America Works CEO Lee Bowes writes in to respond to last week’s report suggesting that temp jobs for welfare recipients can be worse than no job at all. She argues that the problem is not temp jobs, but Michigan’s contracting system, in which firms that are contracted out to help welfare recipients find jobs have no incentive to ensure that they keep them:

In an article in last week’s Wall Street Journal last week entitled Temporary jobs can be a roadblock for welfare clients, Deborah Solomon reported on a new study of The Michigan Work First program that found welfare recipients assigned to programs that rely relying on temporary jobs not only do not find employment, but that these jobs actually worsen a person’s long-term employment prospects. Critics of welfare-to-work programs have seized on this finding to argue that work for its own sake is counter-productive.

I have no issue with the study’s findings per se, and no problem believing that giving a welfare recipient a temp job and a fair-thee-well is no better than doing nothing at all to help them enter the labor market. Rather, my concern is with the design of the Work First program.

In New York City and State, the welfare program pays contractors who help place welfare recipients in jobs only after a person holds a job for six months, meaning that contractors must assist clients not only in getting a job, but with the skills needed to keep it. The contractors work with the welfare recipient on negotiating workplace problems and balancing the demands of work and family; the contractors assist with outside issues and find a new job quickly when the first one is not the right fit.

This is the outside help necessary to get and keep a person working.

Temporary employment is not the villain here. Temporary jobs can and do lead to permanent placements because they allow an employer to “try before they buy” a worker. What this study shows is the employers are opting not to “buy” these poorly coached workers.

The problem is that the new study and the Journal article give ammunition to those who never believed in welfare reform in the first place.

For two-and-a-half years, America Works has run a program in Detroit to place returning prisoners into jobs. Getting a job is easy, but making sure each worker keeps their job or finds a better one is what America Works does. Seventy two percent of those we place are still working months after the program ends.

According to Catherine Pease, who runs the America Works Detroit office, “We have many people from Michigan Work First come to our offices. They have been left to fend for themselves, with no support.”

The State of Michigan can ill afford to attack any part of the business sector, including the temporary employment industry. The state would be better served, and better serve welfare recipients and returning prisoners, by practicing better government.