Welfare Reform Hinges on Job Creation, Clinton Says

WASHINGTON — President Clinton told corporate leaders Friday that the country’s welfare reform effort will fail unless the private sector creates jobs for former recipients but a leading business advocacy group warned immediately that it cannot fill the bill.

“It’s a foregone conclusion that the private sector will have a hard time absorbing these people into the work force,” said Jeffrey H. Joseph, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The statement by one of the most influential business associations--and one that strongly supported welfare reform--is something of a rebuke to the president, who has repeatedly said that he is counting on private business to step forward and hire welfare recipients.

Speaking to reporters during a pause in a White House meeting with business leaders, Clinton again exhorted employers to give jobs to welfare recipients who will be cut off from public aid under legislation approved last year.

“The welfare reform law did not put anybody to work,” Clinton said. “Unless we can create new jobs in the private sector . . . the welfare reform effort will not succeed.”

Clinton signed the sweeping welfare reform plan drafted by the GOP-controlled Congress, despite widespread opposition from Democrats. The measure shifts broad responsibility to the states for the cash assistance program for poor families. States must require recipients to work within two years and limit cash benefits to a maximum of five years in a lifetime. Many states, including California, are devising programs with even tougher restrictions.

Joseph said that communities do not have training programs that can adequately prepare welfare recipients for meaningful jobs, in part because a major package of legislation to consolidate the scores of federal training programs was stalled in Congress.

“That needed to be done first,” Joseph said. “Employers are committed to the civic challenge of moving people from welfare to work. But the recently passed welfare reform legislation addressed only one part of a bigger problem.”

White House officials bristled at the Chamber of Commerce statement.

“The president is not suggesting that this will be easy,” said Barry Toiv, a White House spokesman. “The country has taken on this challenge--the private sector is going to have to play a major role in it.”

Toiv stressed that it was not the president’s fault that legislation which would have consolidated job training programs became mired in Congress.

“The president strongly supported moving ahead with that legislation,” Toiv said. “It was blocked by very conservative elements of the Congress.”

Joseph said that the Chamber of Commerce statement was intended to lower expectations about the extent of help employers can provide and to remind government at all levels that it still has a big role to play in helping people who do not have basic skills.

“We think in the not-too-distant future this baby is going to be left on the doorstep of every local chamber,” Joseph said.

The depth of the problem can be seen in scores on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test. One-third of the welfare caseload scored in the bottom quarter of the exam, meaning that these recipients would not be qualified for military service.

Clinton has proposed a $3-billion program to provide states and cities with money to stimulate businesses to hire welfare recipients and another $400 million to fund a tax credit for hiring welfare recipients.

White House spokesman Mike McCurry was asked this week if the White House would hire a welfare recipient. As a result, Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta has ordered the personnel office to figure out whether that can be done. But McCurry conceded that doing so could be tricky because of the federal government’s stiff hiring regulations.