Pearl River The fight over the budget bill is not over yet, but win, lose, or draw, some kind of work requirement for some level of benefits seems inevitable. The proposal so far anticipates a requirement for all seemingly physically able to perform eighty (80) hours per month of verifiable work, schooling, or volunteer work. That could be twenty (20) hours per week. For all the drum beating about people not working, the insertion of a qualifying substitute of education or volunteer hours with a charity of some sort is a subtle recognition that there aren’t enough jobs in the market to allow people to qualify. Who really knows what they are really thinking, but here’s my cut on this in what might seem radical, but is a serious proposal.
I’ve often joked over the last number of years about how much of our work was powered by our “volunteer army.” Usually, this referred not just to our members but to students and other researchers, many getting some kind of academic credit or required to log some level of community service. We have been lavish in our praise for the work produced on a number of our reports on hospital charity care, rural electric cooperatives, remittances, and more thanks to Tulane, the University of Ottawa, the University of Denver, and others.
Now there are about to be hundreds of thousands of lower income and working men and women who will need volunteer hours. Nonprofits and community organizations always need more people. Getting to scale is frequently a mirage because we simply don’t have the dollars to hire and train the number of workers we really need to assist families and their communities. We need volunteers, and there is about to be a vast army of the unemployed who will need the volunteer hours that we can provide in order to qualify for health and other benefits.
I’m not saying this would be easy. Countless organizers have thrown up their hands at the amount of work supervising volunteers requires. To handle hundreds and thousands of volunteers so that the work performed is productive and fully qualifies would require a real infrastructure that could keep up with the data on volunteers, the relentless verification of hours, the plethora of work orders and specific tasks, and interact with the state bureaucracies to ensure benefits were delivered.
It would also entail risks. These work requirements are designed to be blatantly punitive in hopes not that people will really work or really volunteer, but in order to disqualify them. This means that the organizations running these programs will be under a microscope, and given the current administration’s tendencies, can presume there will be regular investigations. The wisest course might be the creation of a new umbrella organization that could provide this service for multiple non-profit, 501c3 organizations in order to distribute the risks and liabilities. The same organization could also include an educational and training component, although that’s harder because the prospects of jobs in social services and nonprofits, is arguably decreasing now given the federal funding cutbacks.
There’s precedent for all of this. During the Carter administration in the late 1970’s the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act – CETA was designed to create public and other employment during the recession. Numerous nonprofits had large numbers of CETA workers. We even organized CETA workers in many cities back then. The workers couldn’t replace the work of public entities, so they couldn’t substitute for city workers, creating fewer public jobs, but they could do vast amounts of other work, if they were unemployed.
We need to fight these work requirements, but at the same time we should start doing the work to turn this tragedy for lower income and working families into an opportunity, and we need to do it now.