PROSPECTS FOR ‘JOB-MATCHING’ IN THE WELFARE-TO-WORK TRANSITION: Labor Market Capacity for Sustaining the Absorption of Mississippi’s TANF Recipients*

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act (PRWORA) institutes a maximum sixty-month “life-time” benefit window for TANF block-grant recipients, involving TANF beneficiaries actually finding paid employment somewhere in the extant labor force. We believe that this welfare-to-work transition constitutes the most important element of the welfare reform initiative among states in the U.S. because it reflects the most tenuous element of the “social contract” set by Congress in legitimating the PRWORA. As part of a larger study, we examine three key aspects of the transition-to-work portion of welfare reform in Mississippi and relate them to the potentially uneven realization of sustainability that may be associated with the rural-urban continuum. Using USDA’s recent taxonomy of urban influence for Mississippi counties, we examine the following three issues. One, we estimate the prospects for local labor markets to “absorb” the 1996 cohort of TANF recipients by “matching” their current educational credentials to the projected growth in jobs within specific minimum educational levels over the successive five-year period (1997-2002). This builds on our previous work (Howell 1997c) which documented dramatic spatial variation in the crude “absorption capacity” of labor market areas in Mississippi to handle this cohort of TANF recipients. Because childcare arrangements and transportation are two critical elements for sustaining the transition-to-work by families on welfare in the face of available employment opportunities, we also examine the characterization of local areas to meet those needs. Two, childcare facilities in each county within the labor market area are identified and their spatial distributions plotted so as to ascertain the relative availability of these services for TANF recipients. Three, the availability of private automobiles at the household-level within counties is used as a proxy for the availability of transportation. The spatial proximity of households to major road and highway systems is likely to be an effective indicator of “transportation access” in a rural-oriented state such as Mississippi. The results show that, contrary to popular images, there are significant portions of the 1996 TANF cohort who have post-high school education (even holding baccalaureate degrees). There are also disjunctures in the “job-matching” prospects for TANF recipients and these vary spatially. The Delta region labor market involving the nonmetropolitan Clarksdale LMA appears to hold the bleakest outlook for TANF recipients to find jobs that will require the educational credentials that they hold. Areas of the state with the highest levels of urban influence hold the brightest prospects for “job-matched” employment. The availability of regulated childcare facilities also follows this pattern of urban influence.