Off the Rolls: The Ground-Level Results of Welfare Reform
Hays, Sharon
IT'S HARD TO DATE it precisely, but I think my severe case of cognitive dissonance set in on a summer evening in 1999. As part of my research on welfare reform, I'd spent the afternoon playing...
...With two young sons to worry about, she sought help from the welfare office...
...But there are many other issues at stake in the reform of welfare, Reading the daily news these days, one can't help but notice that the topic of poverty has lost its prominence, especially relative to the early days of reform...
...I was struck by his intelligence and creativity and imagined that if his mom were middle-class, she'd soon be having him tested and charting the gifted and talented programs he'd attend...
...With only a $350 welfare check (the average monthly benefit for a family of three), child care arrangements can be very difficult to manage...
...When I met her, she was earning $5.75 an hour, working thirtyfive hours a week at a Sunbelt City convenience store...
...And there was no question that the supportive services that came with reform had helped her to achieve that success...
...Of course there are genuine success stories...
...I also don't mean to imply that all welfare mothers are saints and victims...
...In any case, assessing the results of welfare reform is not just a question of its impact on the poor...
...She got her job through a welfare-sponsored training program offered by the phone company...
...A messy divorce with an abusive (and stalker) husband had cost her her job as a nursing assistant...
...A central result of welfare reform, in other words, is that a large proportion of desperately poor mothers and children are now too discouraged, too angry, too ashamed, or too exhausted to go to the welfare office...
...National statistics suggest that about one-quarter of welfare recipients lose their benefits as a result of sanctions...
...WELFARE REFORM Between Success and Failure Political speeches, policy reports, and the popular media all cite the declining rolls and the employment of former recipients as the central evidence of the success of welfare reform...
...And there are still millions of families on welfare, coming in anew, coming back again, or as yet unable to find a way off the rolls...
...By these standards, Celia and her children would count as a success...
...The cycle of work and welfare implied by these cases is the most common pattern among the welfare-level poor...
...The problem is that there is a wide gap between the more worthy goals behind reform and the ground-level realities I found in the welfare office...
...Monique was also helped by reform...
...Take Sally...
...Yet the price tag on welfare reform is real...
...And she needed those cancer treatments now...
...It is true that their average annual wages amount to more income than welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid combined...
...Approximately one-third have found themselves back on welfare at least once since reform...
...In responding to my question about the men in her life she let me know, quietly, that her father had sexually abused her as a child...
...Yet given their circumstances, and given the structure of low-wage work, it is not surprising that many have found it difficult to achieve long-term financial and familial stability...
...It was a story of redemption— the triumph of individual willpower and American know-how—and the newscaster cheerfully pronounced it a marker of the "success" of welfare reform...
...It is also a question of what this law says about our collective willingness to support the nation's most disadvantaged and about the extent to which welfare reform actually lives up to the more worthy goals it purports to champion...
...Sarah was one example of a "diverted" potential welfare client...
...This included women who made it through some portion of the job search, or the employment workshops, or even took a workfare placement, but just couldn't manage the pressure...
...Yet, knowing what I did from my research into the worlds of low-wage work, welfare, and disability, I was sure there was now virtually nowhere for her to turn, save all those local chari48 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 ties that were already incredibly overburdened...
...Those successes matter...
...This was true long before welfare reform...
...She rarely left her apartment and lived in fear that she would catch a cold, or pneumonia, or worse...
...In a heated argument, one of Kendra's brothers had shot and killed her other brother...
...On the other hand, welfare reform instituted a system of rules, punishments, and time limits that has effectively pressured the poor to steer clear of the welfare office...
...She was cheerful when last I saw her...
...DISSENT / Fall 2003 • 53...
...Without welfare income, she had no idea what she would do...
...That's when the dissonance set in...
...Given the work/welfare cycling process, and given that many families can survive at least temporarily on below-poverty wages and pieced-together alternative resources, it will take many more years for the full impact of reform to emerge...
...Punishment and the Push to Work Upon arrival at the Arbordale welfare office, the first thing one sees is a large red sign, two feet high, twelve feet long, inquiring, "HOW MANY MONTHS DO YOU HAVE LEFT...
...Half of the families who left welfare had no money to buy food...
...Most of the people caught up in this cycle face a number of social disadvantages from the start...
...After three years of ethnographic research inside two (distant and distinct) welfare offices, after interviewing more than 50 caseworkers and about 130 welfare mothers, and after five years of poring over policy reports on reform, it is clear to me that the majority of the nation's most desperately poor citizens are in worse shape now than they would have been had the Personal Responsibility Act never been passed...
...Some were sanctioned, others left on their own...
...When I met her she had a temporary (three-month) job at a collection agency...
...Proponents of reform would mark Andrea, for instance, as "successful...
...One of the first welfare clients I met, Kendra was much loved by the caseworkers who knew her...
...Given her résumé, I wondered just what career ladder she might find to offer her sufficient income and stability to stay off the welfare rolls and successfully juggle her duties as both primary caregiver and sole breadwinner for those three kids...
...The Personal Responsibility Act itself produced two primary changes in the lives of the working/welfare poor...
...In the hours I spent with her, it became clear to me that she suffered from serious mental health problems—matching clinical definitions of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder...
...Connected to these, but harder to count, were all those poor mothers who gave up before they got started...
...Welfare mothers who are not employed within a specified period (thirty days in Arbordale, forty-five in Sunbelt City), are required to enroll in full-time training programs or take full-time unpaid workfare placements until they can find a job...
...Leaving the office, she vowed never to return...
...Thanks to public housing and the time-limited child care subsidy offered by the welfare office, she was making ends meet...
...Celia had an eighth-grade education, no financial assets, few job skills, and no extended family members with sufficient resources to see her through...
...Under the old welfare system, she could have simply returned to full welfare benefits...
...It includes the job search that all new clients must start immediately (forty verifiable job contacts in thirty days), the "job readiness" and "lifeskills" workshops they are required to attend, the (timeconsuming and difficult) child support enforcement process in which they must agree to participate, and the constant monitoring of their eligibility for welfare and their progress toward employment...
...She'd been managing with the help of her father's Social Security checks and her boyfriend's help...
...Before they even begin the application process, potential welfare clients are required to attend the diversion workshop...
...Welfare recipients are overwhelmingly mothers (90 percent), they are disproportionately non-white (38 percent are black, 25 percent Latino, and 30 percent white), nearly half are without high-school diplomas (47 percent), the majority have experience in only unskilled jobs, about half suffer from physical or mental health disabilities, almost as many have a history of domestic violence, and all have children to care for...
...Sonya was one example of the many sanctioned welfare clients I met, though her case was more dramatic than most...
...In Sunbelt City the pressure to get off the welfare rolls is introduced even more directly and forcefully...
...In Arbordale, about onequarter gave up before completing the application process...
...For those who persisted through the application process, their compliance to the rules of reform was assured not just by the long-term threat of time limits, but by the more immediate threat of sanctions...
...Caseworkers in Sunbelt City guessed that about one-third of the mothers who attended their diversion workshops were ("successfully") diverted from applying for benefits...
...Even though it was the 52 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 night shift and the pay was low, she felt good about helping out the homeless, and was grateful for the mentoring and support she'd received from the welfare office...
...The welfare rolls have been cut by more than half— from twelve million recipients in 1996 to five million today...
...I talked to her about the Social Security Disability program, even though I knew that she had only a slim chance of getting help there...
...National-level accountings of reform would also place Teresa and her three children in the plus column...
...Nationwide, as the welfare rolls were declining by more than half, the rate of dire (welfare-level) poverty declined by only 15 percent...
...Add to this the fact that public opinion polls show that almost no one liked the old system of welfare and most people (including most welfare recipients) agree that the principles behind reform—independence, selfsufficiency, strong families, a concern for the common good—are worthy ideals...
...On the one hand, welfare reform offered sufficient positive employment supports to allow poor families to leave welfare more quickly, and in some cases it offered just the boost that was needed to allow those families to achieve genuine long-term financial stability...
...Twenty years old, with a tenth-grade education and two children, she'd been on welfare most of the time since she gave birth to her oldest son at age thirteen...
...They aren't...
...Among those who have left welfare, the majority (60 percent to 65 percent) are employed...
...I watched her feed lunch to her son: every can, jar, plate, and utensil in her kitchen was precisely ordered, and she was unable to continue our conversation until all the dishes were washed and dried and the counters disinfected, twice, for good measure...
...But, over the long haul, we can expect to see rising rates of hunger, homelessness, drug abuse, and crime...
...She still didn't make enough money to get by without child care help and an income supplement from welfare, but was hoping for a raise, studying for her high school equivalency exam, and thinking about taking a second job...
...When I commented on her spotlessly clean and carefully decorated apartment, she told me that she completely rearranged it at least once a month and sometimes once a week...
...Twenty-six years old, with two daughters aged six and eight, she had a history of working only part-time, on and off, in unskilled jobs...
...She was the full-time caregiver for her grandchild on a lung machine, her terminally ill father, and her own two young children...
...Because no one else was available to care for her father or grandchild, she said, it just didn't make sense for her to get a job...
...Mental health facilities and domestic violence shelters will also feel the impact of this law, as will all the poor men who are called upon to provide additional support for their children...
...Kendra might be included among those who found themselves too ashamed, discouraged, or exhausted to return to the welfare office when she needed help...
...I have to swallow my pride, and come in here, and these people just don't want to help you no more," she told us...
...Sonya had been sanctioned for failing to carry out her job search...
...More children will wind up in foster care, in substandard child care, or left to fend for themselves...
...Of course, this story is not apocalyptic...
...But Sammy's mom, Celia, had other things on her mind...
...As was true of so many others, it was unclear to me what she would do...
...One reason for this neglect, it seems to me, has been the highly effective campaign pronouncing the triumph of the Personal Responsibility Act...
...She'd spent most of her adult life outside the mainstream economy—first married to a drug dealer, then working as a street-level prostitute, and finally, drug free, on welfare...
...Some achieve success, most do not...
...and one-quarter work night or evening shifts...
...She was so quiet DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 51 WELFARE REFORM and shy that I wondered if anyone would notice how she'd been affected by reform...
...After paying rent, utility bills, and food costs for her family of three, she was left with $50 a month to cover the costs of child care, transportation, clothing, medical bills, laundry, school costs, furniture, appliances, and cleaning supplies...
...The child care costs for her three kids would amount to nearly three-quarters of her paycheck if she had to cover them herself...
...The Costs In focusing on the hardships wrought by reform, I do not mean to suggest that the successes of welfare reform are trivial or inconsequential...
...It is a cycle of moving DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 49 WELFARE REFORM from welfare to low-wage jobs to mounting debts and problems with child care, husbands, boyfriends, employers, landlords, overdue utility bills, broken-down cars, inadequate public transportation, unstable living arrangements, job layoffs, sick children, disabled parents, and the innumerable everyday contingencies of low-income life—any and all of which can lead a poor family back to the welfare office to repeat the cycle again...
...She did not volunteer and I did not ask if her pregnancy at age twelve was the result of that abuse...
...About one-half of the welfare mothers I met experienced at least temporary successes like these...
...This message is driven home by caseworkers' incessant reminders of the "ticking clock," in the ubiquity of employment brochures and job postings, and, above all, by a carefully seWELFARE REFORM quenced set of demanding rules and regulations...
...When she asked her boss about flexible hours to manage the cancer treatments, he told her she was just too easily replaced...
...They've got programs there to help you...
...Her doctor wanted her to start treatments immediately...
...Like all the information that was invisible in popular accounts of the invasion of Iraq, the ground-level hardship and human costs of reform are largely hidden from view...
...If she were single, she told me, she would manage somehow...
...Although welfare recipients are all technically eligible for federal child care subsidies, only about one-third receive them...
...they told her that if she lost her job she'd have to quickly find another or risk being cut off the welfare rolls...
...Eligibility workers in Arbordale estimated that as many as onequarter of those who started the application process did not complete it...
...There is also a tremendous amount of diversity hidden in those large-scale statistical accountings of the results of reform— and much of it is a great deal more disheaitening than it first appears...
...Yet under the terms of reform, the long-term outlook for the majority is not so positive...
...They are also a central basis for my case of cognitive dissonance...
...One brother was dead, the other on his way to prison...
...Following this same pattern, about three-quarters of the families who left welfare are in jobs without medical insurance, retirement benefits, sick days, or vacation leave...
...As is true in about half the states nationwide, Sunbelt City has a "diversionary" program designed to keep poor mothers and children from applying for welfare in the first place...
...More disabled family members will be left without caregivers...
...And her job, like that child care subsidy, was only temporary...
...SHARON HAYS, author of Flat Broke with Children, is a professor of sociology and women's studies at the University of Virginia...
...Like Sally, she was grateful for the help she'd received from the welfare office...
...Why are all these mothers and children now avoiding welfare...
...But with children to worry about, she knew she couldn't make it much longer...
...Just four months off the welfare rolls, Andrea was already in trouble...
...Fortunately, she lived in one of the few states with a welfare policy that exempted domestic-violence victims from the immediate demand to find work...
...By 2002, the National Governors' Association found itself begging Congress not to follow through on plans to increase the pressure on welfare offices and welfare recipients across the nation—the costs, they explained, would WELFARE REFORM be far too high for already stretched state budgets to bear...
...The poor will manage as they have always managed, magically and mysteriously, to make do on far less than poverty-level income...
...They are a central basis for the celebration of reform...
...Throughout, these working, training, and job-searching welfare mothers are expected to find somewhere to place their children...
...When we talked about the possibilities for employment, she explained that she found it necessary to take four showers a day, and worried that she couldn't handle this with a full-time job, especially, she said, since buses don't always run on schedule...
...But most former recipients do not find full-time or year-round work, leaving their average annual wage estimated at just over $10,000 a year...
...Of those who have left the rolls since reform, a full 40 percent are without work or welfare at any given time...
...In the meantime, only a fraction of welfare families have actually hit their federal lifetime limits on welfare benefits: just 120,000 welfare mothers and children had reached their limits by 2001...
...To make sense of this part of the story, one needs to understand the complicated changes that have taken place inside welfare offices across the nation...
...The reality behind the declining welfare 50 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 rolls is millions of former welfare families moving in and out of low-wage jobs...
...The pressure is intense...
...She'd finally landed a secure and meaningful job, she thought, working at a homeless shelter run by the Salvation Army...
...I've been suffering from it ever since...
...With a good job at the phone company, medical benefits, sick leave and vacation leave, a nine-to-five schedule, possibilities for advancement, and enough income to place her and her two kids above the poverty line, she was better off than she'd ever been on welfare benefits or in any of the (many) lowwage, no-benefit jobs she'd had in the past...
...Her oldest daughter was asking for new school clothes, her youngest had a birthday coming soon, and Andrea couldn't take her mind off the upcoming winter utility bills...
...I can here offer only a glimpse...
...Overall, two-thirds of those who have left welfare are either unemployed or working for wages that do not lift their families out of poverty...
...Using special funds made available by reform, welfare caseworkers not only provided her with a welfare check, but also helped her to manage car repairs and the down payment on an apartment...
...All these women and their children have contributed to the decline of the welfare rolls...
...Welfare caseworkers had helped her out with clothing for work, bus vouchers, and a child care subsidy that got her through the training...
...Teresa was smart and capable, but had only a high school diploma and almost no work experience...
...Conference of Mayors found itself pleading with the Bush administration for more financial help to manage the rising populations of the hungry and homeless in American cities...
...Cradling her infant daughter, she told me that she had been recently diagnosed with cancer...
...one-third have had to cut the size of meals, and nearly half have had trouble paying their rent or utility bills...
...The three workshops I went to all focused on the importance of "self sufficiency," the demanding nature of welfare requirements, and the advantages of work—and left most of the poor mothers in attendance weary and confused...
...Her phone had been turned off the month before, and she was unsure how she'd pay this month's rent...
...I met her as she conveyed this story to her friends in the Arbordale waiting room, fluctuating between tones of anger and sadness...
...Six months later her caseworkers told me how quickly Kendra's life had unraveled...
...Sarah discovered at her initial Arbordale welfare interview that in order to receive benefits she would need to begin a job search immediately...
...The Medicaid system was in crisis, and large numbers of poor families were no longer receiving the food stamps for which they were eligible...
...But her boyfriend had left her, and medical bills were eating up all her father's income...
...Food banks were running short on food, homeless shelters were closing their doors to new customers, and local charities were raising their eligibility requirements to contend with rising numbers of people in need...
...Although she'd been working at a local Fotomart for three months, the welfare office still helped her with the costs of child care—costs she couldn't otherwise manage on her $6 per hour pay...
...I didn't have the heart to tell her...
...Kendra fell apart emotionally, lost her job, and left the welfare rolls...
...Once she and her children were settled, her boss planned to hire her again...
...To put it another way: whereas the vast majority of desperately poor families received welfare support prior to reform (84 percent), today less than half of them do...
...When I went home that night, the local television news was interviewing a smiling former welfare mother recently employed at a supermarket chain...
...At the same time, most welfare recipients have work experience (83 percent), and most want to work...
...Of the 60 percent who do have jobs, their average wage is approximately $7 per hour...
...From one point of view, it makes perfect sense that so many have celebrated the results of the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act...
...I worried, a lot, about how she and her kids would get by...
...I think welfare's better now," she told me...
...As much as Teresa thought she was doing better than ever and spoke of how happy she was to be getting dressed up every morning and going out to work, she was still concerned about the future...
...Many of the most desperate among them will simply disappear, off the radar screen, off to places unknown...
...To be sanctioned means that all or part of a family's welfare benefits are cut, while the "clock" keeps ticking toward that lifetime limit...
...And in many cases it is difficult to distinguish the successes from the failures...
...Any welfare mother who fails to follow through with her job search, workfare placement, training program, child support proceedings, reporting requirements, or the myriad of other regulations of the welfare office is sanctioned...
...As part of my research on welfare reform, I'd spent the afternoon playing on the floor with Sammy, the four-year-old son of a welfare recipient...
...Inside the welfare offices of Arbordale and Sunbelt City many of the women I met became so disheartened that they simply gave up and left the rolls...
...If Monique could remain hidden from her ex-husband, things would work out just fine...
...Yet, as Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein demonstrated in Making Ends Meet, taking into account the additional costs associated with employment (such as child care, transportation, clothing), working poor families like these actually suffer more material hardship than their counterparts on welfare...
...Two caseworkers spent a day off trying to find her (an extremely rare undertaking), but no one knew where she had gone...
...She'd had only one job in her lifetime, and that lasted for just four months...
...She'd also checked with her welfare caseworkers...
...I'm working and I feel like I can make it on my own...
...The U.S...
...They're actually giving you an opportunity...
...She was sweet, quietly charming, and deeply earnest...
Vol. 50 • September 2003 • No. 4
