What Works in Work-First Welfare: Designing and Managing Employment Programs in New York City

6. Promoting Job Retention

61 6 Promoting Employment Retention Providing postplacement services to help people stay working once they become employed is the fourth and final common element among today’s work-first programs in New York City. These services typically involve keeping in touch with participants to offer support and encouragement , and helping people find new jobs if they become unemployed again. Some programs have retention specialists who work solely on these issues, whereas others use case managers to provide retention assistance. RATIONALE Many welfare recipients in the United States lose their jobs within the first few months of employment. In particular, studies from the mid 1990s showed that about one-fourth of recipients who became employed stopped working within three months and at least half were no longer working within one year (Strawn and Martinson 2000). At one wellknown program, Project Match in Chicago, 55 percent of participants lost or quit their job within six months and 71 percent did so within a Create a spirit of partnership Get participants job ready Make good job matches Promote employment retention 62 Feldman year (Wagner et al. 1998). The results from New York City, from the mid 2000s, illustrate that employment retention remains a critical challenge . More than a third (37 percent) of program participants placed into jobs were jobless again three months later, and more than half (56 percent) were jobless within six months. To help people stay employed, New York City’s welfare-to-work programs provide postplacement services. In the words of Karen Smith, Senior Vice President of Wildcat Industries, “Without intensive case management, follow-up, and prodding, those people are not going to stay on the job. They’re going to have an issue and instead of dealing with that issue they’re going to walk away.” Peter Cove, the founder of America Works, elaborated on the reasons behind many participants’ short employment spans: We believe that people lose their jobs . . . because they don’t fit in the workplace [including] the mores of the workplace. What do you do when you don’t have anything to do? How do you handle authority? And also the things that happen on the outside [of work]: The sick child, the day care that falls out, the bad transportation , the housing, the abusive mate—the things that many of us [who are not poor] have supports for and ways of dealing with. We have resources. The people we’re dealing with often do not. Staff cited other factors such as low work hours that can cause people to quit out of frustration or they were given jobs that turned out to be temporary. TECHNIQUES Retention practices can be grouped into two categories: monitoring participants’ employment progress and providing reemployment services. Monitoring Working Participants’ Progress Encouraging participants who become employed to stay in touch To encourage contact between working participants and program staff, programs offer subway passes, paid for by the city. The passes Promoting Employment Retention 63 are available for up to six months after starting work. To receive them, individuals must bring in their pay stubs to their program office every two weeks to prove they are still working. (Staff said that about half of working participants come in to pick them up.) This gives staff members an opportunity to provide encouragement and to ask people about their progress on the job. A retention counselor described a typical interchange: “I do small talk: ‘How’s work? Is your child care in place? Are you getting your Food Stamps, Medicaid?’”1 Keeping in touch with working participants by phone Many programs contact working participants by phone, although the frequency of contact varies. Some make calls a few weeks before the three- and six-month retention milestone dates. If a staff member learns that a participant is no longer working, the participant is encouraged to return to the program to be placed in a new job so that the program can get compensated for retention milestones. Other providers check in by phone every few weeks, including some that have evening call shifts to reach people after work. In terms of the effect of these calls on employment retention, some staff said that their advice and encouragement helps prevent participants’ job losses. Others felt that the main benefit of phone contact is to find out if people had lost jobs, so they can get them reemployed faster. “We don’t really save them from...