Milwaukee -- Until a few months ago, Zadie Jones' workday began at the bus stop outside her home on the city's near north side. Each night, the former welfare recipient would board the bus at 9:50, ride down 35th Street to Wisconsin Avenue, then transfer to another bus that took her to her overnight job at a printing company in Brookfield, a Milwaukee suburb. At her shift's end the next morning, she would scurry out to catch the 7:10 bus back to the city, repeat the transfer, and arrive home around 8:00.

After a year of working, by last winter Jones had saved enough money to make a down payment on a used Dodge Neon, which she now drives to work. She says she feels liberated. Still, with her daughter already 14 years old, she says she had it easy compared withother bus- dependent co-workers and neighbors who must tote their young children to and from child care before and after the workday.

Jones' experience illustrates the challenge of reforming welfare at a time when jobs are moving ever farther from the nation's inner cities.

Milwaukee is ground zero for Wisconsin's nationally acclaimed welfare reform efforts. Under "Wisconsin Works"-- W-2 for short -- welfare cash grants have given way to an assistance program that requires parents to work once their children are older than 12 weeks. The state's thriving economy -- its unemployment rate in June was a record-low 2.9 percent -- has in theory opened the way for former welfare recipients to stream into the workplace. But unlike Jones, who was fortunate to have a job accessible by bus and didn't have to worry about child care, many of the city's new "working poor" have no efficient, manageable way or no way at all -- to get to the suburbs where the jobs are.

Reverse commuting is an old story in the Milwaukee area; well before W-2 was signed into law, suburban employers with jobs to fill were starting to recruit workers from the inner city. Today, though, continued strong economic growth has compounded their problem. Jobs outside the city go begging even as a new crop of potential workers has emerged within it.

In this new environment, transportation and child care have emerged as the chief obstacles keeping ex-welfare recipients from becoming full-time workers, says John Pawasarat, director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Employment and Training Institute, which studies the regional economy and its labor force.

Milwaukee's three surrounding suburban counties continue to have more job openings than they do available workers, and Milwaukee continues to have more job-seekers than available jobs. W-2's core constituents-- women in the cities with preschool-age children -- "do not work full time, particularly in outlying areas, because they can't put together the child-care/transportation/ employment equation," Pawasarat says.

"No one is going to travel by public transit" to the far-away suburbs where the jobs are, Pawasarat says, especially if they have to first get children to and from day care. Such transit often is too time-consuming, inflexible, or simply unavailable.

"People's lives are not set on 9 to 5," notes Patrick Vandenberg of Family Service of Milwaukee, a local social service agency. "When something goes wrong or they're 10 minutes late and miss the bus, they're screwed."

Faced with such circumstances, says Pawasarat, women leaving welfare generally work part-time in high-turnover jobs within the range of buses operated by the Milwaukee County transit system. (The county comprises the city and about a dozen inner-ring suburbs.) Indeed, Pawasarat says, transportation status outweighs even educational attainment as a predictor of who is most likely to make the leap from welfare to work. "Having an automobile and a driver's license," he notes, "are much more important in terms of predictability of getting and staying employed than even completing high school."

Getting in the Driver's Seat

Milwaukee-area business groups, employers, social service organizations, and municipal agencies have been struggling to bridge the welfare-to-work transportation gap. While much of the focus has been on improving and expanding public transit, a handful of firms and nonprofit groups have found innovative ways to help their employees and clients obtain cars for commuting.

For several years, Quad/Graphics, a locally based printer of national magazines with nearly 8,000 employees in southeastern Wisconsin, has provided interest-free loans of up to $600 to help employees buy or repair a car. Some 1,446 workers have obtained $897,596 in loans under the program over the last four years, says Quad spokeswoman Claire Ho. The company also has invited representatives of car dealerships to its plants to counsel employees about car purchases.

"We're a rapidly growing company, and we're constantly expanding our facilities," Ho says. The company's local workforce has grown by 25 percent during the last four years, much of that drawn from Milwaukee.

Other working-poor Milwaukeeans have obtained car loans through the Ways to Work program operated by Family Service of Milwaukee and underwritten by the McNight Foundation. "These are people who could never get a car loan on their own because their credit is just so dismal from being on welfare," says Vandenberg, who oversees the program.

Esperanza Unida, a South Side Milwaukee nonprofit group that offers job training, has put an unusual spin on making inexpensive cars accessible to the poor. For 15 years the agency has used donated, often broken-down cars as hands-on tools in its auto repair job training program. Typically those cars end up back on the market, fetching anywhere from several hundred dollars to a couple of thousand dollars. For the past three years, Esperanza Unida has been giving graduates of its training programs which over the years have included construction work, retailing, child care, and other entry-level jobs discounts of 50 percent or more on one of the agency's resale cars once they get a job.

Although the organization lacks the cash flow to finance a car purchase outright, "for a couple of hundred dollars we get the student a good-running car," says Richard Oulahan, the group's director. Having a car can turn a student's training certificate from a piece of paper into a ticket to the working class, he adds. "In the construction trades you have to have a car. They won't apprentice you unless you have a car."

"Driving While Poor"

Esperanza Unida also helps clients get their driver's licenses reinstated if they've been revoked for traffic infractions or unpaid parking tickets. That brings up another issue that troubles some advocates for the working poor: the so-called problem of "driving while poor."

Low-income workers, their advocates contend, can ill-afford to pay fines for parking or minor traffic violations. The fines mount, and their licenses get suspended. Still needing to get to work, they drive anyway, get caught, and compound their problems. It's an issue that State Sen. Gwen Moore, a Democrat whose district represents Milwaukee's inner city, protested in a letter to Milwaukee's police chief this past summer.

At the same time, many advocates for the poor express frustration that government hasn't done more to make it easier for entry-level workers to get cars. For example, Oulahan says he has tried to obtain funds from state and federal officials to expand his agency's new-worker car discounts, which Esperanza Unida would be willing to open up to graduates of other training programs. But so far, federal officials have told him their hands are tied so long as funding policies are geared to mass transit. State officials, meanwhile, have yet to use their federal welfare block grant for such purposes, Oulahan says.

Beefing up Mass Transit

Other firms and groups, meanwhile, have turned their attention to improving the region's mass transit systems.

Tecumseh Products Co., for example, makes engines for lawn mowers and snow blowers at a plant in Grafton, Wis., an Ozaukee County community north of Milwaukee. Two years ago the company still drew most of its manufacturing workers from the surrounding area, says Don Denis, Tecumseh's human resources manager. That's changed. Like other expanding county employers, Tecumseh now depends on a local shuttle bus line, the Ozaukee Express, to bring in workers from the city who transfer from Milwaukee County transit system buses at the Ozaukee County line. Between 30 and 40 of the plant's workers depend on the shuttle to get to work.

More will likely follow. "These people typically don't have transportation, or they don't have driver's licenses," Denis says. Being on the bus line has become an important recruitment tool, he adds. "When we put ads in the paper or go to job fairs, we indicate we're on the Ozaukee bus route."

Milwaukee County's transit system has also changed its bus routes in response to reverse commuting trends. Four years ago, the bus system established a shuttle linking the northwest corner of the county with industrial parks in nearby Menomonee Falls, just over the county line in Waukesha County. With 134 riders a day on average, the shuttle is one of the transit line's most successful additions, says Kelly Janes, the system's manager of research and planning.

In 1995 the transit system, in partnership with Quad/Graphics, went a step further when it began to extend routes to serve four Quad/Graphics plants in outlying Waukesha County. The new routes were timed to accommodate Quad's 12-hour shifts. Employees ride free on the company dime for the first month, and at a discounted $1 fare a 35-cent savings thereafter. Federal welfare-to-work grants also help to defray some of the transit system's costs.

Long-Term Solution

Of course, the mismatch between suburban jobs and urban workers is more than merely a transportation problem. Lauren Baker, who directs a training program operated by the printing industry and its affiliated unions, calls programs that put urban workers in cars or on buses bound for the suburbs "a Band-Aid solution."

"There's an economic rift between the suburbs and the city that takes a lot more planning [to mend] than just a job-ride program or a company saying we're going to help people buy a car," Baker says. Like many others, she says the long-term solution is to bring jobs back to the neighborhoods where workers live.

In the meantime, though, the workers remain in the city and the jobs remain outside. Getting the two together has become one of the region's continuing workforce challenges. And it's not likely to improve in a hurry.

Wisconsin freelance writer Erik Gunn reports on business, labor, and the economy for several local and national publications.