OFF THE DOLE AND ON THE JOB

By John Greenwald

I want to move up the corporate ladder." That's not a remarkable statement for a career-oriented person--until you consider the speaker. Michael Bradford, 38, battled drugs and alcoholism throughout his adult life and eight months ago was homeless on Washington's streets. His resume includes a six-month jail term for burglary. Born into a welfare family, Bradford fully expected to die in one.

No longer. Today Bradford is a poster boy for the barely begun--and some would say doomed--effort to move most welfare clients off the dole and into decent jobs. As a graduate of a six-week welfare-to-work program sponsored by Marriott Corp., Bradford has a foot on the ladder at the company's Crystal Gateway Hotel in Arlington, Va., where he cleans and sets up conference rooms for $7.60 an hour (vs. the current minimum wage of $4.75). He gets health insurance and profit sharing and will be eligible for stock options next year. "In the beginning I was doubtful," Bradford recalls. "I had started other training programs but never finished them. I wasn't sure this would end any differently."

Bradford isn't the only one with misgivings. "The history of job training is dismal," says Mark Wilson, labor expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Yet the Welfare Reform Act will make training more necessary than ever: at least 1.5 million adults now receiving aid will have to find work by 2002. The vibrant economy has already scooped up the top prospects, leaving many who may be burdened by drug addiction, physical abuse, too many children or too little education. Lots of these folks would prefer to be working. But the more cynical think they never will. "The scale of the challenges is so much grander than the scale of the remedies that one can't be euphoric," says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who is less than thrilled with the reform legislation.

The magnitude of the task has come home to President Clinton, who has been pleading with corporate America to hire welfare recipients. This week he takes his case to St Louis to meet with leaders of many of the more than 500 companies--from Boeing to Anheuser-Busch--that belong to the Welfare to Work Partnership, organized by the White House in May to employ people on public assistance. "There are jobs open in every city and community in this nation," says Eli Segal, who heads the corporate partnership. "Our task is to prepare welfare recipients to fill them."

That's precisely what trailblazing companies like Marriott and nonprofit outfits like the California-based Center for Employment Training have been demonstrating--albeit to a still relatively tiny degree. Under their tutelage, tens of thousands of former welfare recipients now hold down positions ranging from executive secretary to shop-floor inspector to assistant hotel manager. Importantly, the programs are market driven, providing truly qualified workers for companies with real needs. Here is a look at some of the leading efforts:

TIES THAT BIND. "We are doing a good thing, but if the grand gesture doesn't make economic sense, it won't last," says Janet Tulley, the developer of Marriott's Pathways to Independence program. For Marriott, the price has definitely been right. Not only do federal programs and private charities pick up $3,000 of the $5,000 cost of training each welfare recipient, but graduates have also been a loyal lot in a relatively low-paying industry plagued by turnover. Fully 71% of the 500 graduates are still on the payroll after two years with the company, compared with a 60% retention rate for regular hires.

The six-week program combines vocational skills, such as housekeeping and front-desk management, with life-style lessons in everything from grooming to getting to work on time. Welfare recipients "accept failure as part of their lives," Tulley says. "So, if the bus doesn't show up, they just walk away." Marriott discovered that the program has its limitations when half of a special class of homeless participants washed out earlier this year. The company says it will no longer try to work with the homeless in separate groups.

FROM MEAN STREETS TO MEGABYTES. Laptop-computer maker Packard Bell NEC took full advantage of the usual lush incentives to set up its headquarters in Sacramento, Calif., in 1994 in an abandoned Army depot. But of the 4,000 workers the company hired, nearly 1,200 had been on federal aid or were unemployed or underemployed. Packard Bell NEC relied on a city job program that screened and referred applicants. Then it trained the new arrivals in everything from team building to English as a second language.

The new facility has meant a new life for workers like Christine Crabtree, 28, a former welfare recipient and the single mother of a five-year-old daughter. Crabtree parlayed a one-day assignment as a file clerk into a series of promotions that led to her current position as administrative assistant to two senior vice presidents at a salary of between $25,000 and $30,000 a year. Her secret, she says, was to help people around the company with whatever they needed, "so I could learn everything" about the business. But before that, Crabtree had found it hard simply "to go out and find a job when you haven't been working for months. It really does something to your self-esteem."

SEND HELP IMMEDIATELY! Some welfare-to-work programs have proved so successful that the demand for workers has begun to outstrip the supply. At stockbroker Smith Barney, which since 1995 has hired 27 single parents in entry positions at salaries of up to $28,000, executives have been screaming for another 10 trainees to start right away. Such newcomers get 16 weeks of preparation at Wildcat Services, a nonprofit group in New York City, and then spend 16 weeks as interns under the watchful eye of mentors at Smith Barney. If the brokerage firm doesn't hire them, the interns can use their training to help land other jobs. "This started out as a search for new employees," says Barbara Silvan, a Smith Barney director of human resources who runs the jobs program. "It had nothing to do with charity."

Executives of Cablevision were likewise searching for good workers when they hooked up with a community group called the South Bronx Overall Development Corporation. "Our biggest problem is turnover," says Brian Douglas, a spokesman for Cablevision. "We bring someone in and train them, and two months later, they're gone." But of the 130 cable installers that street-savvy SOBRO has placed at starting wages of $8 to $10 an hour over the past four years, 82% are still on the job. As part of its training, SOBRO teaches its charges to change their "street" attitudes--the survival posture in the tough neighborhoods they live in--to more consumer-friendly faces when they make service calls.

Elsewhere, machine shops in the Midwest are chronically short of skilled labor. Enter the Chicago Manufacturing Institute, a largely federally financed training center that each year graduates up to 300 machine operators and industrial inspectors, many of them former welfare recipients. More than 90% of the graduates swiftly land jobs at $8 to $11 an hour.

MASTER OF THE GAME. Perhaps no program has moved more students into skilled jobs than the Center for Employment Training. Run on a $40 million annual budget provided by government and private grants, CET last year placed 3,141 graduates in jobs ranging from graphic artists to medical assistants. Among the recent hires was Pauline Flores, 29, a single mother of five who began work for a Silicon Valley pediatrician in May after seven months of medical training (cost: nearly $6,500). Today Flores earns $8.75 an hour answering phones, drawing blood, doing labwork and assisting physician Katherine Wong. "God, it feels good," Flores says of her job. "I wake up in the morning and want to come to work."

WINGING IT. United Airlines plans to hire 400 welfare recipients in slots from reservation clerks to cabin cleaners this year. The carrier has been using a nonprofit agency called GAIN (Greater Avenues to Independence) to recruit and train the newcomers, who earn from $5 to $10 an hour to start. To help smooth any turbulence, United assigns mentors to welfare hires for their first 60 days on the job. "Mentoring is the key to the whole welfare-to-work program," says Talani Wilson, 23, a new personnel clerk and single mother who had been spending six hours a day commuting from her Chicago apartment to O'Hare International Airport before a co-worker found a car pool that cut the time to two hours. "She's really showed me the ropes," a grateful Wilson says.

Experts are worried that the easy part of welfare to work is already over. "We'll see what happens when we get to some of the harder groups in the case loads," says David Ellwood, a professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former adviser to Bill Clinton on welfare matters. "The jury is still very much out." True enough. But companies like Marriott are showing that the welfare rolls can be a source of valued workers who know how to use a fighting chance.

--Reported by William Dowell/New York, Chandrani Ghosh and Bruce van Voorst/Washington, Rachele Kanigel/San Jose and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by WILLIAM DOWELL/NEW YORK, CHANDRANI GHOSH AND BRUCE VAN VOORST/WASHINGTON, RACHELE KANIGEL/SAN JOSE AND JEANNE MCDOWELL/LOS ANGELES