Pubdate: Sun, 10 Sep 2000
Source: Wichita Eagle (KS)
Copyright: 2000 The Wichita Eagle
Contact:  P.O. Box 820, Wichita, KS 67201
Fax: (316) 268-6627
Website: http://www.wichitaeagle.com/
Author: Somini Sengupta, New York Times

WORKFARE SUIT HELPS ADDICTS

NEW YORK -- Meet Theresa Banchieri: At 36, she has been on welfare her
entire adult life, and for much of that time she has also been a drug
addict. Sometimes she worked as a stripper, and occasionally she stole
to support a heroin habit.

But when New York City's stringent new welfare rules forced her to
work 31 hours a week cleaning buildings for her $234 welfare check
every two weeks, Banchieri said, she saw it as an opportunity. She
hoped she would soon get a real job, and she told everyone she knew.

"I bragged about it," she said.

Then another, seemingly conflicting, city policy kicked in.

Banchieri was barred from participating in the Work Experience Program
- -- as the workfare program is known -- with the city's Department of
Sanitation because she was on methadone, a synthetic opiate widely
regarded as the most effective way to curb the craving for heroin.

The news came from an agency official running the orientation session
for workfare participants one morning in April 1999.

"She said, 'No, I'm sorry, honey, you can't work for the Department of
Sanitation,' " Banchieri recalled. "I started crying. I actually
started crying."

Worse than that, she relapsed, for the first time in a year. She
sniffed heroin, smoked crack, popped pills and finally landed in jail
on a robbery charge. She was released on probation, including
mandatory drug treatment.

"It messed me up," she said.

One city agency was telling her to work for her welfare check. Another
was saying it would not have her. But though confused, Banchieri was
not completely without luck. She found a lawyer, and with her help
filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, charging discrimination on the basis of disability -- in
Banchieri's case, a history of drug addiction.

Two weeks ago, victory was hers: The commission's district director,
Spencer H. Lewis Jr., ruled that the city had violated the Americans
With Disabilities Act, which considers people with a history of drug
or alcohol abuse to be a protected class under the law. The commission
rejected the Sanitation Department's argument that Banchieri's
schedule for methadone treatments would preclude her working a regular
shift.

The quiet triumph went beyond this one instance. As a result of the
ruling, the Department of Sanitation reversed its ban on methadone
patients' participating in its workfare program.

Commonly called the hard-to-employ, hardened addicts like Banchieri
are an increasingly important focus of welfare reform in places like
New York City. Under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's welfare regulations, all
welfare recipients -- unless they can prove that their disability is
so severe that they cannot work -- must work for their benefits. And
many of the more easily employable or resourceful have either found
work or simply been removed from the rolls.

Thus the city agencies that take on workfare clients will have to
contend with many more recovering addicts like Banchieri. That is why
her victory could have wider implications, said Kate O'Neill, a senior
vice president and lawyer at the Legal Action Center, a nonprofit
group that often represents methadone patients in employment
discrimination cases nationwide.

"What a lot of that population needs are entry-level jobs and
entry-level jobs at state and local agencies," O'Neill said. "To the
extent that there continue to be either blanket policies or policies
applied in a way to exclude persons on methadone, the government is
really shooting itself in the foot."
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