Program Trains Welfare Mothers

Biting winds and a fresh snowfall kept most Milwaukee residents indoors on a recent Wednesday. But Kimberly Miller had work to do.

With a heavy tool belt around her waist and a hard hat covering the hood of her sweatshirt, she strapped iron gaffs onto her shins and climbed a 35-foot utility pole. The 22-year-old single mother of three is training to repair and install electrical lines for Wisconsin Electric Power Co. - one of the companies participating in an ambitious effort to find nontraditional jobs for women on welfare.

Dozens of Milwaukee welfare mothers are training to become welders, machinists, printers, sheet-metal workers, auto mechanics and carpenters. All are participating in Milwaukee NET, which is run by the local YWCA and was originally funded by the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW). Milwaukee NET’s goal: to place women in occupations in which less than 25 percent of the work force is female.

As the clamor for welfare reform mounts to include proposals for curtailing welfare to women with dependent children, such training efforts are under growing scrutiny. And Milwaukee NET is among the most successful. Since its training programs started two years ago, with help from a Ford Foundation grant, Milwaukee NET has placed 90 of its 100 graduates in relatively high-paying nontraditional jobs. Eighty-three of them remain in nontraditional jobs.

Miller, who lives on public assistance while she’s in training, will receive a starting salary of $15 an hour if she passes rigorous aptitude and physical tests after nine months of training. That’s much better than the series of minimum wage, dead-end jobs that left her “struggling month after month to survive,” she says.

For the same reason, Jill Baillargeon, 26, has been toughing it out as an apprentice plumber. Now earning about $10 an hour, the single mother of three will move up to $22.40 if she makes journeyman in four years.

Job-training programs nationwide are using Milwaukee NET as their guide.

In Milwaukee, women on welfare who seek federal job training hear a three-hour talk on nontraditional jobs, which, they learn, typically pay 20 percent to 30 percent more than traditionally female occupations like health-care. Women who like the idea of doing nontraditional jobs enroll in Milwaukee NET and spend a week touring training sites to decide which profession they like best. After a series of screening and aptitude tests and before the actual apprenticeships begin, the women go to the YWCA for two weeks of courses, which include remedial math and physical conditioning, as well as lessons in handling sexual harassment.

Despite WOW’s recent success, critics of nontraditional work for women continue to believe that too few welfare women will succeed at these jobs and that the Milwaukee NET approach is too expensive to be practical for larger groups.