Jason DeParle

By Jason DeParle
The New York Times Magazine
December 20, 1998

One Saturday morning this fall, a 54-year-old Bronx woman who has spent more years on welfare than she can remember answered a small-type summons from the city government, the second that she has received this year. "Dear Sir/Madam," it began. "You are being called in to evaluate your employability." She stuffed two doctors' letters into a worn envelope, filled a plastic bag with prescription pills and enlisted her son as an interpreter. They traveled to a drab building off Union Square, where they waited for an hour in hard plastic chairs until a caseworker summoned them to a cramped cubicle. "The reason we called you in," he began, "is everybody on public assistance is required to work." The son, a jobless 21-year-old, answered through a mouthful of gum: "Well, we got letters from her doctors saying she's not really able to work."

The standoff had begun.

The first of the creased letters handed across the desk described a case of colon cancer, successfully treated three years before, followed by diabetes, gallstones and a liver condition that leads to "recurrent abdominal pain." The second added hypertension and warned that "unless very light duty is assigned, this patient should not work." The caseworker, a Nigerian immigrant who had worked his way through night school, was not persuaded. He noted that the woman's application for Federal disability benefits had just been denied and that the city's doctors, who had examined her in the spring, found her to be employable. "Our doctors feel she is able to work," he said.

"They'll make anybody work," the son said. "They don't care what's inside."

Across an acre of old furniture and ringing phones, similar conversations were spilling out in every direction. Indeed, nearly a thousand would transpire in this office alone in just one day, between recipients once coded as too sick to work and caseworkers determined to find something they could do. Some clearly seemed in painful need. A one-armed Russian man arrived with his wife, who limped in leaning on a cane. A woman just released from the hospital complained that she felt faint, then passed out on the floor. Others, however, seemed more indignant than infirm, like the mother of two shouting that workfare is "a system to keep black people down." Dozens of people classified as medically unemployable confessed that they had secretly been commuting to work or to class.

The Bronx woman with the worn envelope was not complaining but staring into space, as if the wrangling between the caseworker and her son was of no particular interest. More of the city's questions followed. What languages does she speak? (Spanish.) What languages does she read? (None.) What grade did she complete? (Sixth.) Is she on drugs? (No.) Has she ever worked? (Once, in a shrimp-packing plant, 22 years ago.)

The caseworker was particularly skeptical of the woman's assertions, written on a questionnaire, that she was unable to "sit," "balance," "bend," "climb," "work in an office" or "work outdoors." "She can't sit?" he said. "Well, she's been sitting here quite a while." The son sounded angry. "You all gonna be responsible if something happens to her?"

"Are we responsible?" The caseworker lingered over the question. In the end, he would relent and agree to another medical exam -- but not quite yet. "We wouldn't put her in the park," he said. "We wouldn't put her in sanitation. If we put her to work, it would be office work." And besides, he said, "if anything happens, we can always call an ambulance in."

His tone was so flat it was hard to tell whether he was offering sarcasm or reassurance.

The Mayor Declares His Last Great War

Last summer, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani walked into a bank auditorium in midtown Manhattan and delivered a remarkable talk on welfare -- remarkable both for the scale of new work obligations he pledged to impose on the city's vast welfare population and for the lack of attention his plan received in a culture that routinely bellows at lesser provocations. Addressing a city that had more than a million people on public assistance -- or one of every seven residents -- when he first took office in 1993, Giuliani promised "to end welfare by the end of this century completely." A few caseworkers in the audience clapped and a reporter asked a technical question about child care. Elsewhere, scarcely anyone noticed.

If Giuliani's welfare speeches now seem routine, it is a measure of the victory he has already won. After five years of bare-knuckled battle, he presides over what is by far the nation's largest workfare program, with more than 30,000 poor New Yorkers cleaning city parks and answering city phones. But while it has been celebrated, litigated, picketed and condemned, the work program still covers only 10 percent of the city's welfare recipients. Giuliani's new timetable -- which happens to conclude on the eve of the 2000 Presidential primaries -- leaves him 12 months to round up the rest.

Bold welfare talk is the political norm these days. But the events now under way in New York are distinctive for at least two reasons. One is the sheer scale of the endeavor. As Giuliani is fond of saying, the number of New Yorkers already shorn from the rolls -- more than 400,000 -- exceeds the population of Buffalo, the state's next largest city. For better or worse, the Mayor has already chased more people off welfare than a famed welfare-eradication program like Wisconsin's ever enrolled, even at its peak. One in 20 of the city's residents is now someone moved off the welfare rolls during the Giuliani years.

In addition, Giuliani is waging his war in the heart of enemy territory. The Union Square site of the Saturday sifting is just a mile from the Lower East Side settlement house where the welfare rights movement was born in the 1960's. The poor people Giuliani is summoning have more political allies, more rights and more lawyers than those in almost any other place.

Though Giuliani scarcely mentioned welfare in the 1993 campaign that brought him to office, he now calls it a cornerstone of his legacy -- and by inference, a key to his political future. "This is by far the best thing we're doing for the city," he said during one of several recent discussions on the topic at City Hall. "It is much more significant than the reduction in crime, although the reduction in crime gets a tremendous amount of attention."

The more the Mayor talks welfare these days, the more he stretches toward philosophical flight. "From 1960 to 1994, the work ethic was under attack in New York City," he said. "New York City viewed welfare as a good thing, as a wonderful thing. They romanticized it and embraced a philosophy of dependency, almost as if it's better to have somebody on welfare than to help somebody to work." Giuliani said he is trying to erase that "perverted social philosophy," which robbed the poor of their ambition, and reawaken the respect for work "in a deep philosophical and metaphysical sense."

But for a mayor who continually returns to the word "philosophy," Giuliani's core commitment is unclear. Is the goal (as he says) to fashion a new "social contract" between society and its poor? Or is it (as he also says) simply to cut the rolls?

And philosophy is only part of the issue in an operation this complex. A second test of the Giuliani effort resides in something more mundane: bureaucracy. Logistically, what Giuliani vows to achieve is anything but welfare's "end." Aid is supposed to continue, but only to those who keep pace with a 35-hour workweek designed and overseen by the Human Resources Administration, the city's welfare agency.

What Giuliani does mean in a surprisingly literal sense is that the obligation applies to everybody: the armies of women with pill bottles and doctor's letters, immigrants who speak only Spanish, addicts in treatment programs. Whether they can sit but not stand, or stand but not lift, Giuliani is vowing to put them to work -- if possible in a private job, if necessary in a workfare position tailored to their needs.

The overwhelming mechanics of that effort now fall, under a compressed calendar, to an agency typically introduced by the word "troubled." Starved of supplies as basic as paint and paper clips, its caseworkers, who number in the thousands, are used to a bureaucratic wasteland where anything that can go wrong, will. They are rigidly clerical and chronically discontent. And they are now being charged with nothing less than reordering the lives of the underclass.

Giuliani raised some eyebrows a year ago when he put the agency's efforts under the command of one of the nation's most uncompromising critics of public assistance. Jason A. Turner, a veteran of Wisconsin's anti-welfare campaign, designed his first workfare plan in junior high school, and he has been refining his craft ever since. A cheerful, earnest, tenacious man, long on good intentions and unconstrained by doubt, he operates on the simple belief -- dangerously simple, his detractors say -- that when it comes to welfare, less is almost always best.

It is the combination of Giuliani's calls and the bureaucracy's response that will determine whether work is offered in ways that support the poor or on terms that drive them away. Hand by hand, case by case, this is a welfare battle in its rawest form, fought across an archipelago of ancient metal desks in a sea of ringing telephones.

Jason Turner Gets a Taste of Harlem, and Kafka

"We're putting the agency on a war footing, if you will," Jason Turner was saying. On a sticky July morning, two days after the Mayor's speech, he was climbing into a black sedan and setting off to barnstorm the boroughs. To the 31 offices once tellingly known as "income-maintenance centers" he was carrying Giuliani's gospel. "We're a generous city to the extent that we truly help people become independent," he said at almost every stop. "We're not generous to the extent that we just give people money." By visiting each office, Turner said he hoped to replicate the sense of governmental mission that swept the National Aeronautics and Space Administration a generation ago.

But NASA this ain't. Nothing at the offices seemed to work. Certainly not the hand-lettered sign in the office on 34th Street, posted amid chip bags and soda cans: "If you keep eating and drinking you won't be seen." Not the copy machines: the agency leases reconstructed models, and they are a source of constant complaint. Not the elevators, either: three years ago, one lurched in a Bronx office and decapitated a welfare clerk. The agency is so disorganized, it literally cannot find a quarter of its case records. Turner was about to launch into his speech in central Harlem when a vision brought him up short. The wall was obscured by paper stalagmites six feet tall. "What are all those files?" he gasped, to a room that roared with laughter.

Among the elements that do not seem to work are some of the workers themselves. In a work-force genealogy, they might be considered kin to postal clerks: a minimally competent, by-the-books staff, long charged with a repetitious task -- in this case, processing checks. There's reason to question their readiness for the more challenging work ahead. In one center, 5 percent of the staff was on worker's compensation -- almost all for injuries they claimed to have sustained by falling out of their chairs. It had not escaped the caseworkers' notice that falling caseloads leave their own jobs in doubt. "Our livelihoods are premised on caseloads -- what will happen to us?" one asked. Yet others worried that their workload would increase. One caseworker in East Harlem aimed a long, polished fingernail Turner's way and warned: "I'm a little hyped!"

"We're overwhelmed!" another added.

"Well, you all are getting the job done somehow," Turner said.

"No, we're not!" the woman with the nails said. "That's what we're trying to tell you!"

Though the depth of the organizational breakdown caught Turner by surprise, it did nothing to alter the work-first message he delivered at Giuliani's behest. Turner harbors an almost mystical belief in the power of work -- not just as a source of income, but also as a redemptive force that can treat depression, order lives and stem moral disintegration.

Turner's faith that labor liberates owes much to his maternal grandfather, John Tufel. A bond salesman who lost his job in the Depression, Tufel donned a suit to sell brushes door to door. Now 45, Turner joined him on a cross-country drive the summer he turned 10, and the diary his mother hoped would fill with tributes to the vistas instead became an admiring ledger of his grandfather's frugal budgets. "He was a man of firm, fixed principle," Turner said.

Addressing the caseworkers last summer, Turner parried the endless what-ifs with one consistent answer: Life is tough, get a job. Will there be training? ("The best preparation for work is working.") What about people who cannot speak English? ("The best way to learn English is to interact with English-speaking people in a workplace.") What about drug addicts? ("Treatment is not a substitute for work.") "Let me leave with this one thought," Turner said, departing one office. "I don't want our agency to own every circumstance and problem a client faces. That's part of empowerment."

The message was new, but not necessarily unwelcome. In the workers' attitude toward the welfare poor, concern and resentment run side by side. Like the Nigerian caseworker at Union Square, many of those now toiling behind a welfare desk are recent immigrants, and they are proud to have grasped a rung on the American working-class ladder. In African, Spanish and Caribbean accents, they wonder why more of their clients have not done the same.

One of the trip's oddest moments unfolded in central Harlem, when a caseworker with dreadlocks and an island accent asked whether Turner would consider giving clients "money-management classes." Perhaps, Turner said. But the real way to learn is this: "Live on what you get, and if you run out, figure out what to do until your next paycheck."

For a moment, the room fell silent. The city's new Welfare Commissioner -- this Ivy League-educated, Republican white man -- had just traveled to the heart of Harlem and proclaimed it morally instructive for the poor to face empty cupboards. Once upon a time, there might have been a riot. In the end-welfare age, the stunned silence leads to applause.

"I like that!" the caseworker said.

The Welfare-Seekers Find It Harder To Make the Rolls

Turner spent much of the year converting welfare offices into so-called "job centers." While the aim is philosophical -- to promote self-sufficiency -- the means are procedural: the changes make it much harder to get on the rolls. Now, before aid-seekers can formally apply, they must first see a "financial planner" trained to promote welfare alternatives, like relying on family or persevering in an unwanted job. Those who still wish to pursue welfare must then complete a supervised job-search program. For those with children, the job search lasts 30 days. (They are seeking Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Federal welfare program created in 1996 that sets a five-year lifetime limit on aid.) For those without children, it lasts 45 days. (They are seeking home relief, a state and local program.) In either case, a single missed hour without an approved excuse can void the entire application. Statistically, the results have been striking. In the early 1990's under Mayor David Dinkins (whose commissioner pledged to make welfare more "user friendly"), about 75 percent of those who walked in the door wound up on the rolls. In his first four years, Giuliani cut the rate to about 50 percent. Now in the job centers, the average rate has fallen to 25 percent. So far only half the offices have converted to the new procedures. But projected across the entire system, the job centers would cut the number of new cases by 50,000 a year.

It's a remarkable figure, but just what does it show?

One interpretation is that many people seeking welfare have other ways of supporting themselves. Certainly some already have jobs. (In Wisconsin, for example, researchers now believe that about 30 percent of those on the old welfare system were employed, though only about 15 percent reported it.) Others may decide that they would rather look for work on their own than hassle with a program.

The new procedures are particularly popular with a cohort of the welfare-agency middle managers who were disillusioned by the old system. Adrianne Fleming's immigrant parents were so hostile to welfare they spanked her when she came home from the fourth grade in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant with a pair of red tennis shoes from a donation drawer. "My mother said, 'That's charity!' She felt offended," said Fleming, director of the Greenwood Job Center in Brooklyn, the city's first. "To this day, my father has a hard time accepting that I work in an agency that gives money away. That's why I tell him, now we give jobs away."

Opening a job center in Harlem has been the highlight of Gail Godwin's 29-year career. "I said, 'Good morning, welcome to the Hamilton Job Center,"' she recounted in a meeting of center directors this fall. "Half the people said: 'Job center? I didn't come for no job center!' This man said: 'No, no! Ah-plee-ca-cion! Ah-plee-ca-cion! No job, no job!"' She laughed so hard at the memory of the scattering clients she could barely finish the story. "He left! That was cute. He left! I could not believe that those two little words -- 'job center' -- could clear the area." In her view, the lesson was clear: "There are some people who are just here for welfare."

The competing view is that the centers present even the most genuinely needy with formidable procedural barriers. Most clients are not allowed to complete an application until they return a second day. The first, spent waiting for a financial planner, can easily stretch to five or six hours. A month of job search may not sound like much, but many applicants have chaotic lives -- sick children, jailed relatives, flagging spirits -- that will lead to a missed hour one day. "No matter how you phrase it," announces the newsletter of the Queens Job Center, "the goal of the Financial Planner, Employment Planner, Social Service Planner and Resource Staff, is the same: Redirect the participant to another source other than Temporary Assistance."

Some clients may be plainly confused. "When they say, 'It's not a welfare center,' people hear it as, 'There's no welfare,"' says Helen Lee, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society. "Some of the workers have been quite courteous. They won't say, 'Get out of here.' They say, 'Come back when you're feeling better.' But I think they picked workers who are inclined to deny people benefits, to find them ineligible. It's set up so the whole process is so cumbersome."

For much of the year, such complaints belonged to the advocates alone. By November, however, officials from the United States Department of Agriculture began investigating the corollary effect on food stamps. Though eligibility for the program remains unchanged, the city's food-stamp rolls have fallen 15 percent in the last year; at the same time, the requests for help reported by soup kitchens and food pantries has risen 24 percent. The U.S.D.A. officials warned that by withholding applications until clients return a second day, the city may be violating Federal law.

In the subsequent fray, Giuliani not only assumed personal control, reversing a decision by Turner to distribute food-stamp applications the day clients request them. He also railed against those with a "romantic and emotional" view of food stamps as anything more than welfare and spent a Sunday morning at City Hall poring over the Federal regulations himself. It remains unclear whether the city's food stamp policy is legal. What is clear is that Giuliani wants nothing about the system to be "user friendly."

The Case of Lester Collins

With thousands of New Yorkers diverted from the rolls, no single figure embodies their fates. (Giuliani has resisted doing tracking studies on, of all things, civil-liberties grounds. "Of course I don't have plans to keep track of people," he said. "I'd be being Big Brother.") One figure does, however, occupy a place of special renown inside the agency. Lester Collins was one of the first to arrive on March 30, when the Greenwood Job Center opened its doors.

Since then, Collins has made at least nine failed attempts to come onto the rolls, not counting the times he did not get far enough to complete an official application. He has hustled female financial planners for dates, threatened to blow up the center and shown up so drunk and unruly he was removed by the police. Turner, on hand for the opening, somehow mentally registered Collins as a success. "Please don't tell commissioner about Lester," said Fleming, the center's earnest director. "It'll break his heart."

After hearing much about the Lester legend, I found him one day at his mother's apartment in a Coney Island public housing complex. At 25, he is a slight, gap-toothed man with a wide grin who relishes an audience, and he offered a long recital of the injustices he had suffered at the Greenwood Job Center. The job-search program was "corny," he said, especially for a man like himself planning to become a stock broker. And so was a stint in a workfare program, which he quit when ordered to clean a public bathroom. "They should just give me my money and stop playing mind games," he said. Arriving home from her own workfare assignment, his mother offered a different view: "Lester needs to go get a head shrinker."

As a young, troubled, home-relief client (one of perhaps a dozen subcultures under the welfare umbrella), Collins is a familiar New York figure. Perhaps he is also a minor harbinger of things to come. Giuliani certainly has reason to argue that he has no place on the rolls; if ever there was a case for caseload reduction, Lester is it. And the loss of his check has not been as dire as critics fear. He has other ways of surviving: odd jobs (he has loaded the occasional truck), other government aid (food stamps and public housing) and family help ("I buy extra food, so I can give him a bag when he goes home," his mother said).

At the same time, there are yet no signs that losing welfare will set Collins on the road to recovery, as Giuliani and Turner would predict. Turner's theory is that the loss of welfare will help troubled clients by prompting them to deal with their problems. He likens the process to one of people being "thrust into the public square," where they will be forced to acknowledge their self-destructive behavior. But thrust into the public square, Collins did nothing of the sort: he flirted, fought, drank, complained and bummed groceries from his mother. So far, for him at least, ending welfare has been another way of continuing the same old life.

Do Giuliani's Job Centers Get People Jobs?

The conversion to the job centers did much to bolster Turner's stock at City Hall. "He's doing a better job than I thought he would do, and I thought he would do a very good job," Giuliani said in mid-October, citing the diversion rates as an example. But a second measure of the centers' performance has received less public attention. That is the number of people in the job-search program who are actually placed in jobs. To be sure, the statistics can easily be misconstrued. The official count understates the numbers really working, since it only counts clients who found jobs through the program itself. There is no way to know how many dropped out and found work on their own. And immediate job placement is just part of the centers' larger goal, of changing the habits and expectations that clients bring to the program. A month of job search before coming on the rolls may teach skills that pay off later.

Moreover, it is hard to know what the benchmark should be. In his July speech, Giuliani sketched out a job-center vision where "for 10 people that came in, for 2 or 3 of them you found a job right away." But the staff at one center was upset, nearly two weeks after opening, to find that no one had found employment. "I was very depressed -- it was nine days into this program, and we hadn't gotten a job for anyone," said an official there. At another center, an official discovered that just 3.5 percent of the first 1,000 clients referred to the program were placed in jobs. "Everyone who comes through the job center, they ask, 'How many people got jobs?"' an official there said. "And we never answer. Because when you look at the number of people who come in, it doesn't sound like much."

The agency now has data on the first 5,300 people to enter the job-search program. Of them, 256 were placed in jobs, or just under 5 percent. When I asked Turner about the numbers, he acknowledged, "We're not there yet" and predicted future improvement. He has replaced five of the original eight private subcontractors hired to run the program. He also said that some of the front-line staff, in their initial excitement, may have had unrealistic expectations. It's na 1/4ve to expect most clients to become dedicated job seekers overnight, he said. "The realistic model is, they make many trips to the door," testing the program, looking for shortcuts and eventually getting serious about work.

For now, however, the job centers are clearly more successful in diverting people than in directly getting them jobs. And the Mayor argues that is appropriately so. Earlier this fall, I asked Giuliani which figures would prove the better measure of success: the diversion rates, or the job-placement numbers? "Both are important," he said. "But if you ask me for order of priority, the most important number is decreasing the numbers of people dependent on the government to support them -- because, after all, that's really government's role." In setting up the job-search program, he said, the city was temporarily performing a task that, "when things straighten out, government really shouldn't have to do, which is to find jobs for people."

This may strike many New Yorkers as a constricted view of society's responsibility for the poor. But Giuliani left no doubt as to what he wants to do: "The first thing that I look at is considerably fewer numbers of people having to come to the government to say, 'Give me a check.' "

How the 'Welfare Capital of the World' Grew and Grew

When the Mayor vowed to end welfare last summer, he did so pointer in hand, standing beside a chart that traced the exploding caseloads of the 1960's. At that decade's dawn, 250,000 recipients. Thwwaaack! Twelve years later, 1.1 million. Thwwaaack! "This wasn't an accident, it wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't supernatural," Giuliani said. "This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare." In railing against "the philosophy that was embraced in the 1960's," Giuliani is not just offering the standard deprecation of the age. In theory and practice, welfare did undergo a revolutionary change.

In an early draft of his presentation, Giuliani even rounded out his history by citing the two Columbia University professors whose audacious role in the welfare explosion is now all but forgotten. In plotting what they called the "flood-the-rolls, bankrupt-the-cities strategy," Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven literally set out to destroy local welfare programs. By drowning the cities in caseloads and costs, they hoped to build support for a more generous Federal solution, preferably a guaranteed national income. What's also all but forgotten now is that the strategy almost worked.

Curious about the period that serves as Giuliani's foil, I sought out Cloward and Piven shortly after the Mayor's speech. The Dutchess County home where they spend their summers is a serene place to contemplate welfare militancy. Piven's gardening gifts were on luxuriant display, with sunflowers outside her window and fresh vegetables on her lunch table. At 72, Cloward is a gruff, distracted figure with a habit of pacing the room. Piven, 65, and now teaching at the City University of New York, has lost little focus or ferocity.The spiraling rolls, the indignant protests, the saturation of welfare with due process rights -- much of what Giuliani deplores is symbolized by Mobilization for Youth, the famous program that Cloward helped found, and Piven helped staff, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Though it quickly became the model for the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty and a forerunner of the national Legal Services program, poverty per se was not the focus when the program started in 1962. Cloward was an expert on juvenile delinquency, and Mobilization's storefront offices were established to work with youth gangs.

But as soon as they opened, the program was overwhelmed by destitute families facing crises: eviction notices, empty refrigerators, closets without winter coats. Many were recent black migrants from the south, fleeing Jim Crow and the mechanization of the farm. They needed money, not youth-gang theory, and they needed it right away. The welfare department was not only disinclined to help; it actually gave some of them bus tickets home. Whatever Mobilization's original intent, Cloward said, "the workers began focusing on getting these families on welfare -- it was something they could do."

With effort, anyway. Though the rolls had already begun to rise at the end of the 1950's, the welfare agency still had considerable discretion to turn people away. There were residency laws, home visits and midnight raids; mothers deemed morally unfit were routinely barred from aid. In a 1964 study, Cloward and Piven estimated that at least half and perhaps as many as three-quarters of the eligible families in New York were not receiving benefits.

The Mobilization strategy for representing them can be summed up in a word: aggression. "They argued and cajoled; they bluffed and threatened," Piven later wrote of the program staff. They (and others) also sued, winning the welfare poor a series of due process rights. By 1966 the New York rolls had doubled to 500,000, a figure not seen since the end of the Depression. Through similar efforts, corresponding increases spread across most Northern industrial cities.

Though it has been much maligned in retrospect, it is easy to see, in the context of the times, the appeal of a relief expansion. Appalled at the racial terror of the South, Northern liberals saw the country's very future at stake in their efforts to redress the nation's injustices. Providing the destitute with material relief seemed a logical place to start. But by 1966, Cloward and Piven had glimpsed the makings of something bigger.

In an article in The Nation, they called for elevating the situation into "a profound financial and political crisis" through a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the rolls." Tactically, they recommended "bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies," "cadres of aggressive organizers" and "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Strategically, they hoped to place local officials in a box. If officials could not raise taxes (and alienate voters) or cut benefits (and risk riots in a riot-prone age), what would they do? They would call for a Federal guaranteed income, the two predicted, which could bring "an end to poverty."

The article generated a sensation on the left, with requests for reprints running 30,000 strong. Shortly after, the National Welfare Rights Organization was born, and the age of full-fledged welfare militancy was officially under way. In Washington, demonstrators occupied the office of the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. In New York, the organization's members blocked the checkout line at Korvette's, telling the department store to bill the welfare agency for their purchases. "Harassment, giving ultimatums, overwhelming centers is our greatest tactic," declared a National Welfare Rights pamphlet. In Cloward and Piven's view, the confrontations were essential, because society responds to the needs of the poor only when the poor themselves demand it.

As predicted, the bureaucracy's first response was to open up the tap. Under Mayor John V. Lindsay, New York reduced its application to a single page of self-declared need, and its Welfare Commissioner became known to detractors as Mitchell (Come and Get It) Ginsberg. From 1966 to 1972, the city's caseload doubled again. Likewise as Cloward and Piven predicted, enthusiasm grew for replacing welfare with a guaranteed national income. One such plan passed the House of Representatives in 1971, only to fail in the Senate a year later.

With the plan's defeat came the movement's demise, but welfare had been fundamentally transformed. The poor now had procedural rights, and the number of recipients remained high. But two kinds of prices were paid. Bureaucratically, welfare agencies essentially became rickety check-writing machines. True social workers were derided as paternalistic intruders, and they were replaced by low-skilled clerks overwhelmed by the mass of their work. Politically, the backlash was swift. Support for a welfare entitlement never ran deep (it was largely established through the courts), and by the end of Lindsay's reign, he, too, was trying to stem the rise of the rolls. The backlash continued for decades. In recent years, reinvented liberals -- most notably, Bill Clinton -- have argued that stricter welfare laws are essential to rebuilding political support for the poor. But Cloward seemed weary and annoyed when I asked if he had worried about backlash, saying animosity toward the poor is a given.

"We knew that trouble was coming," he said. "Our view is the poor don't win much, and they only win it episodically. You get what you can when you can get it -- and then you hold onto your hat."

What the Mayor Believes

A Kennedy Democrat in the 1960's, Giuliani says he was initially sympathetic to the rising welfare rolls. "I thought of it as, 'This is just a natural extension of the New Deal and these are temporary measures that are being put in place that will give people a period of time to put their lives together,"' he said. But by the time he took office in 1994, he had another view. Welfare itself had not figured in his campaign, though it was part of the broader disorder he had pledged to police. More to the point, it was increasingly expensive. The rolls had grown 33 percent in the Dinkins years, and with a $2 billion budget deficit, Giuliani needed targets to cut. Borrowing workfare initiatives and fraud-detection plans that had cut the rolls in Westchester County, Giuliani put both into play on an unexpectedly large scale.

In New York, the man in the street may have as much hostility toward welfare as people anywhere else. But the city does have a uniquely resourceful network of welfare advocates and lawyers. The local judiciary is liberal. The intellectual elite is hostile toward workfare. And so are municipal unions, who rightly understand that welfare recipients armed with brooms are a threat to their members' jobs. Giuliani overcame the opposition in his usual holy-war style. When the unions resisted workfare, he talked up the government privatization plans that could leave them all without jobs. When the Assembly balked at his finger-imaging identification plan, he started it with city funds.

Among the weapons not to be underappraised is the famous Giuliani temper. The welfare program is filled with lore of the Mayor (and his former assistant, Richard Schwartz) making high-decibel demands for faster, more aggressive action -- and, above all, utter secrecy. With daily control in Schwartz's hands at City Hall, even the Mayor's first two Welfare Commissioners, Marva Hammonds and Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, were often out of the loop. "They did not have the same strong philosophical commitment I have," Giuliani told me. The tight control fed the critics' fears, but Giuliani said it was crucial. "My philosophy," he said, "has been, first make the changes and have them moving in a very, very strong way -- then, announce them." At that point, "there isn't terribly much that people that oppose it can do."

In downtown Brooklyn, a building crowded with cops and computers gives one glimpse of the new age. While otherwise shedding city employees, Giuliani stocked the welfare agency with 1,500 new fraud investigators. They now screen every applicant twice, first in the Brooklyn center and then in a home visit. The blatant, multiple-identity fraud of popular legend is rare (though not unheard of, as seen in the phony birth certificates the office director collects in his desk). Still, about 40 percent of the city's applicants fail to survive the screening. More than half of them simply do not show up, and the others typically have modest amounts of excess assets or income, like an unreported savings account. If Ginsberg's moniker was "Come and Get It," Giuliani's might be "Go Ahead and Try."

But the ultimate signature of the Giuliani years is the Work Experience Program -- workfare, that is -- in all its leaf-raking, lot-cleaning, lawsuit-generating sprawl. With up to 37,000 participants a month, the program itself is larger than the entire caseloads of 29 states. Merely to process that many people into the field, the Mayor had to commandeer the 14th Street Armory.

The sight of so many rakes and brooms brings more reactions than Rorschach's inkblots. "Truly terrifying," says Liz Krueger, an anti-poverty advocate who worries that the falling rolls may leave children hungry. "Lawless," says Marc Cohan, the welfare rights attorney who has led the legal opposition. The Mayor, on the other hand, sees the ubiquitous orange workfare vests as the signposts of a Golden Age. "It's the answer to all of the quest for an urban agenda that the liberal elite, if you want to call it that, has been looking for for 30 years," he said.

Operationally, a work program thrown together this fast will have its deplorable moments. And this one certainly has. The affidavits in a lawsuit over working conditions were so gruesomely compelling that they made the "Readings" section of Harper's Magazine. (Anastacio Serrano, age 44: "When I picked up the animals with my bare hands to throw them into the garbage truck, the guts splattered on my shoes and pants.") While the general conditions are considerably improved, questions persist about the treatment of the medically needy. The agency was shaken last year when Marsha Motipersad, a 50-year-old woman with a history of heart trouble, died of a heart attack on her lunch break. (She had quit a private job and gone on welfare after her doctor warned her not to work.) A lawsuit by the Legal Aid Society charges that the assignments doled out in the field often fail to accommodate the individual infirmities identified by the city's own doctors. The suit cites a woman barred from climbing stairs (because of emphysema) or riding elevators (because of claustrophobia). The city gave her a ninth-floor working assignment and cut her off for failing to comply.

Whether this happens a lot or a little is a subject of dispute. But the core conflict goes deeper. There is no agreement on whether workfare "works," because there is no agreement on what it is supposed to do. Giuliani himself alternates between three quite different rationales. One is simply to cut the caseloads. ("The most impressive number is 460,000 fewer people now dependent.") A second is to prepare people for regular, wage-paying jobs. ("The best way out of poverty. . .is working your way out of it.") And a third is to construct a new social-contract that emphasizes everyone's obligations to contribute. ("In life, you have to give back.")

When I asked about this, Giuliani seemed pleased to parse his priorities. "The social contract part is probably the most important," he said, because of "the lesson that reiterates about what life is really all about." He talked of "the wonderful things" the poor gave back through the Works Progress Administration during the Depression: "this building, that building, this garden, this park, this highway." But just a moment earlier he had made a different case, saying caseload reduction was "the more important part" of helping the poor because "as soon as they stop being dependent on the government they're moving in a much healthier direction."

It seemed to me that these are not just different rationales. They are close to being opposites. The prima facie faith in falling caseloads says government aid is the problem. The nostalgic references to public works say government aid is the solution. The tension -- between enrolling the poor in workfare and deterring them from joining the rolls -- is pervasive in the agency's work. Indeed one could argue that it is part of the tension every time a caseworker sees a new client.

But Giuliani doesn't see it that way. When I asked about the apparent contradiction a few weeks later, he said cutting the rolls and creating a new social contract "are both the same thing." The contract he seeks is not primarily one between government and the poor, he said; "it's also the social contract that people have with each other" through family, friends, neighborhoods and churches. "Those are the things that have to be rebuilt," and the government's main contribution is simply to get welfare out of the way. "It would be very counterproductive if government were even a critical part of it," the Mayor said, referring to the social contract. (So much for the W.P.A.) "Just the mere reduction in the number of people dependent on government is a very, very positive thing."

Whatever the theory, there is no doubt that in practice, workfare cuts the rolls. The city's caseloads have fallen 37 percent since 1995, when the workfare expansion began. For the home relief population, the first to be enrolled, the decline has now reached 50 percent. One reason is that fewer people bother to apply if they know they have to work (especially if they already secretly have jobs, since they cannot be two places at once). And for those who do get aid, workfare makes it harder to keep.

That is especially true in the home relief program, where recipients who miss a single hour of work can see their entire case closed. Indeed, a statistical snapshot adds to the suspicion that case closings are the point: last year, a disturbing 69 percent of the home relief clients in the work program wound up being "sanctioned" off the rolls. Many simply reapply a month or two later, in a process known as churning. "It's a fault of the system we're trying to correct," said Turner, who hopes to create a more personalized system of case management over the next year.

There is also no doubt that the work program has given the city cleaner streets at lower costs. Schwartz, the former Giuliani aide, has valued the labor contributed by the welfare workers at more than $500 million a year. In that sense, Giuliani, against the odds, really does have the poor giving back. What is in doubt is whether the program leads to regular, wage-paying jobs, especially in a city where the unemployment rate is still 7.8 percent. "The real criticism, and the fair criticism, is you don't really know that they're going to work in the private sector," said Lawrence Mead, a professor at New York University and a Giuliani supporter who serves as a city consultant. Earlier this year, a state study of those leaving welfare (including but not limited to workfare participants) found just 29 percent had jobs; under Turner, the city did its own study and placed the rate at 54 percent. But he, too, has been surprised to find workfare workers in the same post for years. "People come up to you and say, 'I've been in this job for three years, can I have it?"' he said.

Indeed, for all the concern about working conditions, one of the most surprising aspects of the workfare program is that many do not want to leave it. Right or wrong, they are convinced that they have no place better to go. On the work crew I followed for a day, four of the nine members had been raking leaves in Prospect Park for the past three years. Their esprit was noteworthy, perhaps even a sign of the civic rejuvenation Giuliani has in mind. "I like it out here," said a 59-year-old man named Frank, too shy to give his last name. "If I was sitting at home, I wouldn't be doing nothing but looking at the four walls." At the same time, he added, "I ain't looking for other work -- work is hard to find."

Everybody Working Means Everybody

Like, say, the Normandy landing, a universal work requirement is conceptually simple but logistically beyond complex. When fully implemented, the 1996 Federal law will require just half the caseload to work at a given time, and many administrators have called that standard too ambitious. Giuliani plans to have everyone doing 20 hours of actual work, plus 15 hours of work-related activities, like drug treatment or education. Even if the job centers never let another new person on welfare, to keep his pledge Giuliani has to put to work the 244,000 unemployed adults already on the rolls.

Most have problems. The city estimates that 21 percent have medical limitations. Another 8 percent are in drug or alcohol treatment. Still others are pregnant or caring for disabled relatives (4 percent each). And 16 percent are already in the penalty process, typically for past failures to accept a work assignment. Add other impediments, and the problems list grows to 63 percent. In other words, nearly two-thirds of the recipients Giuliani are trying to employ claim a limited ability to work.

Herding them into a work program would be difficult anywhere, but it is especially hard in New York, where state law offers recipients unusual procedural protections. Anyone claiming an infirmity is entitled to a medical exam, and Turner, like others, insists that some recipients stop taking their medication to appear sicker than they are. (Whatever the medical problem, short of complete disability, the agency is vowing to find ways to accommodate it.)

State law also limits penalties for noncompliance. While home relief clients lose their entire grants when they are "sanctioned" for not working, those receiving Temporary Assistance typically lose just a third. The smaller penalty protects women and children from utter destitution. But it also emboldens defiant clients: they can do nothing at all and continue to collect an average of $387 a month, plus food stamps. Indeed, despite Giuliani's push for work, there are still fewer people in the work program (30,100) than there are in the sanctioning process (42,000) or claiming medical limitations (53,000).

Such arithmetic literally jolted Turner awake one night with the fear that the schedule was slipping. Designing the right work assignments -- desk jobs for those with bad backs, no dusting for people with asthma -- is only the first step in the race to the 2000 deadline to have everyone employed.

Turner is filled with plans for services to wrap around the 20-hour work schedule: child-care expansions, drug-treatment programs, upgraded case management. "This was the year where we had to get the system under control and organized," he said. "Next year you'll see more of an emphasis on new services." He is particularly proud of an agreement just reached with the state vocational agency to place 18,000 medically limited recipients in an employment program; the city has agreed to pay up to $10,000 for each successful job placement. I visited a prototype of the program this fall and found it off to a good start. In his faith that raising expectations will do the poor much good, Turner could not have hoped for a better example than Carmen Espinosa. After 14 years on the rolls, and suffering from a bad back, she had lacked the confidence to apply for a job even at McDonald's. She was frightened when the program sent her to do community service in a kitchen at a day-care center. But she was stunned a few months later when the day-care center hired her into a $9-an-hour job.

But the bureaucracy can only imagine the logistics still to come -- the logistics, say, of shuttling a drug-addicted mother between a work assignment and a treatment program while working around the child care schedules of her preschooler and second grader. Just thinking about the complexity, Turner said, "I kind of woke up with the shakes." And by dawn he settled on a plan: the agency would finish screening every recipient by the end of this year.

One of the first showdowns involved recipients enrolled at the City University of New York. Convinced (with some reason) that the classes can be a strategy for avoiding work, Giuliani has insisted that students do 20 hours of workfare like everyone else. After obtaining a list of the school's enrollment, the agency was stunned to find in August that 12,000 recipients were taking classes -- including 5,000 who had claimed they were too sick to work. Turner decided to call them in and have them screened for workfare assignments.

Anticipating their resistance, a career employee named Rose Manchell described a new tool -- a 26-item questionnaire that asks clients if they can "sit," "stand," "walk for short periods" or perform other minimal feats. The idea was to get them to admit they could do something. "Oh, they were slick!" Manchell reported back, during a meeting with Turner this fall. "The bottom line was they're too sick to do anything but go to school. Somebody said to me, 'I'm depressed!' I said, 'You're depressing me!"' Continuing her acerbic monologue, Manchell had the room in stitches. "What are you, a psychic? You saw on 'Oprah' that you can't work?" Then suddenly the sarcasm melted into something unexpected in a big-city bureaucracy: a pool of grandmotherly concern. "These are young kids -- 20- and 21-year-olds," she said, a few weeks before her retirement. "We've got to get to them."

Punitive or pastoral, the questionnaire worked wonders. Of the first 560 students summoned, 70 percent accepted work assignments without further dispute. Turner then put the form to work in the larger call-ins off Union Square that were triggered by his late-night worries. Clients were lined up by 7:30 A.M. on the last Saturday of September as the great sifting of the poor began. Like Manchell's monologue, the effort showed dual elements -- questioning excuses and promoting work -- intertwined in the agency's efforts. Doubting a woman's contention that she cannot "bend," one caseworker cross-examined her into a confession that she sets her laundry basket on the floor. "So you can bend!" he said. But another spent 30 minutes trying to coax a depressed client into trying workfare, and when she failed she seemed disappointed mostly for the client herself. "If she is around people, it will make her feel better," the caseworker said. I counted two Nigerians, a Jamaican, a Russian and a Filipino among the dozen or so caseworkers I visited, and it was impossible to mistake their immigrant belief that, for all their problems, the welfare poor could do better. "Would you be able to work in an office, like what I'm doing?" one caseworker asked.

The day ended in a standoff. Of the recipients who answered the summons, 44 percent accepted work assignments. And exactly the same percentage resisted, demanding additional medical exams. The same pattern continued throughout the fall. It's both an indication of Giuliani's progress toward his goal, and of the distance that remains in getting to universal work.

The Case of Maureen Scott

As the first day was winding down, a spectacle erupted in the lobby. "They're going to kick me out of school!" screamed an outraged woman. "It's a system to keep black people down, so they can keep sailing in their yachts!" At first this seemed like just the usual office theater. But the events that led Maureen Scott to the office make hers a particularly sympathetic case. This is not Lester Collins.

At 43, Scott has nearly two decades of work history behind her as a beautician and nursing aide. She went on welfare earlier this year, after a beating by her husband ended her marriage and broke the bones around her right eye. With two children now to support on her own, she needed a raise from her $7.50-an-hour part-time wage, and she decided the only way to get one was to earn a high-school degree. Still wearing a surgeon's patch, she enrolled in an equivalency-degree program. "I couldn't even see," she said, producing a student identification card that showed her bandaged face. "I was that determined to help myself."

I later visited the Harlem apartment crowded with other signs of Scott's earnest efforts: the health-care certificates from a technical school; a personal computer for her children; the barber chair from the defunct business she tried to start as a beautician. Logistically, 20 hours of workfare would force her out of her all-day class. Spiritually, she viewed it as a capstone of degradation: after two decades of low-wage striving, her life had come to this. "How am I going to face my children, working in the streets?" she said. "Might as well call my husband, take the beating and let him pay the rent -- they're doing the same thing to me."

Her language was overheated, but her concern is worth noting. The rigidness of the Giuliani program is both a strength (because it gets things done) and a weakness (because it tends to treat everyone alike). A woman who has never worked, a woman who has worked all her life -- the system presumes that workfare is the solution for both. Turner believes that it is the solution. "I'd be surprised if there was any instance in which work, as a component of the package, wasn't the best thing for the person to do," he said. Others in the agency think more discretion would be a plus, if only the caseworkers were talented enough to exercise it appropriately. Scott said: "I agree that some people abuse the system, but it shouldn't be that everyone suffers. They should look and individually supervise."

And that was the point of a ruling this fall that brought the CUNY crackdown to a halt. As soon as the student roundup began, advocates raced into court to argue the universal use of workfare "makes a mockery" of a state law requiring individual assessments. A lower-court judge agreed and ordered the city to do individualized plans. For now, the ruling only affects the CUNY students (the agency allowed most of them to stay in school). But the same principle applied across the caseload could leave a universal work requirement significantly weakened. Arguing that welfare is not student aid, Turner said the program has plenty of room for individualization after the 20-hour work obligation is fulfilled. He predicts victory on appeal.

What Cutting the Rolls Amounts To

Beyond the legal specifics, the CUNY case hints at a broader disagreement in the welfare debate. The student affidavits make most recipients seem like candidates for canonization. ("Once I got home, I would study until about 2:30 or 3 A.M.") The Giuliani effort often seems animated by the suspicion that every case is a con. ("Oh, they were slick!") How one views the program depends, to a considerable degree, on which of the two rings truer. One could say this is essentially a left-versus-right clash. But in fact it is more complicated than that, since each has its internal contradictions. If the welfare poor are really so striving, why are so many on the rolls for so long? Then again, if they are crippled with dependency, as Giuliani says, is it reasonable to expect that they will thrive on their own?

It is hard to delve inside this bureaucracy without having some sympathy for Giuliani's effort to police it. Much as he said, the excesses of the old system promoted a something-for-nothing mentality offensive to the taxpayer and often harmful to the poor. "They should just give me my money," Lester Collins says. Who can argue, in theory at least, with reciprocal obligation? It is also hard to avoid doubting whether the bureaucracy can manage the change. An agency that cannot find a quarter of its files is ill positioned to reorder the lives of a quarter-million troubled New Yorkers.

But the bigger worry about the Giuliani effort extends beyond logistics. It is that all the philosophical talk of a new social contract will prove to be just a cover for cutting the rolls. (This year, the city's savings in welfare and Medicaid are likely to exceed $800 million.) The withholding of food-stamp applications, the zeal for diversion, the hair-trigger workfare penalties -- in practice, all these things do less to offer the poor a new bargain than to encourage them to go away. Giuliani himself could not have put it more bluntly: "The first thing I look at is considerably fewer people having to come to the government to say, 'Give me a check."'

To be sure, the enthrallment with falling caseloads is not limited to New York alone. It is the driving force of the new era, enshrined in its founding rhetoric: end welfare. But like the flood-the-rolls strategy that preceded it, the excessive faith in falling caseloads (to the extent that it's not just a political line) rests on a romantic vision of the poor -- many of whom need more order imposed on their lives, not less.

Giuliani said his critics do not understand that "people on welfare are exactly the same as they are." In fact, the caseload sifting suggests the opposite, that the majority rank as troubled souls: depressed, illiterate, infirm, addicted. A generation ago, the left made the mistake of assuming a check was mostly what they needed. Now the right is on the verge of the same error, confusing the loss of an entitlement with a social elixir. When Giuliani says, "As soon as they stop being dependent on the government they're moving in a much healthier direction," he's making an outsize leap of faith. Swept up in exuberance in one of our talks, he offered this advice to the poor: "If you can't get a job, start a small business. Start a little candy store. Start a little newspaper stand. Start a lemonade stand."

It is hard to know whether that is really what the Mayor believes. A new social contract would be welcome, and Giuliani has still got a year to deliver. But saving the poor from the welfare mess will take more than a pep talk and lemonade.