Companies are teaching welfare-to-work hires how to look and act the part. The results are lasting

YVETTE JOHNSON WAS THE KIND OF JOB APPLICANT who makes employers dread hiring off the welfare rolls. She had been on welfare for six years. Jobs like cleaning hospital rooms and cutting vegetables ended with her quitting or being fired. And she had four kids who had to be shuttled to day care and baby-sitting. When Kimberly Randolph, an operations supervisor for the Sprint phone company in Kansas City, Mo., met Johnson at a job fair, she pegged Johnson as "a job hopper, with a bad attitude." But at her interview, Johnson made a plea. "That was me, and I know it doesn't look good," she said. "But give me a chance."

Johnson took her chance and ran with it. She woke up at 5 a.m. and spent two hours on buses, dragging the kids to day care and then getting to training classes. For nine months now, she has been an operator at Sprint's calling center at 18th and Vine, and she's a star. She sits at a computer with a headset on, placing calls and billing calling cards. She handles 600 calls a day, at an average of 38 seconds a call. Already, she has racked up four "good customer-contact reports" from satisfied callers who put in a good word with her supervisor.

Johnson is part of a small but impressive welfare-to-work program Sprint began last October in one of Kansas City's poorest neighborhoods. Sprint's 18th-and-Vine call center employs 48 operators, half of whom were on public assistance. The center is meeting its performance standards, and its 77% retention rate is more than twice as good as Sprint's call center in the Kansas City suburbs. That's a big deal in an industry where every employee departure can mean $6,000 to $15,000 in lost training and productivity.

Sprint isn't alone on the welfare-to-work bandwagon. Of the top 100 U.S. companies, 34 have programs, and 13 more are planning them. Executives of such blue chips as United Airlines and Salomon Smith Barney were at the White House this spring toasting President Clinton's one-year-old Welfare to Work Partnership and saying their welfare hires had better retention rates than workers found from other sources.

Some welfare experts fear that Welfare to Work is being oversold. Peter Edelman, who quit as Clinton's Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services in 1996 because he believed welfare reform was too drastic, grumbles that these programs "are still taking [people] off the top of the deck" and that many of the hardest-to-place welfare recipients are being pushed off the rolls without having much chance of entering the work force. He is concerned that companies will drop their welfare-to-work hires when the economy slumps and workers become cheaper and more plentiful.

But Hazel Barkley, 18th-and-Vine's operations manager, is a believer. She tells her welfare-to-work employees they can rise as far as they set their mind to. And she lets them know she herself started by working the phones. Yvette Johnson has already picked out a computer-spreadsheet class she wants to take during her daily noon-to-2 p.m. break, and she's aiming for management. "There's a lot of things we can do here," she says. "One thing I know, I won't be on welfare again."

Questions

1. What is the welfare-to-work program?

2. What makes Yvette Johnson "a star"?

Answers

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