On August 22, 1996, President Clinton signed the "Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996" (PRWOA). Although he
thereby fulfilled a 1992 campaign pledge to "end welfare as we know it," the
bill was crafted by Republicans. It was not a "reform" of welfare but the
abolition of the primary federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC). Under AFDC (and its predecessor, Aid to Dependent Children), the federal
government had since 1935 provided guaranteed monthly benefits to all eligible low-income
mothers and children.
The main provisions of the Personal Responsibility
Act:
Ends the federal entitlement to welfare-prior
eligibility requirements will not entitle individuals and families to benefits. Each state
will determine eligibility.
Block grants to states, known as temporary
assistance for needy families (TANF) replace a system in which federal funds were
given to states according to need (determined by number of AFDC clients and benefit levels
in each state).
Cuts federal spending on welfare by over
$55 billion over six years.
Workfare-states must place 25 percent of
recipients in jobs by 1997 and 50 percent by 2002 or suffer reductions in their block
grants of up to 21 percent.
Work participation means that the head of household of a
family receiving assistance is working at least 20 hours a week, an amount that rises to
30 hours a week after the year 2000.
Lifetime limits-no person can be on
welfare more than five years in a lifetime. States can impose shorter time limit.
Morality restrictions-states must end
payments to unmarried teenage parents unless they live with their parents (or in some
other adult-supervised setting).
In addition, states can deny all assistance to
unwed teenage parents
children born to welfare recipients.
Other provisions of the act made it more
difficult for children with disabilities to qualify for Supplement Security Income (SSI),
made legal immigrants ineligible for most welfare assistance (partially restored
this year), and cuts food stamp benefits and imposes work requirements on some recipients.
Who received AFDC benefits, and how much did they
receive?
They were overwhelmingly female. See chart, "Adult
AFDC Recipients by Gender".
They were predominantly Black and Hispanic. See chart,
"AFDC Families by Race of Parent".
They included almost no teenage mothers, wed or
unwed. See chart, "Female AFDC Recipients by Age".
Most recipient families were not large. Over 70
percent had either one or two children; the average was two. See chart, "AFDC
Families by Number of Children".
Only 15 percent of recipients stay on welfare continuously
for five years or more. More than half leave within a year. Thus welfare has been used as
a safety net rather than a way of life (Street 1998, 53).
Benefits were modest to miserly. Benefit increases for
additional children provided little, if any incentive to have more: an average increase of
$88/month for a second child, $84/month for a third, and $120/month for a fourth. See
chart, "AFDC Payments by # of Children".
In sum, the stereotype of AFDC as a
program offering "generous welfare benefits [that]: (1) undermine the
incentive to work, (2) encourage women to have babies out of wedlock, [and] (3)
create a permanent dependent class" (text p479) is wrong. Benefits were hardly
generous-no one could live on them. Most recipients didn't stay on welfare. Benefit
increases for additional children were too slight to offer any encouragement to mothers,
and in fact the average family of welfare recipients consisted of two children. It was not
AFDC that created dependency, but the inability to find decent, reliable, long-term
employment that led to dependency on AFDC.
Workfare as the alternative to welfare-an
assessment.
The clear intent of the act is to substitute the
"temporary assistance" for guaranteed benefits based on eligibility, to
emphasize self-sufficiency in contrast to "dependency", and to shift control
over welfare rules to the states.
This approach is in keeping with popular sentiment. In
fact, some survey results we looked at earlier capture the dichotomy between public
dislike of "welfare" and public support for "assistance to the poor".
See chart, "The Wording Makes the Difference".
Is it realistic to think that most welfare
recipients can find work outside the home?
The new law clearly implies that people stay on welfare
because they refuse to work; the solution therefore is to expel them from the roles while
providing some assistance in finding and holding jobs.
Initial results of the law seemed to confirm this
diagnosis. The welfare dropped dramatically in 1997, and many states became more effective
at finding jobs for clients while using more of their federal funds for child care
assistance (Katz and Mintz 1997).
Experts agree, however, that these results have been
largely fueled by a prosperous economy-for example, the welfare caseload shrank by 31
percent between 1993 and 1997, before the new law took effect (Street 1998, 53).
Moreover, efforts to move recipients off welfare
permanently may already have hit a brick wall. The National Alliance for Business and the
Welfare-to-Work Partnership have found that only a quarter of nation's welfare recipients
are "work ready" and thus capable of an "easy transition" into jobs.
The rest require job training, and one quarter need assistance in overcoming substance
abuse and physical or mental illness (Street 1998, 57).
This suggests that future success with workfare will depend
on expanded opportunities for education and job training. Unfortunately, a study by the
Tufts University Center on Hunger and Poverty found that only 18 states have improved
their commitment to helping recipients prepare for and find work, while 23 states have
actually reduced their commitment (Street 1998, 58).
This might seem counter-intuitive, given that states that
fail to meet work participation goals face financial penalties. The law, however, allows
states to terminate aid to those who refuse to work (CQ, 2698). Since the states
themselves can decide what constitutes refusal to work, they are in a position to, if
necessary, force people off welfare to meet work participation goals.
In addition, most states are refusing to count
postsecondary education as an acceptable work activity, despite evidence showing that such
education leads to financial independence. As a results, even recipients who have nearly
completed degrees are being forced to abandon their educational programs.
Without adequate education and training, the best that can
be expected of workfare is an expansion of people in the low-wage job market, with a
corresponding reduction in wages and benefits. One study predicts a 12 percent reduction
in the wages of the bottom 30 percent of wage earners (Street 1998, 59).
Welfare reform without meaningful labor-market reform is a
social policy travesty. This leads us to the second part of the assessment of workfare.
Is this really what we want-is this a fair and just
policy?
Workfare fails to address the economic roots of the welfare
problem. It is not connected with any effort to manage the economy so as to approach, if
not achieve, full employment. It is not tied to measures to raise wages and benefits in
the low wage sector of the economy to levels that might permit former welfare
recipients-who, as we've seen, are typically mothers-to both work and secure decent child
care. It makes only the weak provisions for education and job training, and in most states
actually penalizes those who attempt to complete college degrees.
It appeals to racial stereotypes and exacerbates racial
divisions in society by stigmatizing the predominantly Black and Hispanic recipients of
welfare as people trapped in a culture of dependency who lack the initiative and
determination to succeed on their own. As one writer put it:
"Racially charged images of lazy, promiscuous, and
matriarchal women have dominated welfare discourse for quite some time, inflaming demands
that mothers who need welfare-although perhaps not their children-must pay for their
improvident behavior through work, marriage, or destitution" (Mink 1998, 59).
It does not provide impoverished mothers with the ability
to achieve economic independence through adequate job-training and placement and the
provision of quality childcare services. But it also does not enable solo mothers, even if
they want to, to create the two-parent households that PRWOA deems desirable (Michel 1998,
51).
Its employment of liberal values, among them self-reliant
individualism, anti-statism, and the virtues of the free market, has the ironic and
destructive consequence of promoting policies that reduce the opportunities for people to
escape poverty, with all the limitations it imposes on economic independence, individual
development, and citizenship.
What stands in the way of a better alternative?
First of all, what would a better set of public welfare
policies look like?
Full employment, either as an actual achievement or as an
obligation of the state which, if not met via the private sector, would entail public jobs
creation programs? A shorter work week, longer vacations, or other devices to distribute
work among more people?
Universal health care?
Postsecondary education as a basic right of citizenship?
A robust system of job training and retraining, combined
with other support for workers who must adjust to changing patterns of economic
development?
Policies aimed at guaranteeing every child a decent start
in life, not limited to basic necessities and schooling, but also including healthy
communities and families?
A reduction in economic disparities combined with
guarantees of basic needs to those unable to work?
Obstacles to change
Political culture.
One explanation for the weakness of social welfare in the
United States is the influence of liberal values, including self-reliance, opposition to
state intervention, and deference to market outcomes. There is no doubt that the specter
of an overweening bureaucracy, the danger of high taxes, and fears of dependency have been
used by opponents of social welfare policies to mobilize opposition. Yet this has not
prevented Americans from supporting and defending such programs as Social Security,
unemployment insurance, subsidized student loans, Medicare, homeowner tax breaks, tax cuts
for childcare, and many other programs.
Moreover, it is not difficult to imagine ways to reconcile
liberal values with strong welfare policies. Government can be portrayed, for example, as
acting to support individual security in ways that neither undermine dignity nor
make individuals dependent on the state (Skocpol 1995, 16). Isn't Social Security widely
seen as protecting the economic security and enhancing the autonomy of
elderly Americans? Or one could argue, in Constitutional terms, that income support for
caregivers is a condition of women's equality, that is, full and independent citizenship
(Mink 1998, 58).
Corporate opposition and the weakness of the
American labor movement.
The majority of corporations have always opposed social
welfare policies, fearing that they would
shrink the labor pool;
enhance workers' bargaining power;
undermine labor discipline (e.g, by making it easier to
quit);
reduce incentives to work;
increase taxation on businesses (to pay for the policies);
reduce competitiveness by raising labor costs and business
taxes.
In addition, corporations that provide private
social welfare, such as health insurers, resist efforts to extend government programs into
areas that infringe on their profits.
Conversely, working people have been among the chief
beneficiaries of social welfare policies in industrialized countries. Hence the ability of
workers to form strong, nationally organized unions and political parties-social
democratic or labor parties-has been key to the success or failure of social welfare
reforms in many countries. Where social-democratic forces were strong
reformers have been more willing and able to build
redistributional welfare states where
governments have been more likely to commit themselves to
full employment policies (Noble 1997, 20-21).
Unfortunately, organized labor has been weak in the United
States. Today, fewer than one in six workers are in unions. Moreover, unions have had
difficulty coordinating political and economic action, and have frequently suffered from
jurisdictional disputes and struggles for control of the labor movement.
Historically, one of the chief causes of labor's weakness
has been racial and ethnic conflicts.
The craft unions of the 19th and early 20th
centuries virtually always excluded Blacks, and frequently denied admission to European
immigrants as well.
The sheer diversity of the American workforce created
difficult problems for labor organizers.
Racism has been especially harmful. The trade-union
movement failed to encourage abolition prior to the Civil War and failed to champion the
cause of freed slaves after it. As a result, the trade union movement found it difficult
to organize the south at the height of industrialization. In addition, employers pitted
black workers against white worker unions to defeat labor militancy.
Even in the 1950s, the AFL-CIO refused to ban overtly
racist unions, and very few unions aided the early civil rights movement (Marable 1991,
51).
Racial and ethnic divisions-the example of the
Great Society programs of President Lyndon Johnson and subsequent white backlash:
Winning passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting
Rights Act (1965) were probably Johnson's greatest accomplishments, but he also achieved a
substantial expansion of the welfare state, including Head Start, Medicaid (a means-tested
entitlement to health care for the poor), authorization to build 600,000 subsidized
housing units each year for a decade, and other programs collectively known as the War on
Poverty. In an effort, however, to conciliate opponents, he did not seek to raise taxes on
the upper and middle classes to pay for these programs. In addition, he rejected job
creation efforts (that is, a full employment goal) in favor of job training.
And he continued to pursue military victory in Vietnam. As a result, the rising costs of
the war cut into the government's ability to fund domestic programs, while the boost given
the economy by the war-especially without the dampening effect of new taxes-caused
inflation. Rising inflation, along with antipathy to forced integration, urban rioters,
and black militants, drove many whites away from the Democratic Party and bred the hostile
stereotypes of welfare clients that remain with us today. The image of the welfare
recipient as a lazy, promiscuous individual dependent on generous government handouts may
have little basis in reality, but it is certainly understandable in terms of working- and
middle-class white resentment at the perceived contrast between the discipline and
sacrifice required of them and the self-indulgent ease they imagined characterized the
lives of welfare recipients. This same resentment fueled attacks on "big
government" as an institution that sapped money from taxpayers to squander on the
undeserving poor.
The American political system.
Efforts to build comprehensive welfare systems have
benefitted from centralized political institutions and multiparty electoral arrangements,
neither of which are found in the United States.
Federalism: Conversely, the decentralized,
federalist structure of American politics, as well as the system of checks-and-balances in
the national government, have usually favored opponents of reform:
By giving them numerous "veto points" to block
state action;
By increasing the structural power of corporations-their
ability to play one state off against another via the threat to "exit" or simply
not to invest;
By requiring reformers to achieve coordination across
states and over extended periods of time (in order to achieve majorities in both houses of
Congress).
It is also likely that political decentralization has
heightened the expression of social heterogeneity (not only racial and ethnic differences,
but also regional, cultural, and others).
The electoral system: The single-member
district plurality system produces a two party politics, with each party competing for the
political center. A social-democratic party, the kind of party that would (and in Europe,
has) supported a comprehensive welfare state, is structurally excluded.