Mayor Koch had been demanding it for months. William J. Grinker, the Mayor's
Human Resources Administrator, responded by drafting a specific plan. Finally,
on June 30, the Board of Estimate approved it: an imaginative jobs program to
get up to 3,000 people off welfare without government subsidies.
The program required that, beginning July 1, every contractor doing business
with the Human Resources Administration would have to hire one welfare recipient
for every $250,000 in contract fees received from the city.
How many have been hired since?
One, Mr. Grinker said somewhat sheepishly last week—a 20-year-old Brooklyn
mother who has been on welfare for two years and went to work two weeks ago as a
clerk-typist for a child-care agency.
The employment program makes sense, if properly monitored, and by
bureaucratic benchmarks it all but rocketed into being. Yet the city's modest
progress so far, in the relatively short time since it attempted to redefine its
bargain with social service contractors, illustrates again what it takes to make
even a dent in the welfare system....
—Sam Roberts, "Welfare Costs: Spending Money to Save Money,"
New York
Times,
August 27, 1987.
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One thing I have discovered is that attitudes and values that I acquired in
China long before I came to the United States have had a great bearing on the
way I do business. These values have much in common, with the virtues of
Confucianism, the system of Chinese thought that stresses proper behavior and
moderation.
—Dr. An Wang, in Northwest,
April 1987, p. 64.
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One of the things that I've made very clear to all my clients [sports
agent Leigh Steinberg says] is that I feel professional athletes should serve as
role models. And I won't take on a player unless he is willing to give back
substantially to the community, whether in terms of scholarship programs to his
school, charity, whatever....
I've talked to some athletes who don't want to be involved. One told me that
he was his own favorite charity, and I told him, "Fine, go get yourself another
agent."
—Los Angeles Times Magazine,
April 12, 1987.
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