Organizing Resources

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The WEP Workers Organizing Committee of New York ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) was founded in the fall of 1996 to defend the rights of participants in New York City's Work Experience Program (WEP) as welfare recipients and as workers performing the functions of city employees. With 137,000 participants enrolled at some time during the last fiscal year, the City's WEP program is the single largest workfare experiment in the United States.

WEP workers receive no sick leave. The welfare check of WEP workers is continually at the mercy of their work site foreman or supervisor -- even one sanction may result in a recipient's case being closed. After three years of WEP, the legally required distribution of appropriate uniforms and safety gear and the provision of safety training is still spotty. Although New York City's workfare program has no real job training component, its "reformed" welfare system is forcing people out of education and training programs that have much higher success rates in terms of moving people into unsubsidized employment.

During the past year, WWOC leaders and organizers collected authorization cards from thousands of workfare workers at hundreds of worksites. The union organized actions at dozens of worksites through which WEP workers won safety equipment denied them by the Departments of Parks and Sanitation. A WWOC mass action submitted nearly 1,000 fair hearing requests challenging the NYC Human Resources Administration's lack of assessment in making workfare assignments. WWOC members were named plaintiffs in class action suits filed by the Welfare Law Center which won court orders requiring payment of prevailing wages, consideration of recipients' current training programs in making WEP placements and safety equipment. (The National Employment Law Project is also counsel in the last suit.) The City has appealed all rulings.

In late October the New York Times and the Daily News reported that the WEP Workers Organizing Committee an election in which nearly 17,000 New York City WEP workers voted to recognize WWOC as their bargaining representative. Despite active public opposition from the Mayor and studied indifference from Federal authorities, the organization assembled a blue ribbon election panel overseen by Jobs With Justice, lined up 150 polling places across the city, and staffed them with hundreds of volunteers for three days of balloting. Unofficial or not, the results of the election represent a stunning boost for the WEP Workers Organizing Committee and help define much of ACORN's agenda for 1998 and 1999.

The NY-WWOC 1998 agenda includes organizing around three sets of demands:

• Restructure workfare into real living wage jobs by converting welfare grants into City pay checks and augmenting them with Federal Welfare-To-Work funding.

• Establish an Office of Collective Bargaining specifically for workfare workers or expand the responsibilities of the current office to include workfare participants.

• Design and win adoption of policies to protect public assistance recipients from being forced to leave educational programs that might actually help them escape poverty.

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

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