Working poor still need welfare allocations
By Ruth Sinai
Haaretz, November 3, 2004
Etti Guari has been working in the Nahariya municipality for about nine months. She was hired as a switchboard operator and advanced to telephone receptionist. Before that, she and her 9-year-old son lived mainly on income guarantee and child support. Although she studied accounting, she could not find a job.
A little more than a year ago, her allocation was slashed by some 25 percent and she joined the protest camp set up by a group of single mothers outside the government complex in Jerusalem.
Guari says she did not come to sit with Viki Knafo to get back her allocation, but hoped that the struggle would help her find a job. She asked every Knesset member who visited the camp for help. Finally, through someone who knew someone, she reached Nahariya's new mayor, Ron Frumer, and was hired.
Guari, 39, is one of 90,000 Israelis who joined the labor force this year. Like most others in her situation, Guari earns minimum wage and has no chance of becoming a tenured worker. Unlike most others, she is employed in a full-time position and has ended her welfare dependence.
Indeed, Guari has never stopped working. She started out in housekeeping in a hospital and an old-age home but the more she worked, the larger her debts became and she realized that she had to break free of the cycle of temporary jobs and welfare allocations to ensure herself and her son economic security.
"I grew up in institutions, without parents. It's important for me to get ahead so that my son will not have such a difficult childhood," she says.
She earns NIS 17.93 per hour, minimum wage. With added overtime for working on Friday, her monthly income reaches NIS 3,500 at most. She receives help from Yedid - the Association for Community Empowerment and from the welfare department, refrains from buying dairy deserts and seldom eats meat. She has no landline because she owes Bezeq money. "I am ashamed, but making do," she says.
Guari is in a minority. Despite the cut in allocations and social benefits that forced unemployed people to find work, the number of unemployed people receiving income guarantees has been reduced over the past year by less that 10 percent - 12,000 families, at most. According to National Insurance Institute figures, 150,000 people were eligible for income guarantees before the slash. A year later, there were 146,000. About 5,000 were struck from the list because their income was higher than the reduced income eligible for the allocation, after the harsher criteria came into effect.
Leah Ahdut, the deputy director general for NII research and planning, does not know whether those 5,000 joined the labor force or what became of the other 7,000 people who were eligible for allocations and stopped getting them. Some probably found work, perhaps some worked before but did not report it. But there is hardly any change in the number of people eligible for income guarantees - those who work but earn very low wages are also eligible for it - they continue to comprise 25 percent of the overall allocation receivers.
This shows that the number of those who receive income guarantee and work as well has not increased. Moreover, the rate of unemployed people looking for work for a year or longer has increased by tens of percent.
Dr. Sigal Shelah, of the personnel planning authority in the Industry, Trade and Employment Ministry, says few of the income guarantee receivers managed to find work. Shelah, who follows the implementation of a program to get single parents into the workforce, says the number of single mothers reporting weekly to unemployment bureaus has stabilized at about 20,000 a week, proving that some of them go to work for short periods but return to the bureaus for income guarantee.
Only 18 percent of the single mothers who found work over the past year managed to keep their jobs and increase their income to such an extent that awarded them a government grant. Despite the allocation cuts and toughening the criteria to get them, the number of people receiving income guarantees is going down very slowly. From a monthly growth rate of some 5 percent in the first half of 2003 it was reduced by 0.3 percent in September 2004.
