The work requirements of welfare law should include education or training, a group of panelists said at the “Off Welfare…on to Independence” forum today at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Massachusetts is the only state in the union with welfare laws that exclude educational or training programs from the 30-hour-a-week requirement, panelists said. Funding for education and training would benefit not only welfare recipients, panelists argued, but businesses and other taxpayers in general.

Rodney Carroll, CEO of Welfare to Work Partnership, a nonprofit organization which helps companies hire welfare recipients, was the keynote speaker at the forum. Carroll was raised on welfare in northern Philadelphia, he told the audience.

Most welfare recipients are women who “had help getting to where they were,” Carroll said, because they were involved in negative situations like abusive relationships. Women like these “need to have an opportunity,” he said, which he hopes to provide by creating educational programs that would allow graduates to have real careers instead of the “dead-end jobs” that many have to put up with.

As a director for the United Postal Service, Carroll said he helped fill a staff shortage by hiring many welfare recipients in Camden, N.J. Carroll said his mission was to empower the poorest of America, to “reach out and give them a hand up.”

Rep. John Tierney (D-Essex) argued for reform and expressed his disappointment in the stagnancy of governmental welfare action.

One “can’t separate policy and politics,” he said. According to Tierney, a Massachusetts welfare reform bill is currently blocked in the state because some politicians would like to incorporate “encouraging sexual abstinence and marriage” into the bill.

Tierney also criticized President Bush’s financial policies, contending that the money he spends could have gone to more worthwhile institutions. With the need to “boost funding for legal immigrants” and “increase childcare for single, working mothers,” Tierney said he believed that the first year tax breaks that Bush implemented could have been used to “invest.”

This bill would be beneficial to taxpayers “in the long run,” according to Michael Widmer, president of Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. The purpose of funding education and training is to help recipients gain “long term self-sufficiency,” so that they can lift themselves out of welfare and become taxpayers themselves, Widmer said, adding Massachusetts has the “most restrictive policy in the nation.”