WELFARE-TO-WORK MUST HAVE ITS REWARDS GETTING PEOPLE JOBS IS ONLY HALF THE FIGHT; THOSE JOBS MUST SUSTAIN.

Byline: Andrei Cherny  Local View

THERE has always been a basic bargain at the heart of the American ``work ethic:'' it's the notion that all Americans are expected to work hard - and that this tough toil will pay off

Whether it was Horatio Alger, Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey, the story of the industrious youngster who with luck and pluck finds fortune is part of the American psyche. While often more fiction than fact, there is enough truth there for this concept to have become a hallmark of public attitudes toward government policy.

It was the ideas behind this basic bargain that led to the 1996 welfare reform act in which a Republican Congress and a Democratic president replaced the entitlement of welfare payments with a requirement of work.

During the past six years, the results have been astounding. Welfare rolls have been cut by 57 percent. While between 1970 and the late 1990s - during booms and busts, expansions and contractions - the welfare caseload hovered between 4 percent and 6 percent of the total U.S. population, the caseload is now less than 2 percent.

Yet the job of welfare reform is nowhere near finished. Federal and state governments have done far too little to fulfill the other end of the basic bargain: joining the work requirement with initiatives that make work pay.

With the U.S. Senate set to return its attention to the nation's welfare system, policy-makers should focus not just on requiring work, but rewarding it.

In all the joy over the falling welfare rolls, it is easy to overlook the fact that the important but often menial jobs available to low-wage workers coming off welfare simply do not pay enough to put food on the table or a decent roof over their family's head.

According to the Urban League's 2001 study of those who have left the welfare rolls, the median hourly wage for post-welfare workers is $7.15. If the new worker is lucky enough to hold down a full-time, 40-hour-a-week job, this translates to a little more than $1,000 a month.

All work has dignity, but the true test of welfare reform should not be a choice between the vicious cycle of dependency and the despair of dead- end jobs and low-pay work.

Instead, this year's legislative wrangling provides a true opportunity to build a real ladder of upward mobility for the working poor and the lower-middle class.

Congress and the state Legislature should focus their legislative work on the simple but truly revolutionary concept that no American family with a full-time worker should live in poverty.

The strategies for making work pay are plentiful. They include expanding the successful Earned Income Tax Credit, which has already raised millions of working families out of poverty, increasing the availability of education and job training for low-skill workers, the modernizing the unemployment insurance system, more strictly enforcing labor and worker protections, and improving assistance when it comes to the big costs struggling families face daily: health care, child care, transportation and housing.

Unfortunately, President George W. Bush's welfare reform proposals have laid bare the poverty of his administration's ideas when it comes to helping the working poor build a better life. The compassion he has spoken of has not been met with a commitment to joining the requirement of work with its decent rewards.

In this case, the choice comes down to a question of resources. And in this post-welfare reform environment, with America's social policy more clearly on the side of the values of work and family, the public at large has become much more willing to dig into their pocketbooks to fund initiatives that assist those struggling in poverty.

In 1995, before President Clinton signed welfare reform into law, 64 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that government ``spends too much on welfare.'' By 2000, 94 percent of Americans believed that we should spend more on job training and fully 56 percent said they would support more worker support measures even if it meant higher taxes.

Once lynchings and child labor were regular features of American life. Today, while not erased entirely, they have been shoved toward the dusty corner where America keeps the dreary chapters of its history. With a public eager for action and social trends heading in the right direction, Congress has the chance to use this week's welfare reform debate to take a big step toward sparing working Americans from a desperate struggle and consigning the concept of the ``working poor'' to that same dark corner of America's past.