Workfare for Food Stamps?

When Brownsville resident Robert Rodriguez went to the city's Pine Street food stamp center in East New York last month to recertify his eligibility for food aid, he was brought up short by what he saw in the waiting room.

"There's a big sign in there telling everybody they gonna have to start working for the food stamps," he recalls. "Last time I noticed, you had to work if you get cash money, but I never knew no shit about no food stamps."

It's a story that is increasingly being repeated among the city's 1.8 million people receiving food stamps: With no public announcement, the city has begun requiring them to either prove that they hold down jobs, or enroll in city work programs — and face having their benefits cut off if they don't comply. Though the city Human Resources Administration insists that there's been no official change in policy, interviews with food stamp recipients, public service lawyers, and advocates for the poor reveal that over the past year, an increasing number of people have been informed by HRA that if they aren't working, they can't get food aid.

There's been "a definite increase since the recession" in requiring food stamp recipients to prove that they're working, says Roxanna Henry of the Hunter College-based Welfare Rights Initiative, which counsels CUNY students receiving public benefits. "They've never imposed the 20-hour [work] mandate for food stamps, and now they are."

The potential ramifications of stepped-up work requirements could affect tens if not hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. Advocates like Henry worry that the apparent crackdown not only comes at a terrible time, with unemployment near record highs, but that it could end up driving needy people away from food stamps, just as the city's "work first" policies have been instrumental in massively reducing the welfare rolls — largely, say many welfare experts and poor New Yorkers, by creating such onerous bureaucratic hurdles that it's easier to give up aid than to meet the city's requirements.

(HRA, on the other hand, attributes the persistent low welfare caseload to a desire by low-income people to eschew cash assistance for the combination of a job and non-welfare benefits, like food stamps.)

"A backpack filled with lead"

Of the 1.8 million New Yorkers receiving food stamps, most are exempt from work rules: Either they're already working, are disabled or otherwise unable to work, are too old, have children, or are children themselves. That leaves the so-called Able-Bodied Adults Without Children, or ABAWDs, of whom there were 90,512 in the city in July 2011, according to the most recent count by the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. About three-quarters of these receive food stamps only, with no cash welfare benefits.

If there's been a big jump in the number of these individuals pressed into city work programs, it hasn't yet shown up in the official numbers: About 20 percent of ABAWDS are currently in HRA job programs, up from 19 percent a year earlier. And in any case, HRA officials have long argued, falling city welfare rolls — now down to about 350,000 from an all-time high of 1.1 million in 1995 — are a sign of the success of work programs in moving people into jobs.

Longtime critics of "work first" beg to differ, saying that by placing unnecessary hurdles in the way of people seeking food aid, it runs the risk of reversing the gains made by the Bloomberg administration's own efforts to encourage city residents to apply for food stamps.

"People are climbing over a mountain with a backpack filled with lead — every extra thing you add is another barrier," says New York City Coalition Against Hunger director Joel Berg. "So there's no question that this could take benefits away from people."

Denying food stamps to those who are not working has actually been legal since 1996, when the federal welfare reform law signed by President Clinton limited childless individuals who were able to work to three months of food stamps in any three-year period. Anyone seeking benefits beyond that limit could be required to show that they were working 20 hours a week — or else, like those applying for welfare benefits, they would be required to enroll in a government job training or work program.

There was one out clause: Cities or states with chronically high levels of unemployment could apply for a waiver that would allow anyone with a low enough income to keep getting food stamps indefinitely, regardless of whether they'd found work. Forty-two states, plus parts of six others, currently have such waivers, according to the USDA.

Mayor Bloomberg, however, consistently refused to apply for the exemption — even on one occasion overruling two top officials, deputy mayor Linda Gibbs and then-HRA commissioner Verna Eggleston, when they expressed their intent to accept the federal waiver. Gibbs' explanation of the reversal at the time: "We believe that every New Yorker who can work should work." Likewise, when the federal stimulus bill suspended all food stamp work requirements for 2009 and 2010, the Bloomberg administration ensured that a provision was included that exempted municipalities that could provide enough work assignments for all.

Still, according to numerous city poverty experts as well as food stamp recipients themselves, the work rules were never widely enforced in New York City. "We had this knockdown dragout fight in the media, twice front page of the New York Times, and they weren't even really enforcing it," says Berg, who has fought unsuccessfully for years to get the city to apply for an ABAWD waiver. "What I never knew — and I never wanted to ask — was how high up did they know that?"

A new enforcement push