ABSTRACT
New York City, 2000. For the past four years, activists from Community Voices Heard (CVH), a group devoted to encouraging organization among the city’s poor, have been campaigning against city hall’s “workfare” system. Their immediate goals have changed over time. At rst, highlighting the program’s poor compensation and working conditions, they hoped to iname public opinion against the program as a whole. In late 1997, the state legislature denied workfare workers “employee” status, turning campaigners to agitation for a “transitional community jobs” program as a better model than workfare for both getting welfare recipients into work, and providing community benets (Krinsky 2008). Coalitions won victories, but they turned out to be paper only. At state level, they won legislation but with no follow-up money or appropriate regulations. On the municipal level, they got the City Council to consider transitional jobs legislation, but faced strong opposition from the mayor.
