Organizing Resources

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 ACORN Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Workfare Workers Organizing Committee joins the New York WEP Workers Organizing Committee as one of the two largest and most aggressive efforts by ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to confront welfare reform. The LA WWOC is building an organization to represent the 25,000 General Assistance workers who work for the city, county, and schools of Los Angeles. (For now, TANF recipients, who are being channeled into GAIN, are not required to perform workfare.) General Assistance recipients work cleaning beaches and schools, unloading dinosaur bones at the museum, and changing beds and blood transfusion bags at the county hospital. WWOC members seek a restructuring of the welfare-to-work program which demands ten hours a week of their time but fails to move them into full-time work even when they qualify for full-time vacancies by dint of months and sometimes years of experience in doing the same tasks for their welfare checks.

Amy Schur, Los Angeles ACORN head organizer, relates that LA-WWOC action has included:

• In Inglewood, 200 workfare workers, who do work formerly done by unionized custodial workers in the local public schools, successfully formed a coalition with ACORN organized parents to demand full-time jobs for G.A. recipients in the schools.

• LA-WWOC members have won safety equipment and, at some job sites, informal but effective grievance structures.

• In November, dozens of LA WWOC members at County General Hospital, which uses 100 GA workers a day, packed the hospital human resources office to demand a first source agreement and a percentage of the construction jobs on the hospital's expansion project.

• In February, LA-WWOC members released a report compiled by Citizens for Workfare Justice -- a support coalition organized by the National Lawyers' Guild and LA ACORN. The report, When Work Doesn't Pay: Workfare in Los Angeles County, documents abuses, miscommunication, and ineffectiveness in the administration of the county's flawed program.

• 250 members and allies then marched the report to the offices of welfare officials who had failed to attend the hearing at which the report was released.

Members are now aggressively targeting individual departments with high turnover and large contingents of workfare workers to negotiate for internal promotion of G.A. recipients as well as placement with firms to which county functions are being contracted out. This phase of ACORN's organizing was launched in mid-February by a busload of members who visited several likely departments to submit job applications and raise their demands.

Finally, the Los Angeles Workfare Workers Organizing Committee reports that it is accelerating toward a recognition campaign scheduled for this May, with 9,000 authorization cards in hand and hundreds more pouring in every week.

Prepared by John Beam for the Workfare Organizing Support Center, a Welfare Law Center project.

-- from the March 2nd 1998 issue of Welfare News