Welfare Job Rules Hit Women With Disabilities

Women in Poverty - Tales from the Recession's Front Lines

Part: 10

Welfare Job Rules Hit Women With Disabilities

By Anna Limontas-Salisbury

WeNews correspondent

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Petra Rodriguez lost her welfare benefits when she injured her back and couldn't keep her welfare work assignment. A Legal Aid lawyer says situations like hers help explain why the rolls have dropped--people are just discouraged from applying.

wheelchair BRONX, N.Y. (WOMENSENEWS)--Welfare rolls in New York State fell by more than 60 percent from 1997 to 2008, according to the New York City-based Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies.

But those numbers do nothing to cheer up Kenneth Stevens Stephens, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn, N.Y.

He says a burdensome process for securing and maintaining benefits has simply discouraged applicants, most of whom are single women with children. Anyone who can possibly get by without welfare, in other words, does.

After the heavy exodus, the bulk of people left on welfare, he said, are either able-bodied people who are ineligible for unemployment insurance benefits or those who face serious barriers of some sort--physical, psychiatric or language--to employment.

The disabled women who depend on TANF--Temporary Assistance for Needy Families--are a particular concern because of the problems they face in fulfilling the work requirements imposed in 1996 when the system was overhauled.

Petra Rodriquez knows all about that.

Rodriguez has for many years lived in the Bronx, the New York borough where the 2008 poverty rate of more than 27 percent was more than double the citywide average.

She was a full-time homemaker until 1995, when the father of her four children, who had been the sole source of income, left the family.

How would she support their children ages 4, 10, 12 and 14, with another on the way?

Where would she get the money for food, utilities and rent in her subsidized apartment?

"I was getting $250 in food stamps once a month, plus Medicaid. I was struggling," she said in a recent phone interview.

A supervisor with a local office of the Human Resources Administration helped the family get more assistance, but even the increase left some of her basic costs uncovered.

"I was surviving because they increased the food stamps to $325 a month with $42 dollars in cash for my electricity," she said. "My rent was behind."

An Unusual Injury

But somehow she kept the family going until 2003, when she suffered an unusual injury.

Her daughter, then 18, was taking care of a relative's disabled son who inadvertently kicked Rodriguez. The accident left her with bladder dysfunction and a pinched nerve in her back that made sitting painful and difficult.

Rodriguez had a job under TANF's job-training Work Experience Program, or WEP, filing paper work in a Human Resources Administration office not far from her home. But the injury made the desk job unbearable.

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