THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY: THE FEMINIZATION OF POVERTY
Ehrenreich, Barbara & Piven, Frances Fox
Despite the widespread misperception that women are achieving economic equality, their economic status has deteriorated sharply since the late 1960s. Today women—and children— are the primary...
...According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a family of four now requires $25,000 a year to maintain an "intermediate" standard of living...
...From the inception of these programs in 1966, health reformers criticized them as inadequate and patchwork substitutes for a national health service that would guarantee the actual delivery of high-quality care...
...Yet the average annual income for working women now is $11,000 a year, and less than $8,000 for black single mothers...
...Of course, not all men and certainly not all black men earned enough to support families, nor were all women supported by men...
...By contrast, the left criticizes the programs for bureaucratic indifference to clients...
...They are no small force...
...two out of three adults whose incomes fell below the official federal poverty line were women, and more than half the families who were poor were headed by women...
...However, that recognition has always been at war with another, usually unstated, imperative—that 166 government must not provide benefits competing with low-wage work...
...Arbitrary and variable decisions can be shattering to recipients and reinforce the notion that social-welfare programs are a form of charity...
...Effects of Political & Business Pressures IN THE MOST IMPORTANT SENSE, the shortcom ings of American social welfare result from the complex political forces that shaped the programs and continue to shape them over time...
...Even so, reform groups expected that Medicaid would make health care financially accessible to many of the nation's "medically indigent" (people who while not classified as poor, nevertheless cannot afford medical care...
...q IN A HOSTILE ECONOMY, women—and not only poor women—have come to rely more and more on government social-welfare programs for their economic security...
...With the revival of feminism in the late 1960s, women have developed a considerable organizational capacity, and a consciousness of common interests that cuts across class lines...
...Unemployment insurance reduces some of the fear of joblessness for most of the middle class as well as the poor, and helps tide over those who are out of work through the dislocations caused by cyclical downturns and shifting patterns of investment...
...it is in fact an opposing critique, and it stems from an opposite assessment of the responsibility of government...
...Taken as a whole, the Houston resolutions amount to a demand, not only for greater federal intervention against sex discrimination, but for the creation of an adequate socialwelfare system for all Americans...
...Flawed though these programs may be, they are critical to the survival of a majority of older women who would otherwise be desperately poor...
...In no state is the combination of AFDC and Food Stamps sufficient to raise a family up to the official poverty line...
...Such distressed workers, according to the 70page report made public this week, are those who have no job or receive wages too low to get them out of poverty...
...For reasons that are hardly mysterious, business interests have always exerted great influence on state and local programs...
...The AFDC and Medicaid programs illustrate the deforming effects of private business interests on American social welfare...
...Long-term structural trends within the U.S...
...It follows that we would work for a unified system that, through the breadth and strength of its constituency, would not be vulnerable to attack by a business-oriented president or Congress...
...Market-priced housing and health services too will remain beyond the reach of most women, even if the income programs are improved...
...Rather, they were the result of a federal government so weak it ceded administrative control over many of the programs to states and localities where they were cannibalized by hostile interests, so weak it could not establish decent benefit levels, and so weak it could not curb the distortions forced on it by private market interests...
...Not only is this a different critique than that made by the right...
...It is mainly doctors who determine the demand for health services...
...In particular, femaleheaded families have come to rely heavily on government social-welfare programs...
...Similarly, federal funding for rape 165 crisis centers and battered women's refuges bypassed local male politicians and gave women, many of them feminist activists, a chance to create client-centered services sensitive to women's needs...
...The right attacks the programs for their high cost and their presumably corrosive effect on the incentive to work...
...Thus, although it is the only program that attempts to meet the daily needs of poor children, AFDC is pegged far below the poverty level in order, ultimately, to avoid any challenge to the determination of wages by market forces...
...Monthly payments to a family of three averaged slightly under $300 in 1980, and only nine states provide more than $400 a month...
...A study by Employment Research Associates estimates that with each $1 billion increase in the military budget, 9,500 jobs are lost to women in social welfare or the private sector...
...For everyone else, especially the over 30 million people who presently lack coverage of any kind, it has meant spiraling medical costs...
...The central political question that has emerged is not whether government shall play a large role in American life, but who will pay for and who will gain from what government does...
...In fact, in almost all states, Medicaid eligibility was tied to welfare eligibility...
...Their loudest critics today are on the Republican right...
...And Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) provides at least a meager subsistence for millions of the most desperately impoverished mothers and their children...
...However, the health system is notoriously impervious to ordinary laws of supply and demand...
...Skilled jobs for men become less skilled jobs for women...
...Conservative critics argue this is the result of excessive consumption of health services by the poor and elderly, and that prices have risen with increased demand...
...2.6 million were enrolled in the Food Stamp program...
...And it's not because the number of jobs available to women is declining...
...But this achievement by unionized male workers helped to thwart women's aspirations for higher wages, particularly in typically female occupations...
...As a result, the Reagan administration's policies are galvanizing a broad movement that joins together middleclass, working-class, and poor women...
...More and more women, married or not, will have no choice but to be wage-earners...
...The women's movement of the last two decades, like that of the late 19th century, has looked to government as the guarantor of women's rights, as in the intense mobilization for the ERA...
...The democratic spirit that infuses such "alternative" service institutions, combined with government responsibility for sustained and adequate national funding, points an important direction for the reform of the American welfare state...
...But this overlooks a politically critical fact: the American poor are disproportionately women...
...Yet the assumption of the family-wage system remains firmly embedded in a wage structure that offers women, hour for hour, only 59 percent of the average male wage...
...The gratuitous humiliation inflicted upon clients by welfare bureaucracies reinforces this effect, for it works to ensure that few will choose welfare over work, no matter what the terms...
...By 1980, America's poor were predominantly female...
...Of course, abysmal poverty and degrading treatment have other effects—depressing the expectations of poor women and their children, destroying their morale, and ensuring that they do not come to believe they have legitimate rights, even to a subsistence income...
...For decades before Medicaid and Medicare were legislated, private interests in the health sector, particularly the American Medical Association and the insurance industry, had fiercely and successfully resisted any major program of government health insurance...
...The right has capitalized on this fragmentation of social-welfare programs and their recipients...
...Worse, within these broad categories, an incredible array of disparate programs applies differently to people depending on their age, their sex, on the specifics of former employment, on marital status, or even on the value of their home furnishings...
...There is no question, however, that the socialwelfare programs established in response to the upheavals of the 1930s and 1960s are flawed and imperfect...
...The Reagan administration does not depend on the poor for votes, and their lack of organizational resources makes effective resistance at the national level difficult...
...The Administration's persistent efforts to eliminate the legal-services program and to rewrite the regulations of a number of the programs so as to weaken procedural safeguards are similarly an effort to shift power relations by expunging the legal rights of program beneficiaries...
...This trend prompted the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity (since then disbanded by the Reagan administration) to observe that "All other things being equal, if the proportion of poor in femaleheaded households were to continue to increase at the same rate as it did from 1967 to 1978, the poverty population would be composed solely of women and their children before the year 2000...
...among minorities, but the convergence of gender and class is unprecedented in American history...
...In the 1970s this shift accelerated as a result of both expansion in the service and retail sectors and a rapid decline in manufacturing, especially in the highly unionized and 163 well-paid steel, automobile, and rubber industries...
...Notwithstanding its avowed hostility to "government interference," the right has worked to increase bureaucratic discretion and to strip beneficiaries of procedural protections...
...Business pressures also explain why a number of the most important programs were left to state (and sometimes local) governments to administer...
...Yet now many women are forced to do exactly this, leaving an estimated 6 to 7 million young children without any preschool or after-school care, and millions more with informal and often substandard child-care arrangements...
...eligibility is conditional on poverty...
...Demands by the unemployed or the poor or the aged were resisted by employer interests fearing that if government provided subsistence to large numbers of people, labor markets would be weakened...
...In the long term we need to build up these services, not as stop-gap measures but as a vital part of our social infrastructure, which must meet the critical needs of a vast sector of the population...
...Nevertheless, the assumption that women entered the work force only as secondary workers reinforced the segregation of women into low-paying occupations and legitimized systematic wage discrimination against women...
...As a result of the combined effects of changes in family patterns and occupational segregation, the fastest growing group among the female poor are single mothers with young children...
...Benefits and eligibility standards should be uniform across the nation, and their financing should not be subject to the whims of state legislators...
...For many women, poverty begins when their marriage ends...
...Thus women receive 54 percent of all Social Security benefits, despite the fact that the average benefit paid to women is almost one-third lower than that paid to men ($215.80 a month compared to $308.70...
...For one thing, the experience of the '70s shows that employment is not a solution to women's poverty: in what are typically "women's jobs," full-time and year-round work does not necessarily bring one over the poverty level...
...In addition, programs have been thoroughly encased in an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus of procedures and conditions so that as little aid as possible would be given to as few as possible...
...Similarly, almost 60 percent of those covered by Medicare are women...
...Nothing could be more critical to the well-being of poor women and children than an immediate increase in the benefit levels of the AFDC program, for example, which, at a minimum, should support families at a level above what is officially defined as "poverty...
...THESE ARE THE REASONS, then, that women, and especially feminists, now lead the way in resisting the attempt to destroy the welfare state...
...For these women, social-welfare programs provide some protection against employer abuses, whether low wages, unpaid overtime work, speed-ups, or personal and sexual harassment...
...for the punitive terms often exacted as a condition for receiving benefits or services...
...Another consequence is that many women will be poor and remain poor, whether or not they are employed...
...Other programs are not age-tested, but "means-tested...
...The third group of women whose livelihood depends on social-welfare programs are those who are employed by them...
...Where only 4 percent of the nation's lawyers and judges were women in 1971, women accounted for 14 percent in 1981...
...The Medicaid program illustrates different flaws resulting from the influence of different market interests...
...UPI) — A research group has a bleak forecast for millions of American workers in economic distress: They can expect to face chronic unemployment or poverty wages throughout the decade...
...The reliance of women on these programs has risen apace with the increase of poverty among women...
...The primary reason for the low earnings of women is occupational segregation...
...But despite the stereotype of the "black welfare mother," poor female-headed households are increasing more rapidly among whites than among blacks...
...Like most industrialized capitalist countries, we have long presumed a "familywage" system...
...The stability of this ratio despite the striking gains made by some women, particularly in the professions—is depressing evidence of the deterioration of the economic status of the majority of women workers...
...By reducing economic insecurity, the social programs thus enhance the workplace power of millions of low-wage working women...
...AFDC is notorious for its humiliating treatment of clients and the inadequacy of the benefits it provides...
...Between the mid-'60s and mid-'70s, the number of poor adult males declined, while the number of the poor in households headed by women swelled by 100,000 a year...
...Some 45 percent of black families are now headed by women, as compared to 14 percent of white families...
...economy offer little hope that market forces will produce an upturn in women's occupational prospects...
...Ten years later, when thousands of women gathered at Houston for the First National Women's Conference, they passed a farranging series of resolutions calling for, among other things, a major federal role in the provision of child-care services, a federal program of national health insurance, a federal policy of full employment, and increases in federal fund169 ing for AFDC and other income-support programs to "provide an adequate standard of living...
...But despite these gains by a narrow stratum of betterprepared women, average female earnings relative to men actually declined slightly, from over 60 percent in the 1950s to 59 percent today...
...In addition to easing the economic insecurity of millions of Americans, federally funded socialwelfare programs often made possible innovative services and new opportunities for citizen participation...
...The result is a marked feminization of the work force, but in jobs that are "badly paid, unchanging, and economically unproductive...
...A weak government has produced weak programs, and weak programs are indeed difficult to defend...
...Nutritional programs, particularly Food Stamps and supplements for women and infants, are credited with significantly reducing hunger and the most common forms of malnutrition...
...In the face of the harsh assault from the right, we need to renew the long-standing feminist commitment to government-funded social services...
...and 2.3 were enrolled in the school lunch program...
...In fact, low-paid "women's work" is expanding, because of two important trends in the labor market...
...Strained state budgets, combined with the identification of Medicaid as a "welfare program," made it an easy target for budgetcutters...
...Thus government social-welfare benefits have reduced some of the income gap suffered by the families headed by women who can no longer rely on a male wage...
...One is the long-term sectoral shift away from manufacturing and toward service and clerical jobs...
...In the same period the percentage of the nation's female physicians rose from 9 to 22 percent, the percentage of female engineers increased four-fold (from 1 percent to 4 percent), and the number of women holding skilled blue-collar jobs also increased...
...Automation, and most spectacularly the automation made possible by new microelectronic technology, accelerates this trend toward what Braverman calls "the degradation of labor...
...Private business has not found it profitable to operate child-care centers or clinics offering primary and preventive health care in low-income areas, much less centers for rape victims or refuges for battered women...
...Influence from the right works for decentralization to the state level, in order to increase the power of business interests over the incomemaintenance programs that bear most directly on labor markets...
...The public economy exists, in reality and in the understanding of most Americans...
...In the past three years, access to these services has been steadily reduced...
...In the same period, earnings in largely male manufacturing jobs increased...
...All told, an estimated one-third of Americans now depend to some degree on government social-welfare programs...
...The significance of the steady stream of poll data showing women's strong disapproval of the Reagan policies is that women have been the first to recognize the question, and the first to offer the answer of resounding support for government policies promoting economic security and equality...
...Women who both raise and support their children need, of course, to earn a "family wage," just as many married women also need to earn a substantial portion of their families' income...
...It is easier for a woman to resist unfair demands, and risk being fired, when she knows the result will not be starvation for herself and her children...
...Moreover, they are not alone in this effort...
...The achievement of a family wage for men, meaning earnings sufficient to support a wife and children, was an important victory of the late 19th- and early 20th-century labor struggles...
...In a number of the Great Society programs of the 1960s, the federal government effectively bypassed entrenched local political hierarchies and called for "maximum feasible participation" of the communities served...
...As a consequence, these programs have turned out to be a bonanza for the medical industry...
...Some trends are encouraging...
...WASHINGTON, Dec...
...The increase in households headed by women is most striking among blacks...
...A report by the group, the National Planning Association, predicted, in fact, that the extent and severity of labor-market distress would probably increase in the 1980s...
...None of these failures is the result of the inevitable bumbling of "Big Government...
...In the course of only two decades, the familywage system has ceased to provide economic security for women and their children...
...Federal disability programs make the fate of the ill and the crippled less miserable...
...People who never before had a role in public decision-making gained positions on the federally mandated community advisory boards of health, mental health, and multiservice centers, giving the recipients of services, for the first time, a voice in determining what their needs were and how they might best be met...
...only they can decide whether a problem will be dealt with in one visit or through extensive diagnostic and treatment procedures...
...Today women—and children— are the primary beneficiaries of social welfare programs for the poor...
...Increasingly, women must depend on their own earnings, and even when they do not, they can't 162 count as they once did on the earnings of men...
...In this way, AFDC helps create the very caricature of the demoralized and dependent recipient, which is then used to justify the harshness of the program...
...Furthermore, a growing proportion of poor women are mothers of young children...
...Half of the marriages in the United States now end in divorce, and in 80 percent of these divorces the children remain with their mothers...
...Accomplishments and Failures THE ACHIEVEMENTS of America's federally sponsored welfare programs are obvious, especially for women, but not only for women...
...Like AFDC, Medicaid is administered and partly financed by the states, and benefits and eligibility have been largely left to the discretion of the states...
...Meanwhile, the media's fancy notwithstanding, the number of men raising children on their own showed no significant increase in the decade of the '70s...
...an almost equal number were covered by Medicaid...
...Moreover, because business interests can successfully resist state and local taxes, the revenues to fund programs at the state and local level must be extracted from regressive taxes on working people...
...When businessmen demand low taxes and restrictive social programs at the state or local level, they wield the threat of relocation...
...Other programs, particularly those that provided "in-kind" benefits in the form of food subsidies or housing, or those that provided such services as medical care, easily became the target of lobbyists who stood to profit from the provision of benefits or services...
...Medicaid and Medicare make it possible for more millions of both the elderly and the poor—who are, of course, the groups most likely to suffer from chronic disease and disabilities—to receive the medical attention previously largely unavailable to them...
...Medicaid and Medicare were passed over the bitter resistance of the AMA, and then only in a form ensuring that the new government financing mechanisms would not affect private control of the organization and delivery of medical care...
...As a result, the benefit levels of the key income-maintenance programs, including unemployment insurance and AFDC, have always been very low...
...In other words, the breakdown of a system of intrafamily income transfers from husband to wife has been partially offset by the expansion of a system of public income transfers...
...To be published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc...
...Poor women, and especially single mothers, should have this option, just as the wives of the affluent do, and social-welfare programs should make the choice possible...
...For the short term, the first priority is to reverse the cutbacks in government spending for low-income housing, day-care centers, refuges (which have depended heavily on federal grants), and other services...
...It seems obvious that without affordable and reliable child-care options, mothers of young children should not be expected to enter the labor market or job-training programs...
...The present system separates means-tested programs such as Medicaid from universal programs such as Medicare and Social Security, thus breeding competition and animosity among recipient groups...
...Between 1973 and 1979 average hourly earnings in services, measured in 1972 dollars, fell from $3.16 to $3.08...
...One obvious consequence is that fewer men will be able to earn a family wage— a fact that renders the anti-feminist vision of a restored family with the father the breadwinner and the mother the housewife utterly hollow...
...Copyright © 1984 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc...
...While Medicaid helped many of the nation's poor to gain access to medical attention, the program had other, unexpectedly perverse effects...
...In his classic 1974 study, Labor and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman showed that the pressure to maximize profits leads employers to replace well-paid, skilled jobs with badly paid, unskilled jobs that are likely to be defined as "women's work...
...Finally, services that have been offered as "commodities" to more or less passive "consumers" (like most medical care) should be redesigned to increase client participation and influence...
...This was the significance of the Administration's "New Federalism" proposals, which would entirely have abdicated the federal role in the AFDC or the Food Stamp program in favor of state and local government...
...Furthermore, because social-welfare benefits reduce desperation among the unemployed, they are less likely to undercut the wages and working conditions of those who do have jobs...
...In short, the occupational ghetto of "women's work" has grown larger, and opportunities for both men and women outside this ghetto have shrunk...
...Poverty in the United States has always been disproportionately concentrated From the forthcoming book Alternatives: Proposals for America from the Democratic Left, edited by Irving Howe...
...Even with a vast expansion of child-care services, some women may prefer to remain at home with their small children rather than do double duty as full-time employees and full-time homemakers...
...In the years that have passed since the Houston conference, the need for expanded and reliable social-welfare programs has become even more acute...
...Third, over the longer term, we should work toward the consolidation of programs so as to promote common stakes and stronger alliances among the many segments of the American population that have come to rely upon the welfare state...
...On the surface, it may therefore seem that no one, neither on the right nor the left, supports the socialwelfare programs, and this helps account for the timid response that has been made to the Reagan administration cuts...
...In 1980, fully 70 percent of the 17.3 million social-service jobs on all levels of government (including education) were held by women...
...In fact, however, very different sorts of criticisms are at issue...
...Further, the fragmentation of the American social-welfare programs has taken its toll in fragmentation and division among beneficiaries...
...Services that have heretofore been limited by narrowly defined eligibility criteria (such as subsidized day care) should be expanded because they are necessary, and because expansion will ensure a broad constituency of support and public involvement...
...Equally important, for teen-agers as well as adult women, is access to a full range of reproductive health services, from contraception to abortion to prenatal care...
...These jobs accounted for fully a quarter of all female employment, according to Lisa Peattie and Martin Rein of MIT, and for about half of all professional jobs held by women...
...Medicaid, combined with Medicare, contributed to the rapid and still escalating costs of medical care...
...As the Reagan administration presses for a shift of funds from social welfare to military spending, a good many of these jobs will be lost, without compensatory employment gains for women...
...What is usually called "the breakdown of the family" occurred without equalizing changes in the labor market, and this accounts for the disproportionate impoverishment of women...
...First, responsibility for social-welfare programs should be firmly fixed at the federal level...
...Child-support payments are a negligible source of income for most of these families...
...The causes for the feminization of poverty are rooted in profound changes in American society...
...Only 0.5 percent of the entire female work force is engaged in work on military contracts...
...For nearly two decades, however, groups that depended on the programs had been sharply critical, including client groups and their advocates, women's organizations, and labor unions...
...There is a wealth of experience to draw on: health centers and refuges run by women and child-care centers run by community groups are only some of the examples of services organized to involve and empower clients...
...Beyond this obvious short-term goal, we should begin to work for organizational reforms that will strengthen the influence of the beneficiaries of income-maintenance programs and reduce the influence of business...
...A second group of women who benefit from government social-welfare programs are those in the expanding low-wage service and clerical sectors of the work force...
...Forty percent of divorced fathers contribute nothing, and those who do contribute pay on the average less than $2,100 a year...
...and skilled work for women is replaced by less skilled work: the machinist is replaced by an unskilled operator, the department-store buyer by the clerk who tends a computerized inventory system, the secretary by the word-processor operator...
...Despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, the expansion of low-paid "women's work" continues, and this points to the continued need for public income supports and services for women, whether they are employed or not...
...In part this results from women's greater longevity, which enables them to benefit disproportionately from programs where eligibility is determined mainly by age...
...Finally, the degrading treatment of those who survived the bureaucratic runarounds ensured that few would choose the dole who could otherwise survive...
...Three basic principles can guide us...
...earnings in retail trade fell from $2.70 to $2.61...
...The welfare state's critics on the right pointed a clear direction for the contraction of the programs that the Reagan administration has attempted to implement...
...In their stead, we should promote broad and easily determined criteria that reduce the need for invasive investigation and give benefits and services the status of legal rights...
...The Meaning of the "Gender Gap" POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY IS clearly a factor in the assault on the social-welfare programs...
...As a consequence, benefit levels set by the states have been kept well below the lowest local wage rates...
...As early as 1967, the "bill of rights" adopted at the first national conference of NOW called for government action to alleviate poverty, to enforce laws against sex discrimination in employment, and to improve the circumstances of older women through changes in the Social Security system...
...Women and Social-Welfare Programs No Hope for The Jobless...
...Many other women are poor before they become mothers and, for them, having the sole responsibility for children is only another barrier to achieving economic self-sufficiency in the labor market...
...3, 1983...
...According to Emma Rothschild, 70 percent of all new private-sector jobs created between 1973 and 1980 were stereotypically women's jobs in such areas as fast foods, data processing and other business services, and health care...
...Of all these services, perhaps none is more critical to women than child-care provisions...
...and for profiteering by businesses involved in the provision of services...
...By 1981, the Census reported 9.4 million female heads of families...
...This pattern in turn generates a climate of resentment and hostility toward locally financed programs for the poor...
...The states have set eligibility levels so that most of the people the program was originally intended to serve have been excluded...
...The overwhelming majority (80 percent) of jobs held by women are concentrated in only 20 of 420 occupations listed by the Department of Labor...
...In fact, real earnings have been declining in the sectors of the work force where women are concentrated...
...It follows that we should work for the elimination of elaborate conditions for determining eligibility—conditions that inevitably will increase bureaucratic discretion and intimidate applicants...
...The Reagan administration still waves the banner of laissez-faire, but the banner is tattered and unconvincing...
...For just this reason we should fight for the outright nationalization of financing and policy-making responsibility for such programs as AFDC, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid...
...for the low level of benefits or services...
...An adequate and unified system of income maintenance would go a long way toward easing the economic insecurity of low-paid working women and toward improving the lives of women now living in poverty...
...it has also looked to government as a guarantor of economic security...
...These occupations are mainly in retail sales, clerical work, light assembly, the catch-all category of "service work," and they are characteristically low paid and dead ended...
...For those women who could depend on the earnings of a male breadwinner, however, the system did offer economic security, if not the dignity of economic independence...
...Yet for women, these services mean the "right to control our own bodies," and they are preconditions for economic security...
...Consequently, as medical inflation encouraged by some features of the program drove costs up, Medicaid coverage shrank, providing fewer services to proportionately fewer of the people who need care...
...AFDC originated as a program of cash benefits to impoverished mothers raising children without a male breadwinner, and it reflected the recognition that such women could not be expected to support their children by their own efforts...
...Republican hostility to these programs stems, in no small part, from their role in the political empowerment of women, minorities, and the poor...
...In 1979, according to the Census Bureau, over 3.3 million of these families, or 34.6 percent of the 164 total number of female-headed families, received AFDC...
...Professor Saks suggested policy changes to help this group, including income-maintenance programs for adults whose employment problem is persistent and alternative schools for high school dropouts...
...Social Security provides some guarantees against the terrors of a poverty-stricken old age for the millions of Americans who have no private pensions, or whose pensions fall woefully short of a subsistence income...
...Our agenda should begin, very simply, with the demand for higher levels of benefits...
...But an incomesupport program cannot provide goods and services if these are not available in the market 168 at affordable prices...
...Underlying each 167 of its major initiatives was an effort, not only to slash benefits and services, but to increase the power of business interests and reduce the power of beneficiary groups...
...Second, bureaucratic discretion in the determination of eligibility and benefits should be reduced...
...In fact, the specific elements of an expanded and reformed social-welfare policy have been outlined before, both by the Welfare Rights movement in the 1960s and by the feminist movement in the 1970s...
...Even if economic recovery is strong enough to reduce overall unemployment significanty, serious structural problems in the labor market will leave concentrated groups in distress," said the report's author, Daniel Saks, professor of economics at Vanderbilt University...
...Some Guidelines from the Left IF THE WELFARE STATE'S CRITICS on the right have pointed a direction for concrete changes, so does the critique developed by left and liberal reformers...
...WHAT ARE THE CHANCES for progress out of the occupational ghetto of "women's work...
...A second trend affecting both the gender composition of the work force and women's economic status is the reorganization of work associated with increasing automation...
...Moreover, provider groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association have lobbied hard, and largely successfully, to minimize government control of the prices of their services...
Vol. 31 • April 1984 • No. 2
