* The 18,900 Philadelphia residents - about 25 percent of the city's adult welfare caseload - who will be required under the state plan to find work by next Sept. 30 or lose benefits. Some 50 percent of the caseload must meet that requirement by 2002.
* Proponents of public-service and ``workfare'' jobs in which recipients work for their benefits.
DPW has not ruled out public service jobs, but argue they seldom lead to meaningful long-term employment.
Mayor Rendell and other city officials agree with the state, but are planning for such jobs because they believe private employment won't suffice.
The disagreement flared at a Dec. 4 City Council hearing on the impact of reform.
``Assuming an 18 percent vacancy rate, there are about 77,000 job openings at any given time in Philadelphia in the retail, service and health fields alone,'' welfare Deputy Secretary Sherri Heller told Council.
Employing the same statistics that DPW used to arrive at the 77,000-jobs figure, the city has done its own analysis.
It concludes there are fewer than 9,000 jobs available in the entire nine-county metropolitan area, including Philadelphia, four Pennsylvania counties and four in South Jersey.
John Dodds, director of the activist Philadelphia Unemployment Project, said the city's numbers ``are a whole lot closer to the reality I know. It's not that there's no work. There is turnover in low-wage employment, and that's one of the things the state's counting.''
Dodds said DPW's analysis seemed sloppy, and assembled to suit its own needs.
``They didn't do it on purpose, necessarily. They just don't think there's a problem with employment, just a bunch of lazy people who don't want to work.''
Former City Councilman Ed Schwartz, who runs the Institute for the Study of Civic Values, which studies and promotes community organizing, was more blunt.
``This is a truth-in- government story,'' said Schwartz.
