Young Adults and Welfare-to-Work:
Lessons for the United States from the UK and Australia

A Forum — November 5, 2001

In August 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which replaced the U.S. national welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). TANF was a major departure from the earlier policy in requiring most recipients to find paid work to qualify for benefits and, also, setting a lifetime limit of five years that a person could continue to receive cash assistance. States were given the freedom to shape their own programs to provide "job preparation, work and support services" to enable needy parents "to leave TANF and "become self-sufficient." Though the jury is still out on the overall success of this policy, research in 2001 found that the law was attaining its goals-welfare participation had dropped 50 percent and employment had risen by a rough equivalent between August 1996 and September 2000, with disadvantaged mothers showing the greatest gains. Congress is preparing to reauthorize the TANF legislation in 2002 and considering program designs, such as providing a better, wider range of educational and training opportunities for recipients, supporting and funding the use of transitional work strategies (e.g., subsidized employment, publicly-funded jobs, work/training positions, temporary jobs, job sampling), and introducing a focus on comprehensive "whole family" approaches.

At the time of the original TANF legislation, similar policies were evolving elsewhere. In Australia, a new Coalition Government was elected on a platform to transform the Australian labor market, including changes in the rights and responsibilities of the unemployed. Among these changes were increases in job search expectations, strategies to move young unemployed people into a new parental means test, privatization of the Commonwealth Employment Service. The new Government's goal was to get people into "sustainable employment," build new relationships, not bureaucracies, and create networks, not new institutions.

In 1997 in the United Kingdom (UK), "welfare to work" and efforts to "make work pay" also became policy. According to Dan Finn, Reader in Social Policy at University of Portsmouth (England), the goal was "to change the culture of the benefits system towards independence and work rather than what has been characterized as the passive payment of cash benefits." Implementation of the New Deal for the Young Unemployed (NDYP) was at the center of these changes-the result of a pledge of the Labor Government to get 250,000 long-term unemployed young people into work.

Finn compared and contrasted the UK's New Deal with the "work for the dole" approach underway in Australia based on recent field research and provided a general overview of the safety-net system for all unemployed youth and adults, including unemployment, income support and disability benefits. He indicated that the UK had looked closely at the US for strategies to make work pay (such as earned income credit), and at the time of these reforms, welfare policy for single parents was about where the US was 20 years ago. For adults, there continues to be lively discussion and real tension in the public concern for upholding the caring role of parents and the requirement that they work. (The UK has the lowest female employment participation rate in Europe and the government is not comfortable pushing women into work.)

The situation is less clouded in implementing policies for youth. According to Finn, in the UK, the overarching goal was to end the "benefit culture" among youth, engage the "lost generation" and reduce youth criminality. Youth Policy Objectives-abolishing child poverty, low basic skills and under achievement-included strategies for removing disincentives and barriers to employment by restructuring post-age16 education and training, and improving transition to employment and post-age16 participation rates. (Although there has been a great increase in post-16 age participation, about 25% of a youth cohort leaves school early and experiences a very "fractured" transition to work.) Special guarantees have been set up for youth. After a period of structured job search, the young person must participate in a training or employment program where they are also expected to look for work. If they fail to find a job after at least six months, or earlier, if they are in a special group (for example, an ex-offender), they re-qualify for the "New Deal."

Specific programmatic components of the youth policy include:

• Sure Smart--mandated time spent on literacy and numeracy for 5-12 year olds;
• Education Maintenance Allowance (the Common Youth Allowance in Australia) -an allotment to each family for children, regardless of family income to encourage children to stay in full-time education;
• Modern Apprenticeships (integrated academics and work-based learning opportunities in prevailing occupations);
• Formal links to support services and agencies (in Australia); and
• The New Deal for Young Unemployed People (UK) and Work for the Dole (Australia).

As in the US, implementing the New Deal has required retraining case workers and professionals. Whereas, the old welfare bureaucracy focused on determining eligibility and checking boxes, the New Deal focuses on providing personal advisers, creating individual options and activities, providing follow-though, attending to retention and progression rates, creating public-private partnerships as well as new intermediaries and providers (greater reliance on community based organizations to deliver programs and services), and developing an evidence base to test effectiveness. Staff is now required to help youth develop strategies for assessing their strengths and deficiencies and putting together a plan to connect them with appropriate learning and employment opportunities. Also, changes in the career service require better guidance services for young people and improved youth services, including after-school/recreation opportunities.

Andrew Moore, Vice President, Public and Global Affairs, National Association of Service and Conservation Corps, detailed lessons for the US based upon his sabbatical in the UK as an Atlantic Fellow in Public Policy in 2000-2001. He also translated many of the assumptions and implementation issues of the "UK context" for a US audience.
Unlike the US, the UK is a univeralist welfare state, embracing contingent benefits and a goal of poverty reduction. Many new youth policy initiatives (e.g., Connexions, motivated by US school-to-work strategies; Millennium Volunteers, the National Service option; and the New Deal) are responses to high youth unemployment. According to Moore, whereas there has been attention to US welfare-to-work efforts, youth policy in the UK could benefit as well from the asset-based approach currently unfolding in youth programs and policy in the US. Among the lessons that can be taken from the UK, and a number of EU countries, is their focus on public transitional jobs (TJ). According to Moore, transitional job programs help fulfill a range of policies (e.g., develop labor market attachment and activation, effective for the hardest-to-help populations). For the individual, TJ offers wages and opportunities for education and soft skills development, work that benefits the community, and opportunities for social enterprise. Lessons exist for the US to build programs that use TJ, such as the youth service and conservation corps and YouthBuild, as well as to adopt universalism as an overriding policy applied to TANF reauthorization in 2002 and the ongoing Workforce Investment Act implementation.

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