David Obey: “I simply want to note that one of the previous speakers mentioned the House passage of the Wisconsin welfare reform…”

“I simply want to note that one of the previous speakers mentioned the House passage of the Wisconsin welfare reform proposal last week. As Members know, what happened last week is the House passed the waiver request sent in by the State of Wisconsin, eliminating the 30-day public comment period. The Milwaukee Journal carried a story yesterday that hidden in those waiver requests were provisions that allowed employers to scale back employment for regular workers, to cut their hours, to cut their benefits, to interfere with their scheduled promotions in order to hire welfare recipients. The main Wisconsin bureaucrat who was supposed to be in charge of administering the program said in the Milwaukee Journal, 'Gee, we had no idea why that provision is there.' The main legislative sponsor in the proposal in the State assembly was quoted as saying that he did not know that that was in the waiver request until he read it for the first time over the weekend. Today, Wisconsin announced that it was a big mistake and that they were going to have to change their waiver request. What this means is that the proposal which the House voted to bless just a week ago tells workers that we do not like the fact that welfare workers are going to be unnecessarily gobbling their tax dollars, but instead we are going to allow them to unnecessarily gobble their jobs. I do not think those workers are going to be very pleased about that.”