By Cassi Feldman

When it comes to work, Calvin Davis, 52, has done a little bit of everything. He's driven taxis and limos, painted houses, cooked, and even owned his own car-detailing shop in Berkeley. But these days Davis, who is homeless and collects general assistance from the city, has a new line of work: giving tourists directions in return for whatever pocket change they can spare.

Davis is trying his best to go back to driving, but with the city's tourism industry in the toilet, he isn't having much luck. Despite new reports that the nation's economy is starting to improve, San Francisco's unemployment rate still hovers around 7 percent, compared with 3.5 percent last year. "It's been really rough," Davis said. "Not only are there less jobs, but there are more people looking." And while the city's welfare-to-work program has helped Davis get his résumé together, it hasn't helped him find steady employment just yet.

Davis isn't alone. The city's Department of Human Services would not provide any information on how job placement and retention have been affected by the recession. But welfare activists say even the most eager job-seekers are getting nowhere.

"During the boom, the [city's] welfare department did nothing really to improve welfare-to-work programs," said Steve Williams, director of People Organizing to Win Employment Rights, a local advocacy group. "Instead they were riding high on the momentum of a booming economy. Now that it's bust, the city's welfare policy is bust."

Did welfare reform work?

The city's approach is based on a federal law approved in 1996, which uses time limits, mandatory work requirements, and financial incentives to get people off the dole.

For a while it seemed to be working. In 1999-2000, 1,500 San Francisco families left welfare because they were earning enough income on their own, according to the DHS.

But that was before the recession.

Recent city stats show a disturbing reversal: the number of families collecting welfare benefits is creeping back up, while the number of families with earned income is dropping.

The same holds true for California and the nation as a whole: A March 8 story in the San Jose Mercury News found that the number of families on welfare in California is up for the first time in six years. A recent study by the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., found that between March and December 2001, welfare rolls increased in 37 states nationwide.

All of which raises a critical question: did welfare reform actually work – or were the gains just side effects of a strong economy? There's some credible evidence to suggest the latter.

Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., a nonprofit, nonpartisan group, recently released the results of a comprehensive five-year study of nearly 5,000 single-parent welfare recipients in Connecticut. They were assigned at random to either a Jobs First program, which has time limits and work requirements, or a traditional welfare program, which has neither, between 1996 and 2000.

The results: During this period of economic prosperity the vast majority of both groups left welfare some point, regardless of which program they were in. After four years 42 percent of those in the traditional welfare program were still employed, compared to 51 percent of those in the Jobs First program.

In other words, work requirements and time limits had only a modest impact on employment; roughly the same number of people got jobs even if their benefits weren't threatened.

Dan Bloom, one of the authors of the study, told us the findings prove Jobs First worked in a strong economy, but he couldn't predict how it would fare now. Even during the boom, he said, wages for both groups stayed low. "With a few exceptions, the programs we studied did not make people financially better off," he said. "But that was not really the goal. It was really about reducing people's reliance on welfare."

What lies ahead

That goal may change later this year, when the reform experiment ends and Congress decides on what should come next. President George W. Bush seems to have already made up his mind. Despite high unemployment nationwide, he's pushing even stricter requirements: 70 percent of recipients would have to find jobs (as opposed to the current 50 percent), and the average work week would be 40 hours instead of 30.

Steve Barbour, a spokesperson for the Administration for Children and Families, told us the plan is "very flexible" since 16 out of those 40 hours can be used for work-related activities like counseling or education. We asked whether 16 hours was enough to get a college degree. "It's not easy," he said, "but if you go to school at night for five years, you'd rack up some credits."

Given the administration's work-first mentality, you'd think San Francisco would make job training a priority. But the DHS has actually proposed more than half a million dollars' worth of cuts to vocational training programs that serve welfare recipients. Trent Rhorer, head of the DHS, said those cuts reflect financial constraints as well as the city's success in reducing its caseload over time. Even though the number of recipients is now starting to rise, he said, "we're not seeing the dramatic increase that some other counties have seen."

Rebecca Vilkomerson of the People's Budget Collaborative, isn't impressed by his logic. "It's DHS's responsibility to protect its programs, especially the ones that prevent or end poverty or homelessness," she said. "But they're allowing this to become a very political process. Compared to other departments, they don't go out on a limb at all."