The province's own research shows that people on social assistance are already doing everything that could be expected of them to get off welfare and into employment. They are job searching, training, and often volunteering, to get a job or assist in their job search efforts. This includes single parents who currently do not have job search conditions attached to their eligibility for social assistance. Most people on social assistance have recent work histories and are only on assistance because of job loss. Unpaid work doing such tasks as garbage clean up and tree planting will not provide new marketable skills, and may well interfere with people's genuine efforts to find employment.

Workfare doesn't work

Unpaid community work experience programs (as they are known in the U.S.) or workfare programs have been extensively studied and evaluated. They have never been shown to improve a person's earnings, chances of getting a job or getting off social assistance. Welfare-to-work programs of any kind accomplish nothing where unemployment is high and there are no jobs to go to. The Government of Ontario is not planning any kind of evaluation, rigorous or otherwise, of its first phase of workfare, to find if has been effective in helping to get people into real paid employment.

Workfare is expensive and bureaucratic

Workfare will cost a great deal more than the province is planning to spend. Workfare programs cost governments money, they do not save money. Even the Common Sense Revolution acknowledged that poorly resourced programs would lead to placements that are insensitive to people's skills, barriers and interests. Placements will be poorly monitored, exposing many participants to dangerous and abusive situations. Sanctions will surely be misapplied, resulting in hardship to participants.

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Workfare always displaces paid employment

Community work experience programs rely upon the public and non-profit sectors for placements, doing work which is normally paid employment. Ontario Works will be no different. Many non-profit and voluntary sector agencies who have suffered from funding reductions will be tempted, if not coerced outright, into participating in workfare to maintain programs and services. Proposals from municipalities for implementing Ontario Works explicitly propose to use workfare placements to do work directly for local governments. There will be no way to monitor or enforce the requirement that the program not displace paid workers.

Workfare will divert resources away from genuine training

Workfare is extremely costly. The unpaid community service and pay-for-performance job placement model will take away resources from other, valuable training programs. The pay-for-performance employment program will "cream" off the most employable and job ready people, leaving no resources for training people who need and want genuine training and upgrading. In the end, money will be wasted on workfare programs to enforce a work requirement for people who would have gone off assistance anyways.

The statements of the provincial government on workfare are hypocritical and contradictory. One the one hand, they claim that welfare recipients need skills training and work experience and assume that people need to be forced to accept training or find employment. On the other hand they are telling the community that there is a large pool of skilled workers ready willing and able to work for free on all kinds of community projects. Obviously, workfare will not add very much to those existing skills; it will simply be unpaid work.

Workfare is antithetical to true voluntarism
Volunteer work is traditionally defined as an activity or service undertaken:
a) by choice;
b) in service to an individual or to individuals through organizations;
c) and without salary or wage.

It is evident that workfare violates the criteria that such activity be undertaken by choice, but the issues raised by "involuntary voluntarism" go far beyond semantics.

The voluntary sector depends on volunteers who are genuinely interested in doing volunteer work and motivated to participate. Many social assistance recipients already volunteer in their communities and many more want to, but can't freely volunteer under current rules, or the proposed scheme.

Mandatory community service is now associated with the criminal justice system as an alternative to incarceration. Is the government saying the unemployed need to be treated like criminals? Will genuine volunteers view their volunteer work in the same way once it becomes associated with the heavily stigmatized welfare system?

Hundreds of thousands of "involunteers"

The voluntary sector is ill-equipped to accommodate hundreds of thousands of "involuntary volunteers." Genuine volunteer work requires an administrative infrastructure. Volunteers have to be recruited and trained, their work assigned, coordinated and monitored. The voluntary sector, under-resourced at the best of times, has suffered tremendous funding reductions from every level of government and simply does not have the capacity to absorb thousands of new "volunteers." To date, the government has been silent on the issue of how people will protected if they are injured or become ill on a workfare placement. Voluntary sector agencies may face tremendous civil liability costs for such injuries.

Workfare Watch will be monitoring and reporting on workfare projects in Ontario through its publications Workfare Watch and Workfare Watch Bulletin. Information will also be available regularly on our home page on the World Wide Web.

� 1997 [email protected]

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