Downsizing the Welfare State

Betty Reid Mandell a welfare rights activist since the 1960s, founded and co-edits Survival News written by and about poor people. Professor Emerita from Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, she is the author of several books on social welfare issues, most recently An Introduction to Human Service Policy and Practice, co-authored with Barbara Schram.

THE NEWT-LED REPUBLICANS, WITH THE AID OF THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of the Democrats, got at least one thing they wanted from their Contract With America -- an end to the federal Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) program that fed, clothed, and sheltered over nine million children and their parents, mostly single mothers. They also deprived millions of legal immigrants of almost all government help, and took away the food stamps of the long-term unemployed.

If ever there were a classic example of the evil of lesser evilism it was the 1996 presidential election, the culmination of more than two decades of liberal and left inaction. Reflecting on the Democratic candidates in the last four elections, it is abundantly clear that having been designated the "lesser evil" in those elections by liberals and, sad to say, even radicals, each one, from Carter to Dukakis to Clinton, assured of the liberal/left vote, moved inexorably further to the right than his predecessor. The "lesser evil" crowd, blindly wed to the Democratic Party, bears a large share of the responsibility for this move to the right which culminated in 1996 in the reactionary assault on welfare, immigrants and affirmative action. If the differences continue to narrow at the same rate, by the next national election the nation will be saddled with two Republican parties. No wonder Wall Street surged almost 100 points the day after the election. It didn't lose. It couldn't.

In what New York Times columnist Bob Herbert described as "officially sanctioned brutality,"¹ Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, a welfare law that ends entitlement to AFDC and gives the states block grants to run the program. Ironically named the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996," the law cuts funding for low-income programs by about $55 billion over the next six years, the heaviest in food stamps, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), (the federal program for the elderly and the disabled poor), and assistance to legal immigrants. (Illegal immigrants were already ineligible for most programs.) Legal immigrants are cut off of most assistance programs, including food stamps and SSI, and other types of assistance. And other bills target Medicaid and low-income housing programs. The Republicans had hoped to eliminate entitlement to both Medicaid and food stamps, but the political stakes were too high. Food stamps were protected by agri-business, and Medicaid was protected by doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes. As Jim Rowan, a law professor at Northeastern University said, "Welfare is the stalking horse for the real budget buster, which is caused by doctors taking their wheelbarrows to the bank full of Medicaid money."

The law replaced AFDC, emergency assistance, and the JOBS (Job Opportunities and Basic Skills) program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant. It gives federal money to the states to run their own programs, but the amount of money is essentially fixed. The amount of federal money that will go to the states every year from 1997 through 2002 is based, in general, on how much money states spent in 1994 . Because national AFDC rolls have fallen since 1994, federal and state spending levels in 1994 were higher than in 1996. Therefore, most states will actually get more money than they previously got for the first year or so of TANF, provided there is no recession. This sweetener to the states helped to assure its passage. However, there is no provision for increasing the amount for inflation or a recession, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that funding will fall $1.2 billion short of expenditures under previous law over the next six years. Under the previous law, state spending was matched by the federal government. That is no longer the case. States can spend more than their federal allotment, but it won't be matched by federal dollars.

In the past, states had to get a waiver from the federal government if they wanted to do something contrary to federal regulations. Now, however, states can set their own standards. They can define "needy" any way they like, and can even use different definitions for different areas of the state. They can set tighter time limits and establish new requirements such as denying aid to children born while the family is on assistance (the family cap), denying aid to two-parent families, or denying aid to parents who fail to immunize their children or fail to keep them in school. Some other features of the TANF portion of the law include:

• Unmarried parents under the age of 18 are required to live with an adult and stay in school in order to receive benefits.

• There is a lifetime "drop dead" time limit of five years on cash assistance. States may exempt 20% of their caseload from the five year limit. (About half of the AFDC population currently consists of recipients who have passed the five-year mark, and the average length of stay over a lifetime is six years.) States may set shorter time limits, regardless of whether the parents in the family can find employment.

• Recipients whose youngest child is more than one year old are required to do some form of paid or unpaid work after 24 months of receiving benefits, or lose their benefits.² States are required to have a growing portion of their caseloads in work activities over the next several years. By 2002, states are required to have 50% of single-parents receiving cash assistance in work programs. The rate for two-parent families reaches 90% by 1999. Single-parent recipients will be required to work at least 30 hours per week by 2000 (20 hours per week for single parents with a child under age six.) Two-parent families must work 35 hours per week.

  These percentages give states a perverse incentive to cut the rolls, since they will be able to meet work quotas more easily if there are fewer people to put to work. States can therefore meet their quotas by knocking people off the rolls.

• Recipients who are subject to work requirements must participate in community service employment ("workfare") if they haven't found a job after two months of receiving assistance.

• The law has a narrower definition of work and training than the previous program. It does not allow higher education, and allows only 12 months of vocational training. Officials prefer really short training programs; in Massachusetts, the Bay State Skills agency says that they are urged to complete training in six weeks.

• Parents will no longer be entitled to child care assistance which is placed in a block grant. Although the law increases the need for child care because of expanded work requirements, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, child care funding will fall $1.8 billion short of what will be needed by 2002. The law also does not provide for transportation costs. The previous 1988 law required work for women whose children were over three, but it provided day care and transportation.

  While the law prohibits states from punishing families with children under the age of six if they can't participate in work or training programs because they are unable to find affordable child care, nevertheless a parent who reaches a time limit and is cut off aid could be cut off without having had access to work preparation assistance.

• People convicted of drug felonies are prohibited from receiving a TANF block grant or food stamps for life.

• The law requires states to impose harsher sanctions than allowed under current law on families where the parent does not "cooperate fully" in establishing paternity and collecting child support. States must reduce by at least 25% the payments made to any family not "cooperating fully," as well as eliminate assistance for an entire family if the head of the family declines to assign support rights to the state. The definition of "cooperating fully" is subject to various interpretations. For a time, Massachusetts was dropping families from the rolls if the mother was unable to provide such information as the father's Social Security number, his whereabouts, and place of employment, even when the mother did not have this information. A class action suit brought by legal services against Governor Weld and the Department of Transitional Assistance (the new name for the welfare department) stopped the practice.

• Unemployed childless adults between the ages of 18 and 50 will generally be limited to just three months of food stamp receipt in any three-year period. Many of these people qualify for no other government benefit except food stamps. Denying them food stamps will leave them with no safety net at all.³

Millions Will Be Thrown into Poverty

THIS LAW WILL THROW MILLIONS OF PEOPLE INTO DESPERATE POVERTY. A study by the Urban Institute estimated that the cuts in food stamps and SSI to legal immigrants and the changes to AFDC will push 2.6 million more people into poverty by 2002 -- a 9% increase in poverty. The incomes of over 20% of all families with children will fall by an average of $1,300 a year. And, giving the lie to all the rhetoric about "reducing dependency," half of the families affected by this law already have at least one family member in the labor market.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that between 2.5 million and 3.5 million children could be affected by the law's five year time limit. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) estimates that if all states were to adopt a two year time limit, 5.5 million children would be denied aid by 2006. Food stamp cuts, amounting to $27.7 billion over six years, will reduce the average food stamp benefit from its current level of 80 cents to 66 cents per person per meal. Children and very poor families will be hit the hardest. About two-thirds of food stamp reductions will be borne by families with children. By 1998, nearly seven million families with children who receive food stamps will lose an average of $435 in food stamp benefits.

Many women trying to escape abusive relationships will have no alternative but to return to those relationships when the new welfare law takes effect. Some studies show that over 60% of mothers on welfare have been battered. The Nevada Network Against Violence says: "As strict time limits are imposed on recipients, batterers will have yet another tool by which to control the victim. If she can be prevented from getting to school, to interviews, to the job, or following through on any other requirement of the program she will lose her benefits."

Beefed up paternity determination and child support enforcement may also prove dangerous to battered women. For those women who are forced to flee violent partners, having to reveal their location to comply with child support enforcement guidelines will jeopardize their safety.

We can get some idea of what will happen to teenage parents under this law by looking at what has already happened to them in Massachusetts, where a similar law has been in effect since November 1, 1995. That law, which requires teenage parents to live with a parent or guardian or in a group home, has forced dozens of young women into inadequate and sometimes dangerous living situations. Jordana Hart, writing in The Boston Globe, reports that out of 668 mothers under the age of 18 who were on the welfare rolls November 1, more than half -- 350 teen-agers, plus their children -- were dropped as a result of the new law. Under pressure, the Massachusetts Department of Social Services last February hired two private agencies to find missing families.

The two private agencies say they can't find 124 of the 350 teen-age families. Investigators say the missing girls may have left no forwarding address or telephone numbers. But they also suspect that some girls remain underground because they don't understand the law and fear, mistakenly, that the state will take their children.

State officials don't care what happened to the mothers. Their only goal is to bring the welfare rolls down, regardless of the suffering caused by the law. Gov. William F. Weld, who has been furthering his political career by being "tough on welfare," points with pride to the fact that welfare law changes have helped to bring down the state's overall caseload, which has fallen from 114,000 in May 1993 to about 83,000 now.

"You don't need a doctorate in statistics to figure out what these numbers mean," Weld said recently. "They mean welfare reform is working."

Immigrants Panicked by New Law

THE CURRENT ATMOSPHERE IN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES IS CHARGED WITH PANIC AND CONFUSION. Ever since Clinton signed the new law, the number of immigrants and refugees seeking naturalization has jumped sharply, straining the services of immigrant organizations. "Rumors have swirled around the new law, sending some immigrants into community centers in tears. Others have spent their days in denial, refusing to believe that changes will take place at all. Advocates say some desperate elderly immigrants even talk of suicide."⁴

Advocacy groups are expanding hours and staffing to meet the rising demand for help in seeking naturalization. Grass-roots organizations are trying to find money to distribute food and clothing to immigrants whose benefits are cut off. And still others are passing out fliers, planning forums and taping spots for television and radio to educate immigrants about the complicated changes.

While denying federal help to legal immigrants in the SSI, food stamp, and TANF programs, states will be allowed either to give or deny noncitizens cash welfare, Medicaid, block grant benefits and other state and local public assistance. New Jersey officials have said the state will try to pick up the cost of benefits for the 20,000 immigrant families now receiving AFDC.

The immigration part of the welfare law was the most controversial. Some Congresspeople voted for the law even while disagreeing with some of the provisions regarding immigrants. President Clinton, who had criticized the legislation's restrictions on immigrants as having nothing to do with welfare reform, has said he will try to change them soon, but change may be difficult because the provisions represent major budget savings. Since the law doesn't include money for enforcing sanctions against employers who hire immigrants, the Republicans aren't really serious about restricting immigration. High-tech sectors of the economy are eager to get immigrants, as are the agri-business, construction, hospitality, and garment sectors; these employers may put pressure on Congress to change the law.

It is far less likely that the TANF portion of the law will be changed, since there are no powerful constituencies that are pressuring for change. Clinton says that he will work to make sure there are enough jobs for welfare recipients, but has made no concrete proposals. Yet we can probably expect a flood of litigation from social service advocates in the states when the law is put into effect, since many features of the law conflict with the U.S. and state constitutions.

The National Conference of State Legislatures expressed concern that the federal welfare law contains mandates that may potentially put states at risk of litigation. States that comply with the federal law are likely to be sued, and states that flout it may suffer financial penalties.

The Clinton Administration also expressed doubts about whether the Michigan plan meets constitutional requirements for due process because welfare benefits could be reduced or ended before the recipients were given an opportunity to challenge such actions at hearings. Yet, like Pontius Pilate, the Clinton Administration washes its hands of any responsibility for insuring that either the federal law or state plans are constitutional. Henry A. Freedman, executive director of the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law, said the administration was taking a "very limited" view of its role, just as Republicans in Congress had intended. Michael Kharfen, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the secretary's role was limited to certifying whether state plans had all the elements specified by Congress, like child support and foster care programs. "It's not our role to make judgments on the substance of state programs," Kharfen said.

Although Clinton had previously vetoed two repressive welfare bills (which contained some features better than this bill as well as a few worse ones), in his eagerness to be re-elected he signed this bill in an opportunistic move to the right.

States' Welfare Plans Prefigured Federal Law

CLINTON ENDED "WELFARE AS WE KNOW IT" EVEN BEFORE THE FEDERAL LAW was passed. Many of the features of the federal welfare law were brought in through the back door by the Clinton Administration, through waivers to the states. In his March message to Congress, Clinton bragged that, despite the fact that national reform legislation had yet to be signed into law, about 10 million public assistance clients, or three-fourths of the nation's welfare population, were "benefiting" from local and state innovation approved by his administration. But he added: "I want out of the waiver business." By 1995, 42 states had been granted waivers. Most were punitive, but a few provided positive incentives such as allowing recipients to keep more assets and a larger portion of their wages when they work.

Clinton tried to steal the welfare issue from the Republicans during the 1992 campaign when he advocated setting a two-year time limit and requiring work. Since then, the president, Congress, and the governors have vied for the position of being the toughest on welfare. Even before the federal cutbacks were implemented, the welfare rolls were dropping rapidly in the states. Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute described this as "welfare reform on the cheap."

While it is not a new practice for states to get people off the rolls by intimidating and harassing them, those tactics have been stepped up. According to the Welfare Bulletin of the Welfare Law Center, the "Eligibility Verification Review" ("EVR") process of New York City's welfare department not only requires recipients to submit to one eligibility review at the local welfare centers, but they have to go for a second eligibility review at a central location in Brooklyn. It requires travel of over an hour each way from many parts of the city. At the review in Brooklyn, applicants and recertifying recipients are grilled by people wearing badges who often try to persuade them to withdraw their applications or close their cases voluntarily. Afterward, teams of two investigators conduct unscheduled visits to the home of every applicant and recertifying recipient. People are often not at home because they are participating in a mandatory work program. Often, eligible people are denied aid based on findings that they do not live at their addresses because investigators have not found them home when conducting these unscheduled home visits. These practices are being challenged by a class action lawsuit.

The "midnight raids" that were so frequently used against African-American women in the 1940s and 1950s and which were declared illegal by the Supreme Court seem to be coming back. According to the newsletter Welfare to Work, in Hartford, Connecticut, city police are conducting early morning raids on the homes of recipients in a sweep to catch "deadbeat dads."

The project had been a closely held secret between the state attorney general and local authorities. Considering how hard it is for women to get officials to pay attention through the routine bureaucratic channels when they report the whereabouts of non-supporting fathers to officials, it is hard to believe that these terrorist tactics are necessary in order to track down "deadbeat dads."

Fingerprinting recipients has become a popular method of harassment by officials in many states. EMPOWER, a welfare rights group in Rochester, New York, responded by putting their fingerprints, in blue paint, all over the welfare office walls.

Seventeen states have requested waivers of federal regulations to allow them to set "drop dead" time limits on welfare. Massachusetts, for example, has already implemented a two-year time limit and a requirement that welfare recipients find work after 60 days of receiving assistance, and take workfare jobs if they can't find paid work. The new law also cut the grants, already 40% below the poverty level, by 2.75%.

Wisconsin (the home of the tough-on-welfare Governor Tommy Thompson) sought a waiver to implement a workfare program called "W2," which would require single mothers to be forced to work for minimum wages or for workfare when children reached 12 weeks of age. It would deny education and training, even English as a Second Language (ESL) and GED, to family heads. Wisconsin also made the unprecedented request to eliminate the federal and state guarantee of Medicaid coverage for all nondisabled children, low-income families and pregnant women.

States have also received waivers to enforce certain behaviors on welfare recipients. These rules reveal a profound distrust of the poor and their parenting abilities and sexual behavior. By November 1995, thirteen states had received waivers to exclude from the grant children born after the family was on assistance (family cap), and more states had applied. There is an "illegitimacy" bonus in the federal law which gives extra federal money for states that lower their nonmarital birth and abortion rates. Mimi Abramovitz says that anti-abortion groups, fearing that the child provision would lead pregnant women to seek abortions, insisted that the bonus be based on nonmarital births and abortions as a percentage of births to all women in the state, instead of just within the AFDC caseload. Control of reproduction among AFDC women is thus linked to control of all women in the state.⁵

Abramovitz lists other state efforts to control reproductive behavior:

• Florida and Ohio have proposed a cash bonus for mothers who agree to use Norplant (the long-lasting but controversial contraceptive implant), along with a separate plan to reward fathers who have vasectomies.

• Colorado has considered penalizing women on welfare who refuse family planning counseling.

• Utah has reviewed a plan to pay $3,000 to unwed pregnant women who carry their babies to term and put them up for adoption.

And many states have imposed laws to control parenting behavior, including "Learnfare," which reduces the grant if a child truants from school and "Shotfare," which reduces the grant if a parent does not get her children immunized.

The Corporations Circling Like Buzzards

UNABLE TO BREAK THEIR DEPENDENCY ON GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS, corporations are lusting for profits from the new welfare law. The delegitimization of the public sector reached its climax in the recent bid of global corporations to take over the administration of public welfare.

Small corporations are already in the welfare business. Curtis & Associates "supplements its successful welfare-to-work jobs clubs with accessories like 'motivational fortune cookies' at $3.99 a dozen. A sample message is, 'The way to control your future is to work hard today.'"⁶ Maximus Inc, a consulting company in McLean, Va., did $100 million in business this year, including $7 million in welfare-to-work programs in Boston, two California counties and Fairfax, Va.

But now giant corporations are in on the take. The New York Times reports that Lockheed Martin, the $30 billion giant of the weapons industry, is bidding against Electronic Data Systems (Ross Perot's company) and Andersen Consulting to take over $563 million in welfare operations in Texas.

"And that is only the beginning," Lockheed executives say. Having hired two longtime Federal welfare employees and top officials from Texas, Oregon and Alabama, the corporation plans to market even more comprehensive welfare contracts to states and counties in what is potentially a new multibillion-dollar industry to overhaul and run welfare programs.

This so-called "privatization" of welfare is the height of corporate-government hypocrisy. The very corporations bidding for welfare contracts aren't "free market enterprises" at all, but were built on government contracts. The September 15, 1996 New York Times gives the details:

The line where Lockheed's resources end and those of the United States Treasury begin sometimes blurs. The corporation, which the Government bailed out in the 1970s and 80s, has a backlog of more than $50 billion in contracts, mostly with the Defense Department, and it is lobbying for $1.6 billion in subsidies for mergers with two former competitors, Martin Marietta and Loral. Members of a bipartisan Congressional coalition opposed to the subsidies have called them corporate welfare at its worst and payoffs for layoffs, because the mergers are tied to 30,000 layoffs and $92 million in executive bonuses. . . .

An opponent of the subsidy, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, has a Lockheed plant scheduled to close in his district . . . Mr. Smith's staff director, Andrew Napoli, said the prospect of Lockheed's winning major welfare contracts gave new meaning to the phrase double dipping.

They would be getting a subsidy to lay off these folks and then could be getting additional money from the Government to help these people get jobs.

The corporations have left a trail of corruption, scandal, kickbacks, and mismanagement in their wake. Electronic Data Systems, which has contracts in 30 states, was the target of an unsuccessful attempt by Florida's Attorney General to bar them from doing business in the state last year in a dispute over what officials called a "grossly inefficient" $240 million computer-management system for welfare eligibility, benefits and child-support enforcement. The same New York Times article reports that America Works "has been embraced by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. But it left a trail of unhappy officials in Ohio, Massachusetts and Erie County, NY." In West Virginia, a state employee was indicted for kickbacks on a Maximus contract and Maximus lost the contract to Lockheed. Lockheed forfeited the chance to bid on contracts in New York City for four years because Mayor David Dinkins had shown favoritism in awarding the company a $150 million contract to run the Parking Violations Bureau in 1993.

Union leaders fear that privatization opens the door to big campaign contributors and their cronies, and they also fear losing jobs as a result of privatization. One longtime worker in social services commented that the new systems seem like a bad dream: "For us old bleeding-heart liberal who were on the streets in the 60s, the idea that Lockheed, or the military-industrial complex, would be in charge of welfare is out of somebody's nightmare fantasy," said the director of the JOBS program in a Northeastern state.

Then he begged not to be identified, saying, "We may end up working with them."

Wages Will Fall; Workers Will Lose Jobs

CUTTING WELFARE RESULTS IN CUTTING WAGES. Welfare has always been the basement level of the wage structure, and now that welfare recipients are working for less than minimum wage, the entire wage structure is going down. One reason that business leaders and public officials want welfare recipients in the waged labor market is to reduce wages for those already working for wages. An Economic Policy Institute study, "Cutting Wages by Cutting Welfare: The Impact of Reform on the Low-Wage Labor Market," found that if the low-wage labor market were to give jobs to former welfare recipients without displacing current workers, pay would fall by nearly 12% for the bottom 30% of workers -- the 30 million earning less than $7.19 an hour. To put it another way, AFDC may have bolstered wages by at least 12%.⁷ Pay for low-wage workers in states with relatively large welfare populations would fall even more. For example, in California, wages would decline 17.8% and in New York, 17.1%.

Robert Haynes, secretary-treasurer of the Massachusetts AFL/CIO, commented on the study, "It's what we've been talking about all along. You can't just flood the labor market with all kinds of low-wage, unskilled people. It's going to have a major impact on the people who are out there."

New competition from former welfare recipients would cost low-wage workers about $36 billion a year in income -- about $8.5 billion more than last year's state and federal expenditure on the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, the report said.

The National Association of Manufacturers has said that welfare recipients are a good source of labor. No doubt they see the advantages of lowering everyone's wages, and of getting a source of cheap labor, particularly in the low-paid service sector. Workfare will also provide cheap labor to private social agencies and to government agencies, and will displace higher paid workers.

New York City gives us a preview of what will happen to welfare recipients and workers under workfare. There are 30,000 workfare laborers in New York City. Participants work at least 26 hours each week in return for benefits that can be as low as $68.50 in cash and $60 in food stamps every two weeks (less than $2.30 hourly). They sweep streets, transport corpses at city hospitals, or perform other chores in the city's Work Experience Program (WEP). The bulk of these WEP workers are single, childless recipients of Home Relief, who under a two-year-old state law are required to work for their benefit checks. But the numbers will climb now that the city has begun to enlist tens of thousands of mothers receiving TANF (formerly AFDC). Mayor Giuliani has estimated that by late 1997 the city will be "employing" 50,000 men and women on Home Relief and another 35,000 TANF moms.⁸

Some recipients working at Bellevue Hospital transporting patients or changing beds say there are so many workfare workers now at the hospital that they are "falling over each other," with virtually none obtaining full-time jobs. "Why should they actually hire anyone?" asked Pat Simmons, a 49-year-old woman who said she had worked 26 hours a week at Bellevue for nearly two years without gaining a real job. "We all but work fr free."

Luis Fernandez, a former automobile mechanic who has spent recent months cleaning streets in Brooklyn, said there were no uniforms for him to wear, often no boots or gloves. Mostly, he said, he is given orders. "We are the garbage," he said. And they are treated as garbage at many work sites. According to the New York Times of September 27, 1996 there is a sign on a Sanitation Department restroom that says, "No WEP Workers Allowed."

While city officials have insisted that welfare workers have not taken jobs formerly performed by union workers, participants in the program are convinced that they are doing the jobs that were formerly done by some of the 17,000 city employees who have retired or accepted buy-outs since 1994. There are recipients working in clerical jobs in welfare offices, and in many other agencies. One even worked as an aide to a senior official at the Human Resources Administration, the city agency that carries out the workfare program. Kevin Anderson, a 22-year-old welfare recipient picking up trash in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, said, "Those union workers should be worried about their jobs. Shoot, we have been doing their jobs for months. I don't even see the city workers around here much. Except when they come to watch us do their jobs."

Public officials have demonized and scapegoated welfare recipients, criminals, and immigrants. We now see that all of those groups are being forced into poor working conditions. Whether or not the demonizing was part of a grand scheme to get cheap labor, it has had the effect of making it seem more acceptable to the public to force welfare recipients into low-paid jobs with demeaning working conditions.

Where Are the Breadwinner's Wages; Where Are the Jobs?

WORKFARE PROGRAMS MAKE NO PRETENSE OF PAYING A WAGE THAT CAN SUPPORT a family. They simply force welfare recipients to work off their grants at a wage that is far below the legal minimum wage. Workers have no hope of a raise, promotion or overtime. They cannot unionize or strike. They have no vacation, sick leave, or fringe benefits. No matter how hard they work, they have almost no chance of being hired as permanent employees, yet they still have to report to the job faithfully. Even one unexcused absence is grounds for losing weeks of "wages" -- that is, the welfare check and food stamps.

In some states, welfare departments used to be concerned about finding jobs for welfare recipients that paid a decent wage. Now, under the new federal law and under most state plans, the best that recipients can hope for is a job that pays the minimum wage. Randy Albelda points out that:

The work requirements are structured in such a way to discourage states from providing education and training that would allow at least some women to move into decent paying jobs. States can provide education and training if they want, but most of the programs cannot count toward the work participation requirement. For states to hit their "quotas" they will want to place women into the labor market immediately.

The bottom line? The new law is designed to encourage states to reduce funding and welfare rolls by pushing women into an unrelenting low-wage labor market without the vital supports that make employment possible.⁹

And where are the paying jobs for over 2 million welfare moms, even jobs that pay a minimum wage? There are simply not enough jobs available to employ the majority of adult welfare recipients, and the available jobs pay very poorly. A study done by the Office of Social Policy Research at Northern Illinois University found six workers needing an entry level job for every opening in Chicago.

This report also examined the job readiness of assistance recipients and noted that they are generally handicapped by limited education and little work experience.

At least half of the AFDC population does not have a high school education. They are mostly women, and disproportionately minority and younger -- all factors that make it harder to get a job. Being poor, they and their children have more health problems. Although people with severe disabilities are exempted from the work requirement, there is no provision in the law for the extra time needed to care for a disabled child. Many recipients live in the inner city and are needed at home to protect their children against the violence of the streets. Most of them are single parents, with the staggering job of juggling work and child care by themselves.

Fighting Back

HORRENDOUS AS IT IS, THE NEW WELFARE LAW CREATES THE CONDITIONS for resistance against it. It is forcing millions of people into the waged labor force (many of whom are already in the unwaged labor force as mothers). As those people face poor conditions of work, they will be impelled to fight for dignity and justice. In fact, there already is a good deal of resistance. In the spring of this year, City University of New York administrators reported that the WEP work requirements had forced thousands of college students out of school and into make-work sanitation and parks jobs. Republicans and Democrats alike took to the students' defense, submitting state legislation to allow on-campus work sites for students and lobbying the mayor to be more sensitive.¹⁰ In Massachusetts, a group called the Welfare Education and Training Access Coalition (WETAC) and an organization that I founded, Survivors, Inc., went to bat for AFDC students, who would be prevented by the new Massachusetts law from attending a four-year college program. The state legislature passed an amendment to the budget that would have allowed four-year programs, but Governor Weld vetoed it and the legislature fell just two votes short of overriding the veto. We will try again in the next legislative session.

WEP workers are organizing in New York City, and have formed a coalition with Local 1180 of the Communication Workers of America which represents about 6,500 clerical supervisors throughout city government. CWA has been meeting with community organizers from the Fifth Avenue Committee and the Urban Justice Center as well as with a battery of public service lawyers to come up with an effective strategy for reshaping the hours, wages and training provisions of the program. CWA has also initiated private talks to bring other unions on board.

District Council 37 of AFSCME has 125,000 city nurses' aides, custodial assistants, sewer cleaners, caseworkers, accountants and other workers, and their future bargaining power could be seriously threatened by WEP workers. Yet the union's executive director, Stanley Hill, has disclaimed any responsibility for organizing EP workers. In response to criticisms of his inaction, Hill counters that he did talk about the WEP issue during labor negotiations earlier this year, pressing the mayor to make more workfare participants legitimate city employees, but Giuliani wouldn't budge. DC 37 has instituted a pilot program with WEP workers in the school cafeterias. There, after training, workers are brought onto the city payroll as unionized employees. Between 30 and 40 people have obtained jobs this way, Hill says. The only thing that Hill has won for WEP workers during negotiations was a sentence saying, "It is not the city's intention to use WEP workers to displace active city employees."

Hill speaks of the difficulty of organizing WEP workers. "We cannot go out and get these people to sign a card," he says. "The simple fact is, we don't represent these workers." But Bill Henning, vice president of Local 1180 of the Communication Workers of America, says that's no excuse for ducking the fight. He concedes that although federal labor relations law protects workers from being capriciously fired for organizing, there is no similar statute protecting welfare recipients from losing their benefit checks if the city finds fault with a worker's attendance or performance.

"It is scary," Henning says, "But when people started building the trade union movement in the thirties, those protections didn't exist for workers. It was by engaging in the struggle that they made those protections apply."¹¹

Welfare activists have also been courting the women's movement for many years, and the National Organization for Women's recent protests against welfare "reform" have been exemplary. In the days leading up to President Clinton's signing of the welfare "reform" law, protests broke out across the country and the National Organization for Women launched a "Hungry for Justice" Campaign. National leaders of the 250,000-member NOW, including president Patricia Ireland and vice-president-membership Karen Johnson, went on a hunger strike to try to persuade President Clinton to veto the welfare bill.

Johnson fasted for 15 days. In a recent interview, she explained that she grew up on welfare and can remember stuffing the holes in the wall with steel wool to keep out the rats. She deplored the fact that while Congress is talking about cutting welfare by $10 billion in the first year, the Department of Defense received $11 billion more than it asked for, and that the government spent $167 billion on corporate welfare, or eight times more than was spent on women and children and immigrants.

For more than a week before Clinton signed the bill, members of NOW, the National Welfare Rights Union, and other groups participated in daily demonstrations outside the White House. Several members of both groups were arrested during the protests. Demonstrations were also held in Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Michigan and many other states. As President Clinton traversed Michigan during his whistle-stop tour, members of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization met the train to demonstrate against him, then joined the Labor Party in a rally at the Federal Building in Detroit as a symbol of their unity.¹²

Despite the courageous actions of NOW's leadership, the ranks have not been massively involved in the welfare issue. In Massachusetts at least, the president of NOW usually speaks at welfare rallies, but NOW members are not much in evidence. The women's movement is split on the issue of mother's work as caretakers. The Wages for Housework (or caretaking, as I prefer to call it) movement is a small segment of the feminist movement and it has allied with the welfare rights movement because it sees AFDC mothers as being in the vanguard of the movement; AFDC (before the new welfare law) was, after all, a form of wages for caretaking. But most of NOW's members are middle class professionals and they have been more concerned with equality in the work place than with winning the right to stay home to care for their children. They did not actively espouse the principle of caretaking as a full-time job. Many of them opposed the principle; in fact many of them think it's a good idea to force welfare mothers to go to work at low-paid jobs.

There is a crisis of caretaking in the nation. About 70% of mothers are in the paid labor force, and many of them are stressed-out by juggling child care and paid work. Many would rather be home full-time caring for their children. This is one reason that the public is so eager to force AFDC mothers into the paid labor force. Rather than demanding the supports that would make it possible for one parent to stay at home -- a family allowance, wages for caretaking, a Guaranteed Annual Income, or a "family wage" for one of two parents -- they turn on the AFDC mothers who are getting paid, meager though the pay is, for caring for their children and demand that they too juggle the demands of a job and caretaking. The economist Randy Albelda sums up this dilemma:

Our economy depends on women for free care of children and for doing low-wage jobs, yet there is an increasing expectation that every adult earn wages sufficient to support a family. For mothers, this is virtually impossible -- you can't both provide free care and work enough hours to earn a family wage.

While many families fare poorly under society's new work expectations for women, single-mother families fare the worst for three simple reasons. First, like all women, single mothers earn less, on average, than men do when they work. Second, raising children is time-consuming work, and children increase the cost of family life. . . Finally, in single-mother families, there is only one adult to both earn income and take care of children.

The difficulties single mothers face are borne out in the poverty statistics. In 1994, half of single-mother families were poor, compared to one out of every 20 married couples with no children. While only 8% of all people in the United States live in single-mother families, they make up 28% of all poor persons.¹³

But the political and corporate elites don't care about caretaking. They have declared war on poor and working people. The most effective symbolic weapon in their arsenal has been welfare bashing. Punitive welfare reform became their chief policy of social division, while they glorify an outmoded, frantic, and exploitative work and family ethic. By these divisive tactics, they have tried to divert attention from the inhumanity and moral bankruptcy of the system itself.

Activists know that we need a powerful movement to reverse these assaults on the poor, the elderly and the homeless. They are seeking common ground for coalitions linking workfare mothers with union members concerned about their jobs and wages; single mothers with senior citizens worried about their Social Security and Medicare; middle-class feminists with low-income women; and immigrant groups with welfare moms. They are building coalitions with African-American, Latino and Asian-American groups and community organizations working to get child care, health care, and housing for poor people; an alliance of all progressive forces to organize movements of popular resistance, the first step on the road to independent political action.

NOTES

1. Bob Herbert. "Welfare 'Reform'": Officially Sanctioned Brutality," International Herald Tribune, 1995. return

2. Randy Albelda, "Farewell to Welfare But not to Poverty,"Dollars and Sense,Nov./Dec. 1996. return

3. Most of the facts about the new welfare law come from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The New Welfare Law. It is a detailed 32-page description of the law and can be obtained by contacting them at 820 First Street, NE, Suite 510, Washington, D.C. 20002, Tel:202-408-1080. return

4. Charisse Jones, "U.S. Assault on Welfare Panics N.Y. Immigrants,"International Herald Tribune, August 27, 1996. return

5. Under Attack, Fighting Back, Monthly Review Press, 1996. return

6. Nina Bernstein, "Giant Companies Entering Race to Run State Welfare Programs," The New York Times, September 15, 1996. return

7. Theresa Arnott, "Will the Economy Be Less Stable?", Dollars and Sense, Nov./Dec. 1996. return

8. Joe Sexton, "Discontented Workfare Laborers Murmur 'Union,'" The New York Times, September 27, 1996. return

9. "Farewell to Welfare," Dollars and Sense, Nov./Dec. 1996. return

10. Kim Nauer, "Slavin' for the City: Making Rudy Pay," Village Voice, August/September 1996. return

11. Ibid. return

12. Jackie Dee King, "'Hungry for Justice' Campaign inspires millions, but fails to move the President," Survival News, Fall 1996. return

13. "Farewell to Welfare," Dollars and Sense, Nov./Dec. 1996. return

Contents of No. 22