New York's "Work-Not-Welfare" Program
Funiciello, Theresa
Governor Cuomo caught the attention of the social welfare world last year with the announcement of a jobs program he called "Work-not-Welfare." (Welfare here refers to Aid to Families With...
...Webster defines work as "physical or mental effort exerted to do or make something...
...As long as poor women's need for income is abandoned by both the right and the left at the altar of imaginary jobs, they will have little hope of attaining either...
...A number of other capitalist countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands have quite successfully established universal income security, irrespective of one's relationship to the waged labor market...
...After some scrutiny of the proposal, the legislature voted it down...
...The single real programmatic difference in the Work-notWelfare plan is a provision for recipients to "work off" their welfare checks—the essence of workfare...
...Most are off welfare within two years, independent of any work program...
...First clue: Beware of Messengers Bearing Gifts...
...purposeful activity...
...Like WIN, the new plan includes almost every conceivable training and work "experience" option—the beauty schools and business institutes, the literacy and job skills training programs, the general equivalency degree for high school dropouts...
...Welfare here refers to Aid to Families With Dependent Children, AFDC, 94 percent of whose recipients in New York are single mothers and their children...
...So while we might wish the political economy would provide more genuine opportunities, it is pure folly to demand that it do so, and for welfare recipients at that, in the absence of some unusual national crisis...
...they are caught in a definitional contradiction and an ideological trap reinforced by the familiar stereotypes about women who FALL • 7987 • 559 CONFLICTS MD CONSTITUNCIES spend their nights making babies and their days watching television...
...There are thousands of unemployed and poorly employed people who would form long lines to sign up for a program they believed would benefit them...
...Absent that kind of opportunity, we have every right to question the basic definition of "work" against which mothers who remain homemakers are judged so severely...
...Would it really offer a new approach to the income dilemma of many of New York's poor...
...Most jobs available to them not only pay little to begin with, but the ladder of opportunity associated with them is barely a footstool...
...Third clue: Limiting Aspirations...
...Like the storybook emperor, "Work-notWelfare" was stark naked...
...the only people who can and should make that decision are those who must live with the results...
...But the ultimate contradiction behind the program is that jobs with adequate wages simply don't exist beyond the training...
...Unlike the rest of us who vote with our feet when confronted with inadequate services, the welfare mother becomes the indentured servant of the service-providing bureaucracy...
...For example, why aren't widows with small children, living on Social Security, either pushed into these programs or at least allowed voluntary entrance...
...When they're employed outside the home, they earn 47 cents for every dollar earned by men...
...Specifics were elusive...
...The city's Human Resources Administration, which administers the local "Work-not-Welfare" program, has been rocked by scandal in recent years...
...That purpose, of course, is to "inculcate the work ethic...
...Yet the new "Work-not-Welfare" program differed from WIN only in that it called for more aggressive placement efforts using the same self-contradictory and ineffective mechanisms as WIN, all in the name of making sure that welfare recipients "work...
...Second clue: The Silly Facts They Overlooked...
...Yes, if one assumes that those who would rather stay home are lazy and that the program puts its participants on the road to better earnings in the foreseeable future...
...Whatever our ideals vis-à-vis wage labor, it is questionable whether our economic system (which isn't likely to change in this century or the next) is capable of producing decent jobs with adequate pay and affordable, quality child care for all who need them unless there is some obvious need within the system itself: during World War II, when women were "needed," throngs of them were brought into the labor market at high wages and offered remarkably innovative child care options...
...and, by targeting AFDC mothers across the board as the subjects of dependency, even though most of them already leave the rolls within two years, it inappropriately targets (and stigmatizes) some people, while leaving too many others out of any serious effort to promote employment and the work ethic...
...The problem with the "Work-not-Welfare" effort, like its predecessors, is twofold: it fudges the question of where enough minimally decent jobs will be found...
...Some lawmakers felt it was too costly...
...As soon as the "need" was removed, the women and their kids were pushed out...
...Of all single mothers in the city, 62.8 percent live below the poverty line...
...Where was the paper...
...If a mother dares aspire to become a teacher, nurse practitioner, or MBA— "unapproved" programs— the essentials, like child care and carfare, are denied...
...Until such time as a universal system of income security is real for all Americans, we need at least to separate the administration of AFDC from the work programs so that the latter do not substitute threats for opportunities...
...If there really was a new plan, there should have been reams of analyses and charts...
...The government could even give priority to welfare recipients without excluding these others...
...A black woman hired as a nanny for an upper-class white family is a "worker...
...As the Social Security system amply demonstrates, it is relatively simple to send income to people...
...they are prohibited from making even a dollar more, even if they're willing to work more hours...
...Ultimately, the state is incapable of making the best decision for masses of individual women...
...They get no vacation or sick time, no typical fringe benefits—a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that they may not be assigned work performed by "real" workers in the first place, and so are not being trained for "real" jobs...
...Conceptually, providing training and work experience to people in need has undeniable appeal...
...Fourth clue: If Bureaucracy Can't Run the Low Hurdles, Why Try the High...
...Again...
...Only then can we pay for it through government transfers, untarnished by the bigotry that surrounds AFDC...
...I have been a welfare mother and have worked with thousands of others...
...But since most people work outside the home to better themselves financially, the workfare concept is the worst possible introduction to what "everyone else" is doing, even if we accept prevailing definitions of "work," about which more below...
...Oddly enough, most jobs available to welfare mothers are variations of the work they do at home...
...Then we play it again, reshuffling to obscure the inability of our system of resource distribution to take in all the players...
...still others rejected its weak day-care provisions...
...And, of course, there is an effective 100-percent tax on their earnings: generally speaking, for every dollar they earn beyond certain minimal work-related expenses, they lose a dollar in welfare benefits...
...Though fewer as a percentage, wage-earning poor people increased in numbers faster during the 1980s than the welfare poor did...
...And New York's contribution to a national hysteria over welfare and work got under way...
...q 560 • DISSENT...
...How could an organization so wounded, overwhelmed, and barely functioning even before the plan was announced, be expected to implement a program for approximately 100,000 AFDC recipients considered "employable" and their approximately 200,000 children...
...For the first time in decades in New York State, there are more poor people with employment income than "on welfare...
...others saw in it the discriminatory targeting of minorities to even deader dead ends than before...
...What we have is a state-administered game of musical jobs...
...When combined with food stamp and Medicaid losses, this means the family is usually worse off in a "job" than on welfare in financial terms...
...Is it really in the child's best interest to be packed off to arbitrary day-care arrangements so Mommy can go off to a job that puts no more bread on the table than before...
...Shortly after a Village Voice article suggested there really was no plan, the state issued a brief description of this latest effort to rescue the mothers of small children from what some seem to think is the debauchery of childrearing, if not from poverty...
...The WIN program is widely agreed to have failed...
...In the training programs other than workfare, the outlook is almost as grim...
...Cuomo's phrase was taken up quickly by state legislators and welfare professionals uncomfortable with "workfare," the term coined by William Safire for Richard Nixon and scorned for that reason by Democrats even when they've embraced a version of the idea through WIN (Work Incentive Program), the federally mandated program to help recipients become "self-supporting...
...If the programs are so good, why are only welfare recipients "eligible" for them...
...Why don't we offer these, our bereaved sisters, the same opportunity to escape dependency...
...The women's movement has reminded us that women's labor in the home has economic and social value...
...The majority of the jobs created since 1980 pay the minimum wage, less than the poverty level for a family...
...The studiers and program monitors got theirs, mostly from foundations...
...Until our society manages to reexamine itself at that level, women will continue to occupy the lowest positions and serve as the political pawns of opportunists and bureaucrats like those who play the empty game of "Work-notWelfare" in New York...
...News of "Work-not-Welfare" leaked months before its actual announcement...
...Calls to the state's Department of Social Services and the city's Human Resources Administration (whose own programs were said to be models for Cuomo's) yielded minimal results...
...What is lost in the travesty that is poverty politics today is the central concern of the AFDC program: "the best interest of the child...
...In fact, a pamphlet published in 1969 by the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) describing WIN anticipated virtually all the elements of the new state proposal...
...And the rate of sanctions (punishments consisting of serious reductions in welfare checks for 90 days or more) is high, as participants predictably treat these parodies of "opportunity" with the lack of enthusiasm they deserve...
...At their best, similar programs across the country studied by the Manpower Development Research Corporation show an abysmal "success" rate—one to seven percent more job placements than for control groups of welfare mothers who receive no special "training...
...The welfare department argues that once a nonmandatory recipient volunteers, she has relinquished her right to automatic exemption based on the age of her youngest child...
...We need to expand the acceptable definitions of work and socially productive activity...
...Does national ill will single out welfare recipients for a program that is in fact more punitive than helpful...
...That many workfare advocates would impose the program on all recipients with children older than three suggests that stereotypes about lazy recipients and the dignity of wage labor alone have replaced serious concern about providing more real jobs and broadening our understanding of work, not to mention the "best interest of the child...
...among commissioners and deputies there is a rapid turnover amid charges of incompetence and worse...
...Although there are dozens of variations to choose from within the "Work-not-Welfare" plan, the recipients are most commonly steered into punitive, meaningless "workfare" slots...
...as a mother struggling under adverse conditions to raise her own children on welfare, she is a parasite on society...
...Surely they receive more national sympathy than welfare families, even though they cost more per capita in transfer payments and are intrinsically in the same position as most welfare families...
...Any employment program that proceeds without altering these basic economic realities has some other purpose than helping families in need...
...Many in "the business" tried to stalk it down...
...by 1977, the city's Human Resources Administration was unable to demonstrate more than a 7-percent placement rate of welfare mothers into jobs...
...When the music stops, some poor persons are left without jobs while some others have them...
...Participants are assigned tasks in various agencies for 558 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUNCIES just enough hours to work off their welfare checks...
...One ought to be suspicious, in the current political climate, anytime significant sums of money are spent on new projects specifically designed to benefit welfare recipients...
...We can hold on to our hopes for better jobs, but we ought not to stop there...
...Our society's definition, however, is much narrower, in that work is considered to be only that effort for which one is paid a wage...
...Indeed, what the New York bureaucracy seems to do best is save money by cutting off welfare to the 25 percent of the city's AFDC "Work-not-Welfare" participants who are sanctioned for real or perceived transgressions: a mother of a two-year-old who volunteers for the program in order to "better" herself (only mothers with no children under the age of six are required to participate) and then decides, as many have, that it offers nothing, finds her benefits cut if she tries to withdraw...
...labor, toil...
...It bore a remarkable resemblance to WIN, which had been around since the late 1960s...
...Through FALL • 1987 . 557 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITONCIES some budgetary sorcery, though, Cuomo managed to allocate enough money to generate the usual flurry of contracts with public and private agencies...
...It was recognition of this failure that prompted the development of AFDC in the first place...
...In the absence of other means of distributing resources, it may be simply the best solution for those left out of the "job standard...
...The only generalization that has any merit is that welfare mothers are much like the rest of society: all different...
...So why be cynical...
...WIN had mandated welfare recipients in single-parent families with no children under six years of age to "register" for job training or actual jobs, few of which ever materialized...
...The point obviously isn't that we should shove women back into the home whether or not they want to be there, but that we should extend the battle cry for "choice" from the reproductive sphere to • the productive sphere...
...The direct service providers, profit making and nonprofit alike, lined up for the dole...
...Or was it just another way of punishing the wretched...
...Some countries, in fact, recognizing the injustice inherent in labeling women's work in the home unproductive, are making serious efforts to include women's unpaid labor in the Gross National Product as part of a broader effort to look beyond jobs alone as the means of resource distribution...
...Why is this so...
...The lure for local welfare administrators is additional state dollars for welfare departments to try every conceivable way to get people off welfare and into jobs—in short, every effort to save welfare families from the dread disease, Dependency, by introducing them to the work ethic...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
