977 / Illinois Issues
approximately 540 people per Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseworker, to 750 people per service caseworker (not all of whom need help), to 400 people per Supplemental Security Income caseworker. It is not possible to know, much less to periodically visit, this number of people. Second, as the regulations increase in size and complexity over the years, caseworkers have found it more and more difficult to master the "regs" over more than a narrow area. Third, it is argued that if the caseworker "function" is narrowed in scope, it becomes a technical job. Then a less qualified person can be employed, and the state will save money.
Finally, the content of the caseworker's job is now defined in terms of process, not end result. The caseworker is not expected to oversee the steps a person or family take toward self-reliance; that is, help, challenge, cajole and raise their hopes to assist them to independence without welfare assistance, or to better health, or to better functioning, or whatever is a practical goal for a person or family. Rather, the caseworker is expected only to do the specialized job of overseeing a particular part of the recipient's life: processing requests for day care or overseeing Medicaid use.
Specialization is the technological answer to the need for lower costs, in welfare as in factory production. Specialization is also an answer to complexity, for the caseworker if not for the recipient. Specialization seems obvious, efficient, and at worst, unavoidable. Yet this narrowing of caseworkers' functions and responsibility represents a slow slide toward treating people as objects, toward allowing those who are able to work to adjust to becoming wards of the state, toward not helping people to live. In this situation no one is really responsible for salvaging human lives. Caseworkers do their jobs, but they are not responsible for a person or for an outcome.
Few caseworkers in Chicago or East St. Louis receive the satisfaction of seeing a family they have helped make it on their own, or alternatively the dissatisfaction of seeing a family that seemed to be making progress fall apart. The rewards for caseworkers who want to help people should come from trying to build-in the grit and self-esteem and hope that can make a difference in recipients' lives. Today there are few such satisfactions or challenges for the caseworker. Yet it is the hope of helping that originally attracted many caseworkers to this tough line of work. Not finding it, many in past years quit after a short time. Now jobs are more difficult to find and caseworkers stay on, though often hampered and frustrated from accomplishing all they could accomplish under a more flexible system.
At present IDPA has no strategy for making effective use of caseworkers to help recipients attain financial independence. To be sure, financial and medical help are provided and this is no small help, especially to people in dire need. But if individuals are not boosted toward independence, help soon becomes the hurt of continuing dependency and loss of self-esteem. The result is second-class citizenship.
If the present system of assembly line caseworkers is not a good way of helping people, what can be done about it? The overall objective should be self-reliance for those persons and families where this is a possibility. If unemployment is high, this goal is not generally attainable. To move in this direction two changes are required.
First, more caseworkers would have to be hired. This would be costly, but a dime spent now might save a dollar of assistance payments in the future. But the budget is tight, and who will speak in favor of employing more bureaucrats! Second, caseworkers should be given broad responsibility for a reduced number of recipients. These caseworkers would have to be well-informed on eligibility, available services, job training and job opportunities.
Would HEW let Illinois return to a comprehensive services package for individual recipients under the supervision of a single caseworker? HEW led the way during the last decade in encouraging specialization of caseworkers. Now, Congress has changed the law and specialized caseworkers are no longer required. HEW, however, is not trumpeting this change across the land. Yet federal law still stipulates that job training and placement are to be provided by the Department of Labor. Changing this seems improbable until one notes that President Carter has declared that states should be given an opportunity to find better ways of meeting needs. Existing ways, he said, are not always the best ways. Will the present caseworker specialization achieve the President's goal? The answer is a resounding no. Too often, it may be added, state welfare programs follow meekly in the train of HEW pipers in Washington.
There are a few signs of change. Several officials of IDPA are beginning to believe that caseworker specialization has gone too far, reducing their effectiveness to help recipients and stultifying morale. A pilot program has been prepared for the new director, Arthur Quern, which would reintegrate IDPA's welfare aid under a single caseworker. Even if this were carried out across the state, the vital functions of job training and finding jobs would still be the responsibility of different officials with different knowledge and interests in the Department of Labor.
Welfare assistance is a dangerous instrument in another way. It causes communities, neighborhoods and relatives to disregard people in need because "welfare will take care of them." This distorted perception undercuts community responsibility. Family and community concern is the essential, if invisible, cohesion of our society. Sociologists call this the integrative function. Welfare assistance can sunder this integrative function, leaving the individual vulnerable and bereft of community support.
Jesse Jackson, director of Chicago's "Operation Push," is right when he says that parents who do not help their children with schoolwork have no business complaining about schools or teachers. Without responsible parents, schools can accomplish very little. And communities that are implicitly instructed by the state not to take care of their own, soon become communities in name only. Caseworkers, if they felt responsible and had departmental support, could build alliances with local church, civic and business groups to provide help, training and jobs for people in need.
Caseworkers should be the personal link between the necessarily impersonal state regulations and the individual needs of people. They should display the concern and creativity to help people become a part of a community and to find self reliance through work wherever possible. This is a worthy challenge for Director Quern and Gov. James Thompson.
To be concluded next month.
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