THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

                          PRESS BRIEFING BY
        SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES DONNA SHALALA,

CEO AND PRESIDENT OF THE WELFARE TO WORK PARTNERSHIP ELI SEGAL, DEPUTY ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR DOMESTIC POLICY ELENA KAGAN

The Briefing Room

2:10 P.M. EDT

MR. TOIV: Good afternoon. Here to brief today on this wonderful success story are Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and Eli Segal, who is president and CEO of the Welfare to Work Partnership. And they will just take your questions.

SECRETARY SHALALA: Welfare works, Sam.

Q I know that Mr. Morris, Dick Morris, told the President he ought to sign that bill, turns out to be right. Is that your view?

SECRETARY SHALALA: The President made his decision. He believed that welfare could work in this country, and it's working.

Q You were against it, weren't you, in the good old days?

SECRETARY SHALALA: I think the President and I agreed on what we needed for welfare reform and we got it. We restored a number of the cuts that were made in that welfare bill the President said he wanted after the election. But the most important message today is that millions of people are moving off welfare. We have the lowest rates we've had since 1969. And the message from the private sector today is that people not only are taking the jobs, but they're staying in the jobs at higher rates than other employees coming in.

And if you'll remember, at one of the early briefings that I did, I said the test of welfare reform is not whether people leave the welfare rolls, but whether they stay in the jobs. The test is retention. The story today that Eli and his colleagues in the private sector told is a story of retention, of staying in the jobs.

Q Let me try a slightly different take on that question. There were a lot of people within your own agency and certainly within the broader community of social activists who had deep reservation about the welfare reform bill. Does he talk with them now, and how much skepticism does there remain? Or do they look at this program and do you sense a reappraising?

SECRETARY SHALALA: As Mary Jo Baine was leaving the Department she said, prove me wrong. We're in the process of doing that.

Q Mr. Segal, if I could just ask about the economy. Boon times, low unemployment, people wanting workers. So when it finds that the business cycle has not been repealed and we go into a recession, what happens to all these people?

MR. SEGAL: Sam, essentially we believe in the United States we have two unemployment systems: one, the chronologically long-term unemployed -- those are the people we say are in the welfare system; the other unemployment system, the people like us, our families, our friends, who are down on their luck, the company closes, the industry changes a little bit, lose their jobs -- they go into the unemployment compensation.

It's no question but that there are a lot of people who are the last hired/first fired, are going to lose their jobs if and when the economy turns south. But they would have been involved in productive labor. It's the reason why we say at the Welfare to Work Partnership every day, we're in a dash -- not in a marathon -- to move as many people as quickly as we can into work, into productive work. If in fact the economy turns bad, they and many other people may well lose their jobs.

One of the other messages of today -- but in short, they may lose their jobs, but they would have been involved in work and they're much more likely to get back up on their feet having an attractive track record in the past.

Q Is there still a safety net if they lose their job?

MR. SEGAL: That's something that I think at some point we're going to need to deal with. At least at this point our responsibility is to move people to work. There will be millions and millions of new people -- there are already hundreds of thousands of people working now who were not working only a year or two ago. And I think if the economy stays strong, we will continue to find jobs, and many people making it into the workplace.

SECRETARY SHALALA: There are actually two experiences that people are having that will be very important no matter what happens to the economy. The first one is they got a job and they kept it for a substantial period of time. The second is that they went through a training process. And that's what's going to keep our economy alive -- the training experience, understanding that to take jobs you have to go through a training experience. And it's companies organizing to move people into different slots as they have needs. And the training may turn out to be as significant for the flexibility of this group of people as actually getting in the job and retaining the job.

Q How do you explain the higher retention rates? Is it because of training programs? Is it because these employees have fewer other options available?

SECRETARY SHALALA: It may be a small part of the latter that you mentioned. But I think the first part is that companies are beginning to learn what it takes to retain people. Many of the companies talked to the President today about mentoring as part -- getting people ready for the job, putting them through internships or through training, but then assigning someone that would just be an ear for them, that would help them make the transition into work.

In addition to that, remember that we've also included child care. There is no children's health insurance available. The earned income tax credit becomes a powerful incentive, because work now pays better than welfare did in the past. So the combination of supports -- but the more personalized the system is, the higher the retention. And I think that's what the private sector reported today.

Even in my own department, where we've hired 200 welfare recipients, we have substantially changed the employees assistance program that is the support system for all entry, lower-income workers. All of our new workers now have one-stop shopping, a much more supportive human resource operation.

Q You mentioned you've hired 200. Can you update us on how the effort by the federal government as a whole now stands, how many have been hired at the White House also?

SECRETARY SHALALA: Do you want to do that?

MS. KAGAN: We've hired 4,800 as a whole in the federal government -- that's 48 percent of the goal that we set for ourselves of 10,000 by the year 2000. Different departments have different records. Different departments made different pledges, depending upon the character of their work force.

SECRETARY SHALALA: My Department, for instance, has hired two-thirds of our goal already, so we're going to exceed our goal substantially.

MS. KAGAN: Many departments are finding that there are very few departments that are running back of their goal.

Q What about the White House?

MS. KAGAN: The White House has met its goal, exceeded its goal. It had a goal of six, which given the White House's small staff was approximately equivalent to many other agencies' goals. And we have hired seven.

Q Doing what kind of tasks?

SECRETARY SHALALA: Well, I don't know what the White House people are doing, but ours are mostly entry-level jobs, though a couple of people have gotten promoted pretty quickly into the system as they've learned the job.

MR. SEGAL: You asked about retention. The businesses are saying there are about four reasons they almost all give together.

First, they talk about mentoring or some kind of on-site coaching. Second, they talk about public/private partnerships, the need to do it not by themselves -- something that represents a dramatic change from where they were a year ago. They need help. They need help from government; they need help from nonprofit organizations. The third thing they talk about all the time is the nature of the benefit package they're offering and they have to make it a good benefit package. And fourth, probably most surprising, no compromise with quality. They require and expect those coming off the welfare rolls to be as good employees as any other entry-level employee.

One other thing that was interesting today. You probably have a stereotype of what a welfare to work person is. One of the things we're learning over and over again is these are not always only entry-level people. We're finding in some companies people are moving from welfare to jobs, white-collar jobs sometimes paying as much as $30,000. And we're finding an incredibly varied experience based simply on the commitment of the company to do things the way they knew best. They know how to solve problems in the shop floor; they know how to solve problems in the office; and now they're knowing how to solve this problem. They're all figuring out a different way to do it.

SECRETARY SHALALA: We also have new statistics on the percentage of people that are leaving welfare who are going into the work force. And the new analysis of the Census Bureau data between 1976 and '77 indicates that 20 percent more actually are moving to work. And remember, people always moved off welfare -- some of them got married, some of them moved back in with their families. But what we're finding is a higher and higher percentage of people are going into jobs, number one. And number two, this discussion today, a higher percentage of them are staying in their jobs.

Q Is there any sense that these companies sort of picked the low-hanging fruit and it's getting harder and harder to find qualified welfare recipients to --

SECRETARY SHALALA: Why don't you take a shot at it. I actually think the answer is no.

MR. SEGAL: I think the answer is mixed.

SECRETARY SHALALA: Good controversy.

MR. SEGAL: Some companies, like Cessna, ask no questions about your background -- you want to come to work there, they'll invest in making this work for you. For the most part companies are looking at the most job-ready person first and there's nothing wrong with it. We're happy to debate creaming or skimming, whatever else we call it. Companies need to get their feet on the ground on this, like any other practical problem, let's have some successes.

I think with the passage of time that they've learned a lot more, they're going to go deeper and deeper into the welfare pool with much, much more success because they've seen it work just the way businesses have always done. They've dealt with reality and they've made success and they will go on from there.

So for the most part, I think we are finding the most job-ready people, people that are ready to work today, and if not today, tomorrow. But I do think you're going to see other companies, some of these same companies step it up going forward.

SECRETARY SHALALA: The reason that I was less hesitant about that is because I think the states have sorted out their welfare rolls. Those that were eligible for SSI that were really, truly disabled have been moved to those programs, and I think that the group that's left on welfare -- remember, we're talking about a new group going into welfare over the last year or so in which a larger percentage are going into jobs. So it's harder to make that old argument that we creamed during the first couple of years. So I would suggest to you that the companies are more sophisticated, as Eli has indicated. The government is more sophisticated about support systems. That the states are getting their act together on getting their child care out. We're giving them lots of technical assistance. Children's health insurance will certainly help. The Earned Income Tax Credit will have a great effect.

But people themselves, in their neighborhoods -- the difference between a demonstration program and having everyone in your community having to think now about getting into the work force is that the culture is beginning to change both in the welfare office and in the communities to move more people out and to find appropriate opportunities for people.

MS. KAGAN: If I could just add one thing to that on behalf of Secretary Herman, who isn't here, because the $3 billion Welfare to Work program is really meant to be geared towards exactly those hardest to employ people that you're talking about. I think the President understood that there was a need for additional funds to go towards those people to make sure that those hardest to employ people also got an entry into the work force. And that the grants that Secretary Herman gave out in the first part of the 25 percent of the program that is in competitive grants, towards agencies mostly community based, that really works with those very difficult to employ people and makes sure that they also get the leg up that they need.

SECRETARY SHALALA: I listened very closely to the private sector leaders today and if they have in their heads from now on that these are better employees, that they're more likely to keep them, which saves them money -- it's always cheaper to keep someone than to go out and hire -- and that as some of them describe it, they're more enthusiastic about working in those places, less cynical.

If that's the attitude they're going into this with, we couldn't be in a better situation at this point in time. And I can't emphasize enough how significant the retention report is today and the fact that more people are going into the job force. Because that was really our test. Our test was never just moving people from welfare to work; it was whether they were going to stick with it in the work force. And we always talked about the first or the second job, because that's what the literature previously told us.

But if there is retention going on now and if the private sector is beginning to see that as significant and economically important to them, then what's going on now is very significant.

Any other questions?

Q We at ABC think this is very important and I will personally brief NBC and CBS and CNN -- (laughter).

MR. SEGAL: Can I make a comment on that? You know, I was last here the day AmeriCorps became the law of the land; there was a similar number of people here. I actually want to say that, at the risk of sounding like a cheerleader or a boosterism, this is a big deal. The policy issues were pretty much decided in August '96. This was turned over to the states, to the people, to the private sector. And it is extraordinary to think that a year ago this was just an idea. Today we have 5,000 companies -- it's not easy to get 5,000 anythings to do something together -- all of whom with a common mission: they all want to hire welfare recipients.

Now, that might not sound very big from a policy perspective, but in terms of changing America, in terms of changing the hiring practice of America, the fact that these companies have put themselves on the line -- some for clearly reasons of charity and being good citizens, but mostly because it's a smart solution for business. I think it is a big deal, and I think we're going to continue to see next year -- 135,000 this year, the President challenged them next year to do twice as many next year. When they do this next year, when we do this next year, and you're going to start talking about the people who move from welfare to work, and you're going to compare it with the size of the welfare rolls a year from now, you're going to see that quietly, in 1996, began a process that ended welfare as we know it.

Now, whether we want to give credit or not give credit, not being the point right now, I think it's a big deal. And whether people --

SECRETARY SHALALA: And the important thing of Eli's companies is three-fourths are small companies, which is where the growth is in the system.

THE PRESS: Thank you.

END 2:24 P.M. EDT