We know that in 1990 there were over 96,000 women on AFDC in Wisconsin. Today, there are less than 8,000.
Wisconsin dropped from over 100,000 AFDC recipients in 1990 to fewer than 8,000 W-2 (the Wisconsin replacement for AFDC) participants today. At issue are how many of the initial 100,000 have become involved in the Wisconsin workforce, and how successful their workforce participation has been. This paper begins the quest to determine the answers to these questions. What follows below is a first attempt to determine the number of formerly assisted women who have gone into and succeeded in the workforce. We initially look to see how many women have joined the workforce and to what degree they have joined. Then we focus on the characteristics of the employers who hired these women to determine the degree to which employer characteristics have an impact on the women’s employment outcomes.
Detailed information about both the women who have succeeded and their employers can, in turn, be used to better assist those who are currently making the effort to join the productive workforce. Organizations assisting recipients today will learn more about the employment paths that successful, former recipients have taken. We will learn, for example, the roles of traditional low-wage entry jobs in temporary-help, health services, and retail sales. Have these industries proven to be stepping stones, holding places, or outright barriers to income growth and stability? We learn not only of industry placements, but also size of employer, number of recipients placed at an employer, length of time with individual employers, and similar factors that may influence the ability of recipients to earn incomes that help get them out of poverty.
This first paper concentrates on the characteristics of the employers that have hired former welfare recipients. It traces through the end of 1998 the work paths of the women who received AFDC in Wisconsin in 1990. We learn who joined the workforce, when, and with what results. More importantly, we learn the characteristics of all the employers with whom the women became involved. We learn who employs these recipients, for how long, and with what earnings results. We take the first cut at determining whether there are preferable work paths if one is to earn some minimum level of income. Future papers will report on more sophisticated analyses of the links between work success and employer characteristics, and how these vary with the characteristics of the women themselves.
