The Challenge

In the United States today, the social consensus is that work must be the primary solution to poverty, and that reliance on public benefits should be strictly limited. Yet, more than five years after the implementation of welfare reform, many who remain on the welfare rolls have significant employment barriers, and many former recipients are caught in a cycle of acquiring and losing dead-end, minimum wage jobs. In this welfare-to-work era, there is a pressing need for effective employment preparation, training, placement, and retention programs.

In designing such programs, it is important to recognize that chronic and serial unemployment do not occur in isolation from other social problems. In fact, these employment issues are closely linked to a complex set of problems that includes homelessness, substance abuse, mental and physical illness, domestic violence, and family dysfunction – as well as the commonly acknowledged deficits in education and skills.

Although creative employment programs are critically needed, such efforts will flounder if they fail to acknowledge and address the complicated web of underlying problems that accompanies chronic and serial unemployment. Unidimensional approaches to solving employment problems result in fruitless efforts, waste of social investments, and eventually, public frustration and compassion fatigue.