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Newly-appointed city welfare commissioner Lilliam Barrios-Paoli apparently doesn’t agree with one part of her own administration’s workfare agenda.
Speaking Thursday at a panel discussion, Barrios-Paoli said the Giuliani administration needs to look into providing real job-training and education for welfare recipients assigned to menial or clerical city jobs.
“I’m not naive enough to believe that without some degree of [job] training something is going to happen,” Barrios-Paoli told participants in a welfare conference sponsored by the Citizens Committee for Children of New York.
The new commissioner took her welfare lumps throughout the otherwise collegial roundtable.
Mary Jo Bane, a former Clinton-administration welfare official, lambasted Giuliani for his last-minute criticism of the federal provisions stripping benefits from legal immigrants. “I think it was unfortunate that the mayor of New York didn’t speak up against this until the day it was passed,” said Bane, who resigned her post in the Department of Health and Human Services after Clinton okayed the historic measure last year.
“I could talk about or sort of defend the policies of the Giuliani administrationo or I could talk about working together,” Barrios-Paoli said, deflecting criticism. “I thought working together would be more productive.”