ARCHIVES OF THE MAYOR'S WEEKLY COLUMN Archives of Rudolph W. Giuliani

Increasing New York City's Welfare-to-Work Performance

Over the last six years, possibly the change that's transformed the spirit of the city more than any other - maybe even more than our historic crime reductions and record job gains - is the unprecedented reduction of our welfare rolls.

In the early 1990s, more than 1.1 million people - one in seven New Yorkers - were collecting welfare. So many people collected welfare for so long that the City created a culture in which generations of families accepted welfare as a way of life. This idea was considered "progressive" by some people. But the reality is that there is nothing progressive about making able-bodied people with talent, potential, and ability dependent on government.

When you do that, you erode the work ethic, which is essential to a healthy city, to healthy families, and to healthy individuals. And you erode the social contract, which says that rights and responsibilities are inherently related, and that for every benefit there is an obligation.

That's why - as of July 2000 - we've moved 599, 651 people off the welfare rolls and toward lives of self-sufficiency. And that's why we are replacing welfare offices across the city with Job Centers, which provide welfare applicants and recipients with opportunities to avoid dependency through employment and job-related activities.

No longer do these offices encourage people to get on welfare. Now, when a person walks into a Job Center, the first question he or she hears is, "What can we do to help you find a job?" That kind of emphasis instills the work ethic and helps people take control of their lives.

Every week, more than 1,200 former welfare recipients report that they have found a job. That's tremendous progress, the effect of which on individual human lives is incalculable. But we can calculate the amount of money this progress saves City taxpayers -- $120 million every month.

As a result of the work of the City's Human Resources Administration (HRA), we now have the lowest number of people on welfare since 1966. And we have every hope that we can outpace our performance of last year -- in which we were able to find 67,000 jobs for people - and reach our goal of 100,000 jobs in the year 2000.

The way HRA does this is by adapting the Police Department's highly effective Compstat technique -- which monitors crime rates in local precincts and holds precinct commanders accountable -- into an innovative management tool called JobStat.

Under JobStat, each one of HRA's 28 Income Support/Job Centers located throughout the city is given a target to reach. Each week they measure how close the center has come to reaching its individual goals. JobStat is a powerful tool for helping local managers achieve their goals and allowing senior management to monitor progress and hold staff accountable for results.

Today we can measure real progress as we transform our city from the Welfare Capital of the World to the Work Capital of the World. New York's welfare-to-work program is one of the country's most successful, helping thousands of people move toward self-sufficiency and giving them an opportunity to create better lives for themselves and their families.