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[Page: H1275]  GPO's PDF
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   The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Mrs. Mink) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.

   Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the minority leader's designation of this hour to the discussion of welfare reform.

   The Bush administration has submitted various proposals. Most of them go to the technicalities of States' performance and percentages of people that must be in a work program. They have increased the work requirements from 30 hours to 40 hours, with some allowance for the use of 16 hours for other than actual work activity. But in most cases the administration's proposals do not go to the matter of the actual recipients and families that have been affected by the many changes that we made in 1996.

   I do not think there is any dispute on either side of the aisle that the provision of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act did dramatically lower the number of welfare recipients all across the country. This was because there were mandatory requirements on work. If you did not work, if you did not register for work, if you did not go into some sort of a work project, you would lose the cash assistance. Therefore, the numbers that fell dramatically to about 50 percent of what they were in 1996 is basically because of the rules that were included in the 1996 TANF legislation.

   The requirement to work has removed many of these families from the welfare roles. The problem with just removing these families from the welfare roles, however, is that they have simply gone to dead-end jobs, most of them earning minimum wage, perhaps some as much as $6 or $7 an hour, but that is it. So most of these families remain under the poverty level and, therefore, continue to be a responsibility of the national and State governments.

[Time: 17:15]

   They continue to be eligible for housing support. They continue to be eligible for food stamps. They are eligible for Medicaid allowances and are, of course, as former TANF recipients, going to work under the TANF rules entitled to significant amounts of child care support.

   The object of welfare reform, it seems to me, is to really take a look at the outcomes, not simply the mechanisms; what percentage, 50 percent, 60 percent are at work. The mechanisms have been proven to work, partly because of the flexibility that the States have been given to implement these new requirements.

   The real way that we can measure the success of welfare reform, it seems to me, is to look at the quality of the family life after they have left welfare. Are these families earning sufficient funds to really take their family out of poverty, out of all of the support services that the poor in this country are entitled to? I think the answer to that question is that the substantial majority of families that have gone off welfare are still poor, are still below poverty and are still dependent upon the wide variety of support mechanisms that are there for the poor in America. So, therefore, welfare reform, it seems to me, has stopped short of accomplishing the real mission which it should be, and that is to bring these families up to economic self-sufficiency, to a matter of economic security.

   One of the real mistakes I think that we made in the enactment of TANF in 1996 is that we did not consider these families as being those that might benefit from education. We have 1 year vocational training as a work activity, but for many of the individuals on welfare, additional educational opportunities ought to be provided. That is the number one goal of legislation that I have introduced in the House last November, which now enjoys 90 cosponsors. And it looks to the welfare reform legislation from the perspective of the recipient, not from the perspective of the mechanic, the percentages that are being held or the percentages that are being gotten off of welfare or all of those mathematical statistical charts.

   What we have done in the bill I introduced, H.R. 3113, is to look to see how it impacted the families, and as a result of the legislation, H.R. 3113 currently enjoys the support and endorsement of over 80 organizations throughout the country, the YWCA, the National League of Women Voters, a large number of women's organizations, Business Professional Women, Center for Women Policy Studies, and on and on.

   These individuals have not come on to support the legislation as casual observers. In most instances, they have participated in the writing of the bill from, again, the perspective of the child, of the family, of the single parent, to see what we could do to enhance their condition, their standing in our society.

   The people on welfare have to be looked at as individuals who want desperately to improve their condition, and I think that the major item that is missing in the current law and in the Bush administration's proposal is the importance of education.

   Our bill hopes to consider education as a work activity. The law says one must be in a work activity. So in order to comply with the law, and not to be sanctioned for failure to comply, we must first of all say education is a

[Page: H1276]  GPO's PDF

   President Bush for his initial thrust, when he came to this Chamber and addressed the country from that podium there, he said that we must not leave any child behind. Following that message, we passed a major education bill, elementary and secondary education, H.R. 1, as it went through this House, and today it is Public Law 107-110. And the whole approach is that we have to uplift the standards of our public educational system so that no child in America is deprived of the basic opportunities to earn an education and to be somebody to the best of their talents and abilities.

   That is the approach I think we should be taking with welfare reform. What can we do to uplift and enhance the quality of life of these children? It is still aid to dependent children, even if we call it temporary assistance for needy families. It is still based upon what can we do to support, help these children.

   I think, for instance, that care giving is an important responsibility of all parents, not just those in the middle class and in the upper middle class and the rich, to be free and able to stay home and care for their own children, nurture them, raise them until they are school age. That should be the social, moral responsibility that is recognized by government for all mothers. But we do not do that in TANF . We do not do that in this welfare reform law that we enacted in 1996, nor do we do that in the current reauthorization versions that have been submitted.

   Instead, we say that everyone on welfare must go to work, must have a self-sufficiency plan, must perform 40 hours of work, because we must train these individuals to understand what work responsibility is, and we ignore the fact that nurturing a child at home is as important a responsibility as engaging oneself in a minimum wage job.

   Furthermore, many of these parents, in a collection of comments that I have been reading through in a publication called Faces of Change, written by welfare recipients and those that have left welfare and are now engaged in work, how troubled they are because they come from troubled families. They have many difficulties in their own personal situations. They have sickness in their family, a child that is asthmatic, or there are mental difficulties and other kinds of health difficulties within the family that makes steady employment almost impossible. And certainly if the child care is not adequate, they raise the concerns of the mother even more.

   So I think we have to bear in mind that the individuals who are on welfare need to have this special consideration. The legislation that I have put forth, H.R. 3113, explicitly says for the nonschool-age children that the option ought to be left to the mother to decide whether to remain at home and to care for these small children. Even with the children who are in school, the teenagers who are apt to get into trouble, apt to find themselves in difficulty, need a parent at home.

   Many of these parents who write their story say the only job they could get was something at night that brought them home at 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning. Their teenaged children were left unsupervised. How can we say that this is in the best interests of the children of these poor families not to have an adult or parent there to supervise them when they are home from school?

   We do not have after-school programs also in many places, and as a consequence, school is over after 2 or 3 o'clock, these teenage children, age 14, 15, are out on the street. No one is at home to take care of them, because under our TANF law the parent is required to work; and now, under the new proposals, to work not just 30 hours but to work the full 40 hours, not necessarily in compensated work, because the assumption is that if they cannot get compensated work, they ought to be doing volunteer work or doing workfare for the State or for some charitable institution.

   I think that this is all very, very wrong. It does not accord the respect to our mothers in this country who are struggling to raise their children. Just because they are on welfare, they do not love their children any less. They do not have any lesser responsibilities for their children. And therefore it seems to me that we need to put first things first, and that is to enact legislation that carries with it this sense of responsibility of this government and of the States for its smallest citizens, for the children.

   So I am hoping that this perspective can come into the discussion and the debate as we work these bills in the two committees. The Committee on Education and the Workforce will be doing markup, the bill was only introduced yesterday, but will be doing markup next Wednesday. And I am told that the Committee on Ways and Means also has an expedited schedule.

   The general public is not going to have adequate time to reflect on it, to react to it, to contact the Members of Congress to express their personal objections to the various changes that the administration is proposing, and therefore I take this means today to heighten the awareness of the community out there, which I know is engaged in this subject, and ask for their attention and urge them to contact members of the Committee on Ways and Means and of the Committee on Education and the Workforce and to convey their concerns about the recipients of welfare, or the children and the children's welfare, and not to enact stricter requirements on work which will make it even harder for these families to survive.

   I would like at this time to yield to my colleague who serves on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, has been a stalwart defender of the rights of families and mothers, and works hard to benefit the children of America. She is also a cochair of the Task Force on Welfare Reform on the Democratic side, and she has been working very, very hard to try to amass public opinion, learned discussions about this subject, so that this House can have the benefit of the best information, best records that we can put together. And I am really pleased at this time to yield to my colleague, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

   Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Mrs. Mink) for the partnership she provides for me in this House of Representatives. I appreciate it so much.

   We might want to just talk back and forth a bit, because I think there is a lot we can talk about that I think is so important. My colleague may have said most of it, but I think it bears repeating.

   In 1996 when we passed welfare reform, after both of us voting against it because it did not provide a safety net for children, we warned the President, then Bill Clinton, and our colleagues, many of whom agreed with us and voted with us, that getting women off of welfare and into jobs would not be enough, that just could not be the end result of welfare reform, and we warned them that that was particularly important to look at if there was a downturn in our economy.

   We did not mean to be prophetic. I mean, we did not want to be seers. We just knew, and there it is. We were right, because this recent economic downturn has exposed the problem that we talked about in the 1996 welfare reform bill.

   The guiding principle of 1996 reform was that welfare was the enemy. But the enemy was not welfare, and we knew it. The enemy, and still is, is poverty. When I hear people brag about how successful welfare reform has been, I wonder how they are measuring the success. I know how they are measuring the success. We both do. The success of welfare reform must be measured by how we break down the cycle of poverty, not how many people have left the welfare rolls.

[Time: 17:30]

   First of all, we do not know that everybody that has left the welfare rolls has gone to work. We just know how many people are no longer on welfare.

   We have to measure when we are looking at the success of welfare reform, we have to measure if families have become self-sufficient, which means that they are able to raise their

[Page: H1277]  GPO's PDF

   President Bush wants to increase the requirement to 40 hours a week from what is currently 30. The only way this requirement is going to work is if we count education as work. I know the gentlewoman just discussed this, but if we want self-sufficiency and women particularly to go from welfare and get out of poverty, we have to see that they have education and training to qualify for jobs that pay a livable wage.

   Mr. Speaker, to that end I have introduced legislation called the Education Counts Act. What this does is allows education activities to count as work activities and not be counted against a welfare recipient who is going to school in order in the long run to earn a real living. Rather than penalize them, the clock is ticking and her welfare limits are disappearing while she is at school, I think that we should stop the clock entirely because only by giving women access to education and training will they have the background and skills needed for jobs that pay a livable wage so they can become self-sufficient.

   Also, if we expect women to go to school or to go to work, in particular, because that is what the goal of the President's plan is, to put everybody into jobs, whether or not those jobs pay a livable wage, and if we want families to transition into self-sufficiency, we have to make sure that we have good child care available, quality child care and enough child care because we have to ensure that moms can free their minds when they are at work and know that their children are well cared for. By quality and availability I mean also nighttime work and weekend work. That is very important.

   A lot of welfare moms are going into jobs working weekends and at night, and there is no child care available for them and for their children. We cannot afford to leave our children behind, and what is happening in the President's proposed welfare bill is flat-funding child care, which does not account for any increase in costs; and in the long run, it means a cut in child care when we need an increase because we are increasing the number of hours that these moms are expected to go to work.

   Just as welfare recipients need to be held accountable for working their way off welfare, States have to be held accountable for how they use the taxpayers' money earmarked for welfare programs. The current system rewards States for lowering the number of families on welfare without any regard to what happens to those families. That could be throwing money out the window because if States are not helping families be self-sufficient, then they are keeping families subsidized in the long run, and that costs money.

   Mr. Speaker, I have introduced the Self-Sufficiency Act, which helps States figure out how much it would cost for families in their States to be actually self-sufficient, to take care of their children without any public assistance. Once States have this information, they can better allocate resources to help families move towards self-sufficiency.

   In doing that, they will be looking at housing costs, transportation costs, child care costs, and health care costs in their communities. Every community is different. Some are higher and some are lower, and each State can look at that individually.

   I know what it means to need a leg up, to need some help, to hit hard times and realize that there is no place else to go but to one's government for help.

   Mr. Speaker, 35 years ago my children's father left us when my children were 1, 3 and 5. He was emotionally and mentally ill, and would not get help for his illness, and plain abandoned us. Lucky me, I had good job skills, some college education; and I was able to go to work because my children were solely my responsibility. It never entered my mind that I was not going to take care of them.

   In order to have the health care that we needed and the child care coverage and the food stamps, I went on Aid for Dependent Children while I was working. Without that, we would not be where we are today. That was exactly the safety net that it took, and it took 3 years

   for this mom with an education. I was very healthy; my children were healthy. Members have to know I was assertive. I could get through the system. I knew what needed to be done, but I could not do it without that help. And that was 35 years ago. It is way more difficult for young mothers now. It has never entered my mind, I did it, so can you.

   Lucky me, I have four great, grown children; and I am a Member of Congress. My kids are successful in what they do in their lives, and I am here as a Member of the House of Representatives; and I can tell Members, we have paid back what the government invested in us many, many, many times over. But I can also tell Members if we had not had that help, I do not know what we would have done.

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