"This is the untold story of W-2...dead-end low-paying jobs."

Phil Wylato
A Job is a Right Campaign

We met Phil Wylato outside, collecting signatures on a petition to end evictions in winter. He is a printer by trade and coordinator for the "A Job is a Right Campaign."

Question:
What problems do you see with W-2, particularly with
winter evictions?

Phil Wylato:
A few months ago, the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors commissioned a group called Women in Poverty Initiative to do a survey of what's happened to people who are no longer in the W-2 program. It was the first done of that kind. Governor Tommy Thompson says 30,000 people are off the Welfare rolls. But there's been no survey to find out what's happened to them. If they've gotten jobs; if they're homeless, if they've moved out of state.

So, the Women in Poverty Initiative went out door-to-door and interviewed people. They found, of the people who had been declared job-ready – that's a classification from the W-2 agency – and had been pushed out of the program, only 15 percent had full-time jobs. Forty percent had been evicted, or were facing eviction. The majority were living on $400 to $600 a month.

So, what are they doing? They don't have a place to live. They're living with relatives, with friends, They're moving from house to house, they're in homeless shelters. And an increasing number of them, and this was in a "Milwaukee Journal" article this past Saturday, increasing numbers of them are giving up their children to foster care or friends, and showing up in homeless shelter. These are single mothers.

This is the untold story of W-2. The W-2 system may benefit a few people. But the majority of them that get jobs, they'll be dead-end, low-paying jobs. They won't advance. And after five years lifetime participation in the program, they'll be out of the W-2 system and worse off than when they started. Then there's a whole chunk of people who are out of the program altogether.

The evictions that take place in Milwaukee County, there's a thousand evictions a month, twelve thousand a year...the number of sheriff-assisted evictions is skyrocketing...These are people who in the past might have gotten an eviction notice and then moved. Now, there's no place for them to go. If you ride around this neighborhood, you will see piles of furniture out on the sidewalk, where people are being physically evicted with absolutely no place to go. And they're destitute.

A large part of this is due to W-2. The landlords admit it, the sheriff's department admits it. We've exposed it, but the state refuses to deal with the question. We're saying the W-2 agencies that benefit from this program should create a fund, to pay emergency rent to keep these people in their apartments at least until April 15th.

It's wintertime in Wisconsin.

Question:
We hear a lot "There's a labor shortage, why don't these people go out and get jobs?"

Phil Wyalto:
Unemployment in the state is under 4 percent, in (Milwaukee) County I think it's just slightly above that. But in this neighborhood here officially it's 25 percent, that's officially. And there's a lot of neighborhoods that were two-thirds folks who were surviving on AFDC.

From here to where the jobs are – see, there's no jobs in this neighborhood – from here to where the jobs are there's no public transportation. The few places where there is public transportation, it'll take you 2 to 2 1/2 hours to get out to those jobs and then take 2 to 2 1/2 to get back. So if you have children, now you're talking about putting your children in daycare for 12 hours, which is not covered by W-2, that length of time.

So you've got a transportation problem. You can't move out to the suburbs because there's no affordable housing there.

Milwaukee, statistically, is one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Most major cities the population is 20, 30, 40 percent people of color in the surrounding suburbs. Milwaukee County is 98 percent White in the suburbs. It's the smallest percent of people of color living in the suburbs of any major city in the country.

Racial segregation, the lack of transportation, the lack of jobs in the city, all mean that when you are unemployed in the central city, it's very difficult to get a job and get yourself out of that situation.

There are some obvious solutions: put some jobs in the central city, break racial segregation in the suburbs, create a real mass transportation system. All those things would help.

Employers have a problem because there is a labor shortage, so they're trying to come to terms with that. But nobody is talking about putting a new AO Smith in the central city, a new American Motors, a new Briggs and Stratton. Those are the jobs that are being destroyed. The jobs that are being created are the $5-an-hour, $6-an-hour jobs, which is not going to bring anybody out of poverty.

The biggest solution to that is obviously unionization. If there are $5-an-hour, $6-an-hour jobs, those workers should be unionized. W-2 workers should have the right to be in a union, represented by a union contract.

Question:
Why do you care so much about this?

Phil Wylato:
Because I like to go home at night and put my feet up and watch TV and not have to think that two doors down there's someone whose living in an abandoned home.

And it's not right what's happening in this society. It affects all of us. Nobody's future is really all that secure anymore; a lot of us are one paycheck away from being homeless. And they've destroyed the safety net; for 61 years we had a guarantee through the Social Security act of 1935 there would be some minimal level of support for people. President Clinton signed a bill and wiped that out in 1996. So now, where's the safety net? Where's the guarantee?

You've got all these layoffs coming down, Johnson and Johnson and the oil companies and the papermaking companies. Whose job is secure, who's secure in this society?

Our organization is called a Job Is a Right. We believe a job is a right. Well, that's controversial. Are public schools a right? That's becoming controversial, too, because of the school choice program. How about a sidewalk, do I have a right to walk down a public sidewalk?

We define what are rights in this society. And we're saying that people have the right to a job, they have a right to housing, to medical care and to education. And we need to structure society to make sure that those things are guaranteed. It can't only be the right to make a buck. That can't be the only right we have. We're fighting for justice. We're not doing it out of sympathy for the poor. We're doing it out of solidarity for all of us who just want to survive, who want to live and have a decent life for themselves and their kids.