Comment on "Supporting Work for Low-Income People with Significant Challenges"

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This paper is a response to New Safety Net Paper 5, "Supporting Work for Low-Income People with Significant Challenges" by Pamela Loprest and Karin Martinson.

“Supporting Work for Low-Income People with Significant Challenges,” by Pamela Loprest and Karin Martinson, provides an excellent overview of the policy and programmatic challenges confronting efforts to improve employment outcomes for low-income parents who face serious barriers to steady, full-time work. The paper is particularly strong in describing systems challenges such as Workforce Investment Act (WIA) performance standards that discourage local programs from serving the hard-to-employ, work disincentives in disability assistance programs, and rules in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program that discourage states from providing intensive, long-term services. Perhaps most important, the authors also note that relatively few service strategies have been shown to increase employment for the most disadvantaged and that even those approaches that “work” still leave participants with very low earnings.

The authors propose three different kinds of strategies: (1) changes within existing systems to promote employment services for those facing serious barriers; (2) additional funding and research to develop and identify more effective employment strategies; and (3) broader policy changes to provide income assistance to parents whose personal challenges seriously reduce their earnings capacity.

In the first category, the authors propose specific changes in the TANF and WIA systems, among others. With regard to TANF, for example, they propose to relax the current rule that limits to six weeks the amount of time states can count “barrier removal activities” as work. Although it would be controversial, this change is consistent with the goal of the block grant structure: providing states with flexibility to determine how best to move recipients toward employment. It serves no one’s interest to allow recipients to languish in ill-defined barrier removal activities, but certainly some types of recipients—for example, those with serious substance abuse disorders—could benefit from more than six weeks of treatment before moving to traditional work activities. This is particularly likely to be the case because rates of relapse are high and many people require multiple episodes of treatment.

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