When
did the conversation about uplifting the poor lose political traction
in the U.S.? It’s no longer considered good form --
even in progressive circles -- to mention the desperate plight
of the growing number of Americans who are economically disadvantaged, systematically marginalized
or chronically underprivileged. We’re now invited to turn
our attention to the hardships faced by the “working poor”
and “low-income families” -- as if some critical
distinction exists between those who are merely impoverished
and those who are absolutely destitute; as if they are not precisely the same people at different points in their life course and employment
history.
I suspect this reframing
of the poverty problem has occurred, in part, because it’s
become culturally unfashionable to embrace the opinion that some Americans --
due to their race, or sex, or age, or maternal status, or circumstances
of birth, or random and unfavorable conditions beyond their control --
do not have equal access to the same opportunities enjoyed by those
born near the top of the social and economic heap. Even to suggest
such a thing is dangerously liberal in a political moment when the
term “liberal” is used as a pejorative.
Those who of us who lean to the left are advised by those on the right that the time has come to forget about all
that crazy economic justice stuff and put our faith in job creation
and the power of privatization-plus-personal-responsibility to resolve
the nation’s most vexing socioeconomic problems. Beyond that,
national discussions about poverty reduction tend to center on the
U.S. commitment (such as it is) to relieving devastating economic
inequality in the developing world, and not what should be done to alleviate
the home-grown variety.
Which seems either simple-minded,
or misguided, or both -- because poverty is a pressing problem
in the United States, especially for women and children. Yes, the
U.S. is the wealthiest nation in the world. Yes, the U.S. does have the highest per capita income of all economically
advanced countries. The U.S. also has the highest
rate of overall poverty and the highest rate of child
poverty of all affluent nations tracked by the OECD.
And despite recent reports of an economic turnaround, the poverty
situation is getting worse. According to the U.S.
Census Bureau, the nation’s official poverty rate rose
from 12.1 percent in 2002 to 12.5 percent in 2003. More than 35.7
million Americans live below the poverty line -- including 24.2
million young women and children -- and an additional 15.2 million
women and children live in near-poverty. Over 10 million women and
children in the U.S. live in deep poverty, measured as households with
incomes less than 50 percent of the official poverty line. In 2003, 6.1 million
households headed by single parent women with children under 18 -- 60 percent of all such households -- made
do on less than $25,000 a year.
By comparison, just over
9 million Americans (that’s less than 5 percent of the
adult population) have annual earnings of $100,000 or more.
(Guess who is more likely to reap the benefits of the Bush administration’s
recent tax cuts?) New
studies on growing income inequality in the U.S. suggest the prospect of upward mobility is extremely limited. Even in the
strongest economy, destitute families may be able to work themselves
out of abject poverty but few are likely to achieve long-term financial
security.
The official reaction
to this unsightly blemish on America’s celebrated record of
prosperity has been to re-examine the moral and social consequences
of the distribution of aid to the poor. By the early 1970s, the
War on Poverty was over, and the War on Welfare -- and the mothers
who depend on it to support their families -- was underway. Welfare
was recast as the cause of poverty and social decay rather than
a flawed and incomplete response to it; tough-minded lawmakers concluded
that the system’s principal shortcoming was providing cash
benefits to poor women who gave birth to children out of wedlock -- children they feared were destined to repeat the cycle of poverty.
Rather than addressing
the complex network of social, cultural and economic conditions
that permit poverty to flourish in the shadow of astonishing wealth,
attention shifted to the reproductive behavior of poor women and
how public policy might be used to control it, although the stated rationale was reducing
social spending and promoting self-sufficiency. This strategy moved
to a new level in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan launched
a highly successful campaign to convince taxpayers that the typical welfare recipient -- whom Reagan and his henchmen
notoriously branded as “Welfare Queens” -- was flagrantly
indolent, willfully ignorant, sexually promiscuous, recklessly fertile
and living large on the public dime.
Despite pressure from
conservative factions to cut spending on social programs, legislators
resisted reducing or placing limits on welfare benefits until 1996,
when Bill Clinton set in motion the deft political slight-of-hand
that transformed “welfare as we knew it” into the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Thus
was Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC -- a meager
cash benefit for desperately poor mothers and their children --
scuttled in favor of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families
(TANF) -- a meager cash benefit with work requirements and a
five-year lifetime limit.
Flat
broke with children in America
Sociologist Sharon
Hays -- whose 1996 book, The Cultural Contradictions
of Motherhood, stands as the definitive work on the ideological
construction of “intensive” motherhood" -- undertook
a three-year study of welfare reform and its impact on the women
most likely to be affected by it: caseworkers and welfare recipients.
Over the course of the project, Hays logged over 600 hours in the
field and spent time with over 50 caseworkers and about 130 welfare
mothers. The purpose of her research was not so much to determine
whether welfare reform has been successful as a social program,
but to sort out the “cultural norms, beliefs, and values”
threaded through the laws and regulations governing the allocation
of TANF.
As Hays states in the opening chapter of Flat Broke
With Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform,
“A nation’s laws reflect a nation’s values.”
She found that the Personal Responsibility Act -- in its content,
cultural context and implementation -- is an unusually rich
site for exploring the conflicting values of work and family life
in America. As Hays methodically unpacks her subject, she reveals
that "welfare reform" is not an innovative and effective
anti-poverty measure -- although much has been made of the
fifty-percent reduction in welfare rolls since PRWORA was enacted,
fewer people on welfare has not translated into fewer people in
poverty -- but a “social experiment to legislate the work
ethic and family values.” In describing the ideological tension
embedded in welfare reform, Hays writes:
Depending upon one’s
angle of vision, welfare reform can be seen as a valorization
of independence, self-sufficiency, and the work ethic as well
as the promotion of a certain form of gender equality. On the
other hand, it can serve as a condemnation of single parenting,
a codification of the appropriate preeminence of family ties and
the commitment to others, and a reaffirmation that women’s
place is in the home.
Further, it is certainly
no accident that the primary guinea pigs in this national experiment
in family values and the work ethic are a group of social subordinates -- overwhelmingly women, disproportionately non-white single parents,
and of course, very poor.
As for the efficacy of welfare reform, Hays provides data throughout
the book demonstrating that only about one-third of welfare recipients
are able to find and keep jobs, and considerably fewer achieve financial
stability and self-sufficiency. If the goal of welfare reform was
to decrease poverty overall, she writes, “there is no indication
that anything but the cycle of the economy has had an impact.”
Readers familiar with Hays’ earlier work will recognize the
analytical framework she revisits here. Flat Broke With Children examines the fundamental contradictions between the ideals of individual
autonomy and self-determination and the widespread belief that connection
and commitment to others -- as expressed through community,
care-giving and reciprocity -- is imperative for the continuation
of moral and social life. The Personal Responsibility Act is widely
recognized as a “welfare-to-work” mandate -- with
few exceptions, recipients are only eligible for cash support and supplemental
benefits (such as child care and transportation subsidies) if
they are working, looking for work, or receiving job training. But
as Hays points out, the letter of the law is more concerned with
promoting an idealized family form than with helping impoverished
women achieve economic independence. Indeed, the
long preamble of Congressional findings spelling out the
logic of the Personal Responsibility Act leads with the following
statements: “(1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful
society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a
successful society which promotes the interests of children. (3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral
to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.”
Furthermore, the federal funding mechanism for TANF requires states
to:
(1) provide assistance
to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own
homes or in the homes of relatives;
(2) end the dependence
of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation,
work, and marriage;(3) prevent and reduce
the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and establish annual
numerical goals for preventing and reducing the incidence of these
pregnancies; and
(4) encourage the formation
and maintenance of two-parent families.
As Hays comments, “It should be noted that only one of these
goals is directed at paid work. And even in this case it is set
alongside marriage as one of the two proper paths leading away from
welfare.” She concludes there are “two distinct (and
contradictory) visions of work and family life” implanted
in welfare reform: the Work Plan and the Family
Plan.
In the Work Plan, work
requirements are a way of rehabilitating mothers, transforming
women who would otherwise ‘merely’ stay at home and
care for their children into women who are self-sufficient, independent,
productive members of society. The Family Plan, on the other hand,
uses work requirements as a way of punishing mothers for their
failure to get married and stay married. In the Work Plan we offer
women lots of temporary subsidies …to make it possible for
them to climb a career ladder that will allow them to support
themselves and, presumably, their children. …According to
the Family Plan, work requirements will teach women a lesson;
they’ll come to know better than to get divorced or to have
children out of wedlock. They will learn that their duty is to
control their fertility, to get married, to stay married, and
to dedicate themselves to the care of others.
…The two competing
visions embedded in welfare reform are directly connected to a
much broader set of cultural dichotomies that haunt us all in
our attempts to construct a shared vision of the good society --
independence and dependence, paid work and caregiving, competitive
self-interest and obligation to others, the value of the work
ethic and financial success versus the value of personal connection,
family bonding and community ties.
In Flat Broke With Children, Hays’ central project
is to record how the women enmeshed in the welfare system --
the mothers who seek support and the caseworkers who administer
it -- articulate and negotiate the conflicting cultural objectives
of welfare reform. She notes that while the Family Plan dominates
the language of welfare law, the Work Plan takes precedence at ground
level. According to Hays, the welfare clients she interviewed were
not routinely instructed in the larger message about the value of
marriage, the importance of two-parent families or the priority
of caring for children “in their own homes.” Nor do
welfare offices offer couples counseling or dating services. According
to Hays, the welfare mothers she studied “knew they were expected
to find jobs, and they knew they were expected to obey the rules.”
As the foot soldiers in a rigid bureaucracy, the welfare caseworkers
Hays observed understood that their primary directive was to communicate
and enforce the countless rules and regulations governing their
clients’ eligibility, specifically in regard to time limits
and work requirements. Welfare recipients who violate work participation
rules -- by failing to comply with reporting requirements, or
for quitting a job without good cause -- face stiff sanctions;
all or part of a mother’s welfare benefits may be suspended
for a period of weeks or months for non-compliance, leaving her
family without means of support. Hays explains that being unable
to work due to one’s own illness, child care problems, or
needing time off to care for a sick child are not considered “good
causes” for leaving a job.
Given the nature of the employment most welfare mothers are likely
to find -- low-wage or minimum-wage service jobs, with few or
no benefits, little or no working time flexibility, little or no paid
time off, and little or no possibility of advancement -- Hays
questions whether welfare regulations emphasizing enforcement and
compliance with harsh penalties for transgressions are designed
to prepare poor women to grab their very own piece of the American
Dream:
How can welfare caseworkers
convince their clients that they recognize them as independent,
assertive, self-seekers while simultaneously demanding their unquestioning
deference to an impossible system of rules? How will clients understand
their paid employment as a positive individual choice when it
is presented as one of many absolute demands, backed up by multiple
threats of punishment? …If we really want to include welfare
mothers as active citizens, full-fledged participants in society,
and social equals of both men and the middle class, it doesn't
make sense to use bureaucratic mechanisms to mentor or inspire
them. If, on the other hand, what we are actually preparing them
for is to serve our fast food, clean our toilets, answer our phones,
ring up our receipts, and change our bed pans, the bureaucratic
operations of welfare could be construed as very effective.
Later in the same chapter, Hays’ tone becomes even more critical:
Recognizing the realities
of low-wage work, one could argue that the underlying logic of
the Personal Responsibility Act is either punitive or delusional.
On the punitive side, the work rules of reform might be interpreted
as implicitly aimed at creating a vast population of obedient
and disciplined workers who are hungry enough (and worried about
their children enough) to take any temporary, part time, minimum-wage
job that comes their way, not matter what the costs to them or
their family. More positively (or nearsightedly), one could interpret
the Work Plan as following from the assumption that there is an
unlimited number of career ladders available for every American
to climb. The time-limited nature of welfare reform’s childcare,
transportation and income supports, for instance, suggest a middle-class
(and increasingly mythological) model of working one’s way
to the top.
The
trajectory of downward mobility
For all the brilliance
of Hays' analysis, what makes Flat Broke With Children exceptional
is her ability to bring to life the voices and experiences
of welfare mothers, a population of women who -- beyond the
demeaning stereotypes perpetuated by those convinced they hold
the moral high ground -- are all but socially invisible. As
a trained observer, Hays is guardedly sympathetic and respectfully
unsentimental (a quality she also brought -- somewhat less effectively --
to The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood). She assiduously
avoids portraying the mothers she encounters as cunning cheats,
heroic survivors or hapless victims of fate. What we find instead
are complicated and often moving stories of real women caught
between a rock and a hard place. Hays writes that the welfare
mothers profiled in her book agreed to share their painful stories
as a testimony:
They had heard more
than once the stereotypes labeling them as lazy, dependent, ignorant,
promiscuous, and manipulative cheats. They told their stories
…with the hope they would be recognized not simply as a
composite of clichés, but as whole persons …it seemed
to me they implicitly asked to be treated as citizens and social
members. No special dispensation was requested. It was visibility
and inclusion that mattered.
When reading the accounts of these mothers’ lives leading
up to their entry into the welfare system, I was reminded of a comment
made by my former psychotherapist when, after several years of intermittent depression and general inertia compounded
by a series of failed relationships, I met and fell in
love with the man who is now my husband and the father of my children.
Her words, as I recall, were: “You seem to do pretty
well when everything is going well.” And my first thought
was: Well, can't that be said of everyone?
When a person has good health, when no family, personal or financial
crises looms, when there is no threat of abandonment or violence,
when we feel loved, when things are going smoothly on the job, when
there is enough money to pay the bills and a bit left over to save
or have fun with, when life offers the possibility of joy and success -- when all these conditions are in place, it’s easy to “do
pretty well," even when there's old damage to be mended or grief and trouble in the past. And while
I have the advantage of being white, middle-class and fairly well-educated,
it’s my personal experience that when you start scratching
items off that basic list -- good health, good job, stable family
life, feeling cared for, economic security -- life can go to
hell in a handbasket in no time flat.
Hays describes this as “the domino effect.” Typically,
it’s not just one unfortunate event -- such as having
a child out of wedlock -- that lands women on the welfare rolls;
more often, it’s an accumulation of hard luck mixed up with
bad timing and human fallibility that starts the downward spiral.
Sheila was engaged to marry
her high school sweetheart, but when he was killed in a car crash
shortly after their graduation, she lost her bearings and put her
plans to go to college on hold. A year later, her father walked
out on her mother, leaving behind the car that was not paid for
and owing back rent. Sheila and her mom found jobs at the same dry
cleaning establishment, and by working 15 hour days, six days a
week, they managed to make ends meet. But when her mom developed
a serious medical condition and was unable to work, Sheila’s
earnings weren’t enough to cover their expenses. Caught up
in the stress of financial insecurity and dealing with her mothers’
health crisis, Sheila lost her job. The pair became homeless, living
with friends and scavenging for food.
While homeless, Sheila found a regular part-time job and met Sam,
the man she believes fathered her only child. When she discovered
he was married, she used her scant earnings to buy a bus ticket
and sent him home to his wife. Three weeks later, she was raped -- “That’s a danger for women who live on the street,”
Sheila explains -- and then discovered she was pregnant. Still
working part time, Sheila entered the welfare system when she needed
medical insurance to cover the birth of her daughter. At the time
Hays interviewed her, Sheila had worked off and on but was concerned
about her ability to care adequately for her then eight-year old
child when long bus rides and a full-time job kept her away from
home for as much as 12 hours a day.
Elena had worked steadily
since she was 18. But her orderly middle-class life started to unravel
when her husband developed a substance abuse problem and became
physically abusive. Elena moved to another city with the youngest
of her three teenage children, and by working two jobs as a skilled
hospital technician was able to maintain a comfortable middle-class
lifestyle. Then one morning after dropping her son off at school,
her minivan was hit by a truck and Elena was severely injured in
the accident. She returned to work when her health insurance ran
out after six weeks, but her neck and spinal injuries were so painful
that her doctors advised her to stop working. She contacted an attorney
about collecting damages from the trucking company, but he wanted
money up front -- money Elena did not have. Since doctors expected
her to recover almost fully after she completed the recommended
course of treatment, Elena did not qualify for Social Security disability
benefits; because she was technically “unavailable to work”
she was also ineligible for unemployment benefits. She finally turned
to welfare to get health care coverage for herself and her son;
Elena’s family helped her with her house payments so she and
her son would not end up homeless. When Hays interviewed her, Elena
had been on welfare for six months.
At the time she was interviewed, Hays calculates
that Diane had been suffering from depression and
mental health disabilities for over 20 years. Diane’s parents
were school teachers, and she was a good student; she also started
working part-time at the age of 15 to help with the family’s
finances. But when Diane was 17, her parents discovered she was
using contraception and forced her to marry her boyfriend (although
she was not pregnant at the time). For the duration of their 13-year
marriage, Diane’s husband was physically abusive and openly
unfaithful. When Diane was 24, she gave birth to a daughter and
left her well-paid job as a manager of three discount stores, hoping
that the change would improve her marriage. Diane’s husband
earned a good wage and she devoted herself to caring for their immaculate
home and young daughter. But the abuse continued: “He beat
me really bad for a long time. Once he locked me in a closet for
two days. I ended up in the hospital more than once.”
At the age of 31, Diane finally left, leaving her daughter in the
custody of her ex-husband. Derailed by the divorce, Diane started
drinking. She took a job as a topless dancer because it paid well,
but Diane’s drinking problem escalated. In an effort to turn
her life around, she quit dancing, stopped drinking, and applied
for food stamps and subsidized housing while supporting herself
with a series of low-paid house cleaning jobs. She eventually met
and fell in love with the man who became the father of her second
child, a son: “I thought we would get married. I thought I
could build new life. But he left.” Diane considered abortion,
but Medicaid would not pay for the procedure and she could not pay
for it out of pocket. When her son was born, a hospital social worker
suggested that Diane apply for welfare. Diane was bright and extremely
positive about the job training programs available through the welfare
Work Plan, but at the time Hays conducted her interview, Diane had
been unable to find a good permanent placement that enabled her
to coordinate child care and transportation.
When Hays first met her, Christine was 24 and had an 8-year old daughter. When Christine was a teenager,
her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As the family struggled
to cope with her mothers’ rapid decline, Christine started
taking risks, got pregnant and became a mother at age 16. Six weeks
after giving birth, Christine suffered a severe stroke that left
her hospitalized for six weeks. She continued to suffer from debilitating
headaches and never fully recovered the use of one arm.
Christine first entered the welfare system to get assistance with
her medical bills. She was able to finish high school, but had to
be hospitalized more than 25 times -- once for three months -- for conditions related to her stroke. Christine had been on welfare
for four years when Hays interviewed her; her disabilities made
it difficult for her to work a full day, and doctors recommended
that she not work at all. Christine was afraid that when she hit
the five-year lifetime limit for welfare eligibility, she would
be unable to hold down a job or afford private health insurance
to cover her considerable medical expenses. Even though her physical
disabilities are significant and long-term, Christine’s first
application for federal disability benefits was turned down.
Hays found that mothers like Sheila, Elena, Diane, Christine and
others -- with their significant histories of misfortune, emotional
trauma, disability and domestic violence -- were more representative
of the welfare clients she encountered in the course of her research
than stereotypical welfare mothers who are incompetent, irresponsible
or just looking for a handout. (To provide a balanced perspective,
Hays does include a chapter on the mothers she studied who might
be categorized as pathologically dependent or hopelessly entangled
in the “cultures of poverty.”) She notes that studies
on the physical and mental health of welfare mothers suggest that
between 10 and 31 percent are afflicted with physical disabilities
which limit their ability to work; that somewhere between 4 and 56
percent of welfare mothers suffer from mental health disabilities
that prevent them from finding or keeping a steady job; and that
at one time or another, over half of all welfare clients are impacted
by domestic violence. Low-income mothers are also more likely than
higher-income mothers to have children with disabilities or chronic
medical conditions.
The personal narratives Hays presents in Flat Broke With Children are much more substantial and nuanced than these short synopses
can convey. But one thing I find particularly compelling about these
mothers’ stories -- especially when recorded in the women’s
own words -- is how deeply these women care for their children,
and how conflicted they feel about the values attributed to paid
work compared to the value they place on caring for their children.
The emotional and practical impasse faced by welfare mothers who
dutifully comply with the requirements of the “Work Plan”
is especially disheartening when it comes to finding decent child
care, since in many cases the only child care they can afford -- even for the few who manage to get child care subsidies -- is
substandard, and in some instances, unsafe. Hays questions --
as we all must -- the economic and moral logic of a system that
is willing to pay child care providers more than it costs to provide
cash supports to poor mothers who want to care for their children
“in their own homes.”
Hays’ study strongly suggests that, contrary to popular beliefs
about the maternal qualities of resourceless women, the hearts
of welfare mothers are no different from the hearts of other mothers
(a topic that historian Rickie Solinger also broaches in Beggars
and Chooser: How the Politics of Choice Shape Abortion, Adoption
and Welfare in the United States). It may be socially, politically,
and economically expedient to typecast impoverished, minimally educated,
unmarried women as uncaring mothers who are ill equipped to rear
successful children -- as Hays perceptively acknowledges, someone’s
got to change the bed pans -- but Hays’ research attests
that many welfare mothers are just as devoted to their children,
and just as anxious about providing them with stable and loving
homes, as many affluent mothers. It appears that American mothers --
even the ones who depend on welfare -- use the same kind of
language to express their sense of attachment to their children
and describe the challenges of fulfilling their maternal roles. Grinding
poverty and the health and psychological damage that flows from
it may not be conducive to the style of intensive mothering favored
by the American middle-class. But based on Hays’ work, there
seems to be little or no evidence that welfare mothers, as a class,
suffer from a lack of caring intent or a deficiency of maternal
sensitivity.
Flat Broke With Children presents a convincing argument that
the vast majority of welfare mothers do not need to be “reformed”
according to the dual agenda embedded in the Personal Responsibility
Act -- they already share the core values of mainstream culture.
The mothers Hays studied believe in hard work and personal responsibility,
and they place conscientious mothering high on their list of personal
and social obligations. It’s more likely that what poor mothers
need most -- what all mothers need most --
is a comprehensive social safety net which enables women and their
children to lead safe, secure, healthy, productive and dignified
lives, even in the worst of times.
“The primary point I want to drive home,” writes Hays,
…is that all
the welfare mothers I have [described] are not the causes of the
rise in single parenting or the rising number of women and children
living in poverty. They are its consequences. If we want to change
the number of people who are forced to go on welfare, if we want
to change the rate of single parenting, if we want to change the
color of welfare, if we want to undo the feminization of poverty,
then we must squarely address those larger phenomenon. If we approach
these social problems only by attempting to “fix”
all the individual women currently using welfare, our efforts
will fail. The social system that created their plight will simply
spawn a whole new generation to take their place.
Behind
the scenes of welfare reform
Jason DeParle,
a senior writer for The New York Times, takes an entirely
different approach to the issue of women, work and welfare. DeParle’s
critically-acclaimed book -- American Dream: Three
Women, Ten Kids, and A Nation’s Drive To End Welfare (2004) -- is based on a character study of three mothers caught
up in the welfare system before and after the age of reform. But
while American Dream is thought-provoking and skillfully
written, it suffers from the tinge of sensationalism (from the front
flap: “Cutting between Washington, DC and the streets of Milwaukee,
DeParle follows the story from the White House to the local crack
house”). Furthermore, DeParle’s emphasis on the tawdry
underside of poverty seems typical of mainstream media reporting
on disadvantaged families. It doesn’t help that DeParle selects
as his subjects a high-spirited trio of young African American women
who, in one incident after another, manage to embody the worst-case
stereotypes of self-defeating, underachieving, irresponsible women
trapped in the culture of the underclass.
From 1996 and 2004, the author tracked the exploits of three cousins -- Angie Jobe, Jewell Reed and Opal Caples -- whose trials and
tribulations with the welfare system in Milwaukee, Wisconsin provide
the background for DeParle’s study of the political evolution
of welfare reform. Yet when all is said and done, DeParle's potrayal of
these women and their children seems weirdly one-dimensional. By
the end of the book, I found it difficult to sort them all out;
the flashes of humanity that infuse their separate lives and inform
their personal trajectories seemed to blend into a kind of undifferentiated
amalgam of small strides tempered by predictably crushing setbacks.
Perhaps because I finished Sharon Hays’ Flat Broke With
Children before reading American Dream, I felt something
crucial was missing from DeParle’s rendition of these mothers’
private lives and affections. We’re permitted to see Angie,
Jewell and Opal screw up in countless ways -- we see them quarreling;
we see them having babies and taking up with the wrong men or pining
over lovers serving hard time in prison; we see them lying and scamming
and drug addicted; we see them starting and quitting various low-wage
dead-end jobs and in general doing whatever it takes to scrape by.
But unlike the mothers in Flat Broke With Children, we
rarely see them worrying about or caring for their children. I suppose
it’s possible that these women were truly devoid of any noticeable
maternal affect, or it’s possible that DeParle observed their maternal
attachment and concern but, for some reason, decided not to report
it. It’s also possible that there are limits to how much a
poor black woman is willing to let a white, middle-class, male reporter
know about the contents of her internal life.
DeParle’s writing seems more natural when he’s examining
the actions and motivations of men, be they ambitious congressmen,
nerdy policy wonks or beleaguered welfare caseworkers. His writes
energetically about the strange moral logic, unfounded optimism,
and protracted political maneuvering that eventually led to the
passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act in 1996. His chapters on for-profit contractors squandering
hundreds of thousands of dollars earmarked to help the City of Milwaukee’s
welfare poor are confident and richly detailed. And the story of
Michael Steinborn, welfare caseworker XM128W, is one of the most
memorable and compelling in the entire book. It’s worthwhile
to pay attention to DeParle’s masculine slant, since, the
individuals who determine how welfare funding is apportioned, regulated
and distributed are overwhelmingly male -- and people who, as
Sharon Hays dryly remarks, “have never spent time with welfare
recipients in their entire lives.”
Apparently, DeParle has a partial solution for welfare poverty
in mind; he repeatedly implies that wayward men -- not just
wayward women -- are at the root of America’s poverty
problem. In numerous comments and side notes, he suggests that the
stabilizing influence and essential economic support provided by
involved fathers is sorely missing from the lives of the troubled
and troubling people he encounters in Angie, Jewell and Opal’s
intimate circle:
The conservative critique
[of pre-PRWORA welfare] that seems more on point concerns the
absence of responsible fathers, a condition that had shaped the
Caples family for at least three generations and that speaks more
directly to the underclass dilemma. The lack of a father means
the lack of income, affection and discipline that a father can
provide. Kids can overcome it, and they do so all the time, but
for someone growing up poor, having just one parent amounts to
a double dose of disadvantage.
To drive this point home, DeParle portrays the lack of a
benevolent father figure as the tragic core of the drama of his
subjects’ lives:
The more time I spent
at Angie’s, the more it felt like everything was about Greg
[the father of three of Angie’s four children, convicted
of murder and sentenced to 65 years in prison]. He had been gone
for eight years, but his absence left a hole that nothing had
been able to fill— not welfare, not work, and certainly
not the parade of men filing through Angie’s life. …He
hung over the house like a private gravity field.
The ideological agenda DeParle is pushing seems relatively mild
but is not unproblematic. For example, American Dream could
mention more about the need for effective social programs to addresses
the acute economic, educational and vocational training needs of
underprivileged men. However, DeParle’s assessment of the
cultural anxiety and political machinations that brought an end
to welfare as a simple entitlement for needy families is intelligent
and illuminating, as is his informed skepticism about the capacity
of the Personal Responsibility Act to propel destitute mothers and
their kids into the security of the lower middle class:
On Welfare, Angie was
a low-income single mother, raising her kids in a dangerous neighborhood
in a household roiled by chaos. She couldn’t pay the bills.
She drank lots of beer. And her children needed a father. Off
welfare, she was a low-income single mother, raising her kids
in a dangerous neighborhood in a household roiled by chaos. She
couldn’t pay the bills. She drank lots of beer. And her
children needed a father.
Technically, Angie Jobe is a welfare-to-work success story. She
found stable employment and a degree of personal satisfaction working
as a nursing aide. Her first job paid $6.50 an hour; after seven
years of working for the same employer, she earned $8.99 and hour—
an average increase of 36 cents a year. When DeParle concluded his
research for American Dream, Angie still depended on
food stamps and housing subsidies to make ends meet.
Why work is not enough
According to Beth Shulman, the failure to provide
a living wage for mothers leaving the welfare rolls is just one
aspect of the crisis of low-wage work in America. “Inadequate
wages are only part of the problem,” she writes in The
Betrayal of Work: How Low Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans and
Their Families (2003). Most low-wage workers, she
reports, “lack basic benefits such as health care, sick pay,
disability pay, paid vacation, and retirement. Their jobs leave
little flexibility to care for a sick child or deal with an emergency
at school -- let alone the normal appointments and needs of
everyday life.” Shulman adds that low wages, non-standard
work hours, forced overtime and having little control over one’s
work schedule make reliable, good-quality childcare prohibitively
expensive and nearly impossible to find. Moreover, she shows that
the conditions of low-wage work are often dangerous and dehumanizing.
But for many millions of U.S. workers, there are few other viable
options for gainful employment outside of poorly paid, no benefits,
dead-end jobs. And three out of every five workers in America’s
low-wage workforce are female.
The awful truth about America’s impressive wealth, at least
from a historical perspective, is that it is largely a product of
the exploitation of vulnerable and marginalized populations --
women, children, minorities and immigrants. Shulman’s research
for The Betrayal of Work suggests this pattern still holds
true. Profit-making in the free market circa 2004 gives employers
ample incentive to cultivate a class of highly expendable workers
who have the “choice” of selling
their labor for nothing or next to nothing or not working at all, and who place few
or no additional financial burdens on the business. Cultural norms
and federal labor standards prevent the outrageous abuses of the
past -- such as slavery, unregulated working hours and conditions,
child labor and other types of mistreatment
commonly inflicted on American laborers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Today, we have the fast food industry, call centers and WalMart.
“Whatever one thought of America’s welfare poor,”
Shulman remarks, “few people were making money off them. The
same cannot be said of our new working poor. …Low wage jobs
translate into billions of dollars of profits, executive pay, high
stock prices, and low consumer prices.”
Shulman identifies the problem of the working poor and growing
income inequality in the United States as both a labor crisis and
a crisis of values:
…If work does
not work for millions of Americans it undermines our country’s
most fundamental ideals. We are permitting a caste system to grow
up around us, consigning millions of Americans to a social dead-end.
The notion of equal opportunity becomes a farce in the face of
these harsh class divisions. It is a sentence passed onto not
only those toiling in the poverty wage economy, but onto many
of their children who lack the support they need to succeed.
Through short case studies interspersed with more formal data, The Betrayal of Work opens up the world of the hard-working
men and women who labor “in the heart of our economy and our
lives” -- nursing assistants and home health aides, child
care workers, janitors, poultry-processing workers, hotel maids,
cashiers, and receptionists. While she note that most of these occupations
are defined as “low skilled,” Shulman objects to this
classification:
The “low skilled”
label is a distancing device. It allows us to dismiss the workers
as undeserving, somehow flawed. It allows us to justify how poorly
their employers treat them. It makes it easier to blame them for
their own plight. Undervaluing low-wage job skills, most of which
involve working with people, is especially ironic in our consumer-driven,
service economy. But this denigration is no accident. Most low
wage jobs have historically been “women’s jobs.”
These jobs involve nurturing, caring, and communicating with people,
skills that have been historically trivialized.
Shulman argues passionately that it’s time for change.
Given her own professional background in the labor sector, it comes
as no surprise that she relates the larger problem of low-wage work
to employers’ resistance to unionization. There is no
question that low-wage workers -- and all workers --desperately
need a more powerful voice in the workplace. However, as Thomas
A. Kochan comments in Regaining
Control of Our Destiny: A Working Families’ Agenda for America,
labor unions may need to substantially reinvent themselves to serve
the needs of the 21st century workforce, including the low-wage
workforce. That said, Shulman’s insistence that revitalizing
the labor movement is key to solving the problem of low-wage work
in America -- as well as resolving the broader issue of excessive
working time in the U.S. -- seems on the mark.
In addition to highlighting the impediments to collective bargaining
for low-wage workers, Shulman writes that four myths have deadlocked
the debate over low-wage work in America: the myth of upward mobility,
the myth that education and skills enhancement is the primary solution
to the problem of low-wage work, the myth that America’s entry
into the global marketplace limits our ability to improve wages
and working conditions for workers at home, and the myth that volunteerism
is a substitute for social policy.
It doesn’t take much digging to undermine the first three fallacies
on Shulamn’s list: study after study shows that occupational
and economic mobility for low-wage workers is virtually non-existent
in the U.S. (although Shulman notes that workers in the EU fare
slightly better). Skills improvement may indeed help some low-wage
workers get ahead, but training alone does not create a surplus
of better-paying jobs which call for more advanced skills. Globalization
has had a profound impact on workers in the manufacturing industry
and occupations that are easily outsourced, but security guards,
convenience store cashiers, parking lot attendants, child care workers
and waiters and waitresses can’t do their jobs from India
or China or Mexico. Their work -- like most work in the low-wage
service sector -- is location dependent, so the global market
theory only goes so far in rationalizing their marginalization.
It’s the last bit of political folklore Shulman identifies -- the myth that volunteerism is a substitute for social policy -- that seems so insidiously connected to America’s willingness
to dismantle the war on poverty (and in this case, whether we are
referring to the “welfare poor” or the “working
poor” or the poor souls who fall completely through the cracks
is irrelevant). There is something wonderfully heartwarming about
the idea that caring individuals and communities will always step
in to make sure no one is forgotten or left behind; the charitable impulse
is a kind of grace and should not be underestimated. But in the
long view, the corrective effects of volunteerism and charity are
transitory. Volunteerism -- even at its best and brightest -- is a response, not a solution, to social problems, and it’s
certainly no solution for a social problem as entrenched as poverty
in America. In the scope of national politics, we presently rely
on volunteerism to hold the social instability resulting from profound
economic inequality in check. But what happens when charity and
good intentions are no longer enough? With community food banks
exhausted and homeless shelters overflowing, that day is surely
approaching. As for the working poor, Shulman quite reasonably suggests,
“Americans who work hard should not have to rely on hand outs
for their basic necessities. They should not have to rely on the
goodwill of individuals and organizations to make up for the deficits
of their jobs.”
Shulman has some ideas about what it will take to turn
this sorry situation around. She calls for a comprehensive "Compact
with Working Americans" which includes part-time parity; assured affordable
health care; increased workplace flexibility and stricter regulation
of mandatory overtime; paid family and medical leave; paid sick
leave and minimum paid vacation time for all workers; substantial
child care subsides for low-income families and universal preschool
for 3- and 4-year olds; continuing education and/or vocational training
for all workers; safe, affordable workforce housing; expanded unemployment
benefits for low-wage and non-standard workers; and better retirement
benefits. This daunting (and undoubtedly expensive) list of supports
may seem politically untenable, but these are precisely the kinds
of policies that might have prevented many of the mothers profiled
in Flat Broke With Children from descending into poverty
in the first place and could help former welfare mothers like Angie
Jobe become truly self-sufficient. It’s also worth mentioning
that Shulman’s Compact mirrors the package of universal family
supports offered in European countries where maternal and child
poverty is exceptionally low.
As Shulman concludes:
Whether we will be
a nation of opportunity and justice for all or one in which only
the few prosper at the expense of millions of workers and their
families is ultimately up to us. Many argue that these improvements
will cost too much. But the cost of doing nothing is even greater.
It denies workers the essentials of a decent life and subjects
their children to such deprivation that they have little chance
of success. It hurts our economy, it hurts our democracy, and
it hurts our health as a nation if we ignore those who are working
hard but getting shortchanged.
Inside
the lives of the poor
Our national resistance
to attacking poverty head-on is not grounded in a lack of compassion.
Rather, America is paralyzed by the enduring conflict between the
high value our culture places on rational individualism and the
reality of human need. As far as resolving the dilemma of the working
poor, Shulman’s idea that some configuration of more money,
better policy and stronger labor regulations would do the trick
makes sense. But what configuration? In a capitalist society --
in fact, in any society -- poverty is an ideological problem
as much as a social and economic one. And in the U.S., there
is no clear consensus in either popular or political thought about
whether poor people are poor because of the way they act , or the things that happen to them.
If poor people are poor because of the way they act, laws and policies
to promote the general welfare might include a system of incentives
and deterrents to reform self-defeating behaviors and efforts to
isolate those who appear disinterested in self-improvement so they
won’t drag the rest of us down. On the other hand, if individuals
are thrust into poverty by things that happen to them, we’d
need to create laws and policies to prevent or remove conditions
which exacerbate social and economic inequality. At different times during the 20th century, the United States
has implemented policies based on one or the other of these approaches
with mixed results.
After visiting the homes, neighborhoods and workplaces of the men,
women and families who inhabit the unforgiving terrain of “forgotten
America,” Pulitzer-prize winning author David K. Shipler found that neither the causes of poverty nor its potential remedies
can be calculated with the “either/or” formula. In The
Working Poor: Invisible In America (2004), Shipler
documents the exhausting struggles of families living at the edge
of the nation’s social and economic margins: “Their
wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their
lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back.” The
Working Poor rigorously challenges the simplistic logic of
the “American Myth” -- the supposition that “people
who work hard and make the right decisions in life can achieve anything
they want in America” and its equally problematic counter-logic,
the “Anti-American Myth,” which holds that “society
is largely responsible for the individual’s poverty.”
Like Sharon Hays in Flat Broke With Children, Shipler
discovers that poverty is caused by a predictable combination of factors
that involve both how individuals act and the things that
happen to them. Like the rest of us, people in poverty sometimes
make poor choices and end up worse for the wear.
But there are also pervasive social, cultural and economic factors
which compound the effects of poverty; as Shipler observes, “The
poor have less control than the affluent over their private decision…
Their personal mistakes have larger consequences, and their personal
achievements yield smaller returns.” In other words, poverty
in and of itself is wounding -- when the poor take a fall, they
fall harder.
Of the workers he portrays in The Working Poor -- including factory workers, agricultural workers, child care workers,
welfare mothers, sewing machine operators, retail workers, and many
others who drift from one low-wage occupation to another --
Shipler writes, “Each person’s life is the mixed product
of bad choices and bad fortune, of roads not taken and roads cut
off by accident of birth or circumstance. It is difficult to find
someone whose poverty is not related to his or her unwise behavior…
And it is difficult to find behavior that is not somehow related
to the inherited conditions of being poorly parented, poorly educated,
poorly housed in neighborhoods from which no distant horizon of
possibility can be seen.” And in the case of women, he might
have added “poorly treated,” since women living in financially
insecure families and neighborhoods are significantly more likely
to experience domestic violence.
Shipler doesn’t downplay the dejection and internal instability
experienced by the low-income families he spends time with -- like everyone else in the U.S., Shipler's subjects don't
always spend their money wisely, don't always parent well, and
are sometimes self-indulgent, disorganized, apathetic, abusive,
slovenly and oppositional. Yet Shipler renders these weaknesses with
extraordinary kindness and empathy; the reader is never permitted
to picture the working poor as anything less than fully human.
Shipler is especially concerned about the lasting effects of inadequate
or harmful parenting on both the adults and children he encounters,
but he remains guarded in his assessment:
There is no more highly
charged subject in the discussion of poverty, for impoverished
families have long been stigmatized as dysfunctional. The father
is a drunken or addicted ne’er-do-well, if he’s around
at all, and the mother is an angry shrew or a submissive incompetent,
The parents don’t read to their children, don’t value
education, don’t teach or exhibit morality. That is the
image, Absent from the picture are the devoted grandmothers and
parents who love zealously, the sensible adults who make smart
choices within limited means, the supportive web of relatives,
all of whom could overcome with more help from society at large.
At the extremes of
the debate, liberals don’t want to see the dysfunctional
family, and conservatives want to see nothing else. Depending
on the ideology, destructive parenting is either not a cause or
the only cause of poverty. Neither stereotype is correct. In my
research along the edges of poverty, I didn’t find any adults
without troubled childhoods, and I came to see those histories
as both cause and effect, intertwined with the myriad other difficulties
of money, housing, schooling, health, jobs, and neighborhood that
reinforce one another.
However, when Shipler asks a behavioral pediatrician who “treats
children of all socio-economic levels” to describe the conditions
that “prevent bad parenting,” his answer implies the possibility of good parenting is reserved for the middle-class:
“It’s a lot easier to be a good parent if you’re
well rested, you can afford baby-sitters, and you have someone to
clean your house. People who have some of those psychological resources
that allow them to be good parents quite often have the resources
that allow them to be relatively secure financially.” Of course,
the “psychological resources” the doctor itemizes are
usually dependent on the economic resources that low-income parents
sorely lack. One of the more disconcerting aspects of The Working
Poor is the number of examples of helping professionals who
fail to see beyond the lens of their own middle-class privilege
when evaluating the behavior and problems of the poor.
The Working Poor connects the lives of low-income families
to the wider circle of individuals and institutions that influence
their well-being -- employers, social workers, teachers and
school administrators, health care professionals and workforce training
programs. Some of these agents have a better apprehension of the
complex origins of individual poverty than others; some are overtly
judgmental and unhelpful, but others are doing what they can to
improve the lives of the poor. While Shipler cites some of these
efforts as exemplary, he predicts that the proliferation of isolated
interventions -- no matter how innovative or effective -- will never be enough to relieve, let alone reduce, the dire consequences
of poverty in working America. As Shipler writes, “All of
the problems have to be solved at once.”
As long as a society
picks and chooses which problems to resolve in crisis— usually
the one that has propelled the family to a particular agency for
help— another crisis is likely to follow, and another. If
we set out to find only the magic solution— a job, for example—
we will miss the complexities and the job will not be enough.
The first question
is whether we know exactly what to do. What problems do we have
the skills to solve, and where do our skills reach their outer
limits? …The second question is whether we have the will
to exercise our skill. Would we spend the money, make sacrifices,
restructure the hierarchy of wealth to alleviate the hardships
down below?
We lack the skill to
solve some problems and the will to solve others, but one piece
of knowledge we now possess: We understand that holistic remedies
are vital.
The overriding question
is what, and how much, our government will do to design and implement
such holistic remedies. This is where the American Myth and the
American Anti-Myth vie for supremacy, and where politics-as-usual
clash with the politics of care. According to Shipler, “If
either the system’s exploitation or the victim’s irresponsibility
were to blame, one or the other side of the debate would be satisfied.”
The lesson of The Working Poor is that such simplistic
morality -- and any social policies that might be derived from it -- will be insufficient to lift the downward pressures which fix low-income
families in the grim world of forgotten America. “Opportunity
and poverty in this country cannot be explained by either the American
Myth that hard work is a panacea or by the Anti-Myth that the system
imprisons the poor,” Shipler concludes. “Relief will
come, if at all, in an amalgam that recognizes both the society’s
obligation through government and business, and the individuals
obligation through labor and family -- and the commitment of
both the society and the individual through education.”
The nation’s working
poor may be invisible and forgotten, but they are part of us -- our lives and economy depend on their labor. And until we rework
our vision of the American Dream to fuse the ideals of freedom and
self-determination with the complex realities of human need and
human frailty, many more of us may be joining their ranks.
What
works for mothers
Beyond
the problems with welfare reform, beyond the problems of low-wage
work and the working poor, poverty in America remains primarily
a women’s problem -- or more precisely, a mothers’
problem. While the overall poverty rate for women aged 18 to 64
is 10.6 percent in the U.S. (compared to 8.1 percent for men in
the same age group), 33 percent of single parent women with children
under 18 live in households with incomes below the official poverty
line. Lone mothers are nearly five times more likely to live in
poverty than mothers in married couple families -- which is
one of the rationales for pitching marriage promotion as an anti-poverty
measure, although one might reasonably conjecture that the individual
and social factors favoring or discouraging marriage are as varied
and complicated as the causes of poverty itself -- and that
the two are not unrelated.
Welfare
is not, and has never been, a poverty reduction program. In its
earliest inception, states provided stipends for widowed and abandoned
mothers so they would not be forced to seek employment outside
the home. In its present incarnation, welfare legislation dictates
that mothers must earn their benefits through labor force participation
and promotes marriage as the magic bullet that will wipe out women’s
poverty once and for all. Never has the U.S. implemented a social
program providing the kind of support that would allow poor mothers
and their children to live with dignity in the mainstream of society -- or help them thrive rather than just survive.
Work,
of course, has everything to do with women’s poverty -- not only due to low-wages, pay inequality, occupational segregation,
inflexible workplace practices, stingy social policies and inadequate
labor regulations, but also because some kinds of labor are classified
as “work” while others are not. Caring for children
is obviously “work:” it requires time, effort, organized
thinking and is location dependent (it happens wherever
young children are). And as Beth Shulman emphasizes in The
Betrayal of Work, most low-wage occupations dominated by
women are caring occupations -- nursing assistants, home health
aides and child care workers -- and these jobs are poorly
paid precisely because they involve caring work. There are also
broader issues of care yet to be resolved: What does it mean to
be a caring society? Do individuals have a right to be cared for?
Do they have a right to care for others? What is the relationship
between care and social power, and how can it be shifted so that
care-givers have a real shot at full social and economic citizenship?
Or, as
Hays writes in her conclusion to Flat Broke With Children:
A citizen should be
able to simultaneously raise children, care for others, participate
in determining the future of the nation, and be an independent,
productive participant in the public world. The question is, what
would it take to make this possible for all members of
this society?
The public discussion about how caring work should be acknowledged
and accommodated -- as well as how it should be shared within
families and by society as a whole -- is building steam. There
is little doubt that more generous public policies and stronger
labor regulations are in order if we hope to free more working families
from poverty. But as Sharon Hays reminds us, a nation’s laws
reflect a nation’s values. Unless we are prepared to move
backwards or stay in place, the emerging mothers’ movement
must address both the “law” and the “values”
ends of this equation at the same time. Any viable solution to the
compound circumstances of women’s poverty -- as well as
the middle-class work/life predicament -- will recognize that
carework is work without resorting to legislation that
codifies carework as the best work for women. My own dream
is that someday soon, this solution will be within our reach.
mmo : december 2004
Judith Stadtman Tucker is the founder and editor of the Mothers Movement Online.
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