Sharon Hays's Flat Broke with Children

...But those very networks mean also a greater interdependence, a greater vulnerability to the hardships and need of that extended family...

...Welfare does offer a disincentive to work...

...STEPHEN PIMPARE teaches political science at Hunter College...

...We have dodged the troubling issues, for example, by denying the truth of the "perverse incentives" claims of the right...

...Some studies have tracked the declining, and now rising, welfare caseloads, carefully documenting variation from state to state...

...It is a stunning measure of how well anti-welfare rhetoric has pervaded the culture that even women's own experience cannot dislodge it...

...It fact, given the histories of women on welfare, Hays suggests that welfare has become a "giant economic 'shelter' for domestic violence survivors...

...And what their behaviors consistently reveal is that they act, most often, with their children's well-being in mind...

...It was not millennial hysteria than gave them pause, but the realization that the first local time limit on benefits would kick in...

...But as she observes, this is not the direction in which reauthorization is heading...

...10025 (212) 316-3120...

...We get all the information we would get from wading DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 95 BOOKS through a pile of evaluations (and a fine, intelligible reading of them, too) but each bit of data is held up against the real experience of someone Hays met in the welfare office...

...In the absence of some such incontrovertible evidence to policy makers that something has gone horribly, cruelly wrong, the best we might hope for is that this book gets a wide readership, especially among those politicians who only have white paper evaluations with which to judge the success of their efforts...

...Economists have tried to gauge the relative importance of the economy, reform itself, the earned income tax credit, and other factors in driving down the rolls...

...Leaver" studies give us estimates of how many former recipients have entered the workforce (40 percent to 60 percent), their average wages (relatively low, often below poverty level, but sometimes above), and their material well-being (some are clearly better off, some poorer...

...We have data on demand for food at soup kitchens and food pantries, homelessness, and foster care placements (they're all up...

...But it is even richer, for Hays brings us with her into the welfare office and lets the caseworkers who are responsible for implementing the program speak, too...

...Worse, women benefit little from this intrusion, since most (and in some states all) of the money collected goes to the state to "reimburse it" for welfare expenditures (in Arbordale and Sunbelt City women were allowed to keep $50 per month of any money collected in child support from the child's father...

...We know what's happened to marriage rates (little) and out-of-wedlock birth rates (still rising, but more slowly...

...We learn that Nadia knows what little value she has in the labor market, but also knows her value as a mother...

...THROUGHOUT THE book Hays returns to the fundamental illogic of so much of reform...

...We meet a range of women, with a broad range of experiences...

...For most, welfare marked them as failures...

...caseworkers sensibly make little or no effort to guide women in the ways of love because, first, they are too busy racing against the ticking clock of time limits, and, more important, they know enough about their clients' lives to know that men are as likely to be the problem as the solution...

...Joy, a drug addict, has had four abortions and two children...

...They are just the run-of-the-mill souls we encounter every day, living their complex and sometimes dreary lives...

...Indeed, in Flat Broke one can find stereotypes of the "welfare queen...

...That choice that welfare offers should be celebrated and shared...

...Hays never shies away from describing the opinions and behaviors of the women she has met, even those who may seem to give comfort to critics who identify poverty as a behavioral problem and a moral failure...

...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 a very effective route...

...Sandra, belligerent, demands relief as her right...

...His book comparing recent welfare reforms with those of the Gilded Age will be published in 2004 by the New Press...

...There weren't, of course, in part because, as Hays says, "the impact of time limits is an unfolding process rather than as an explosion...

...she insists that 96 n DISSENT I Fall 2003 raising her children is work, and that she should get paid for it...

...We see some of what we might call "pathological" behaviors, but we also see real women making choices, some good, some bad, some resoundingly bad, we might think, but doing what they can, as best they can...

...Earlier in the book, Hays tells an interesting story: caseworkers in Sunbelt City were worried as New Year's 2000 approached...

...Just as a police officer has a wide range of options after pulling you over for speeding (from a mere warning to arrest, or worse), so too does a caseworker have the ability to arbitrarily choose among a broad range of responses to the client...

...The result is what may be the best book yet on welfare reform...

...If policy makers meant their family-values rhetoric they would find room to accommodate such ties...

...It will be most striking to some, as it was even for Hays, to see the ways in which welfare mothers have so fully internalized middleclass understandings of welfare and reform— very rarely did anyone claim welfare as a right or an entitlement, or think of its receipt with much of anything but shame, even when it was the only practicable option...

...There's another tension, too: a job, any job, is the responsibility enshrined in the PRA...

...This passage cuts to the heart of the central deceit of welfare reform...

...What makes these mothers different from other mothers is that their lives afford them less room for error than is likely the case for most people reading this magazine...

...There's Nadia, a woman with four children now collecting benefits, who quit her jobs because the pay was too low and the work too hard...

...But they were as ready to judge who among them was worthy or unworthy as any nonrecipient might be...

...Others show the increasing concentration of cases in cities...

...Flat Broke tells us more about living and surviving on the edge in America today than a library full of careful "scientific" evaluations...

...She or (less commonly) he might deny benefits for reasons the law doesn't specifically permit (perhaps the caseworker is in a foul mood, or just doesn't like your attitude...

...A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...

...Two caseworkers Hays met admitted to having used funds designated "work-related expenses" to fund abortions...

...The presumptions encoded in the PRA betrayed an ignorance of poor women's lives in other ways, too...

...Because of their very poverty, poor women may be more connected to—dependent upon, if you prefer—their neighbors, their family, and their friends, forming extended networks as survival strategy...

...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 310 Riverside Drive #1201, New York, N.Y...

...They were less sanguine about being forced to leave their children for lousy jobs, outraged when required to place children in what they deemed unsafe care, and resentful of being treated like children themselves...

...Here poor women are not data to be entered or cases to be catalogued or fodder for political arguments, but individuals living in a specific place and time, with real children and boyfriends and sick mothers and fear and despair and hope, trying to make the best of the few choices available to them...

...Hays similarly exposes the foolishness of efforts to encourage marriage through the welfare office...

...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...

...After distributing the specific bequests listed above Ito others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...yet giving up welfare and Medicaid to take a minimum wage job would, as Laurel tells Hays, be an irresponsible decision for many welfare mothers...

...Cycler" studies measure how many who have left the rolls have returned (perhaps 20 percent, so far), and "stayer" studies describe the characteristics of those who have never left the rolls (generally those with "multiple barriers" to employment--disability, mental illness, few skills, little education...

...She argues that the reauthorization of the PRA should, however, end sanctions, repeal the "family cap," move away from "work first" strategies, and end efforts to discourage potential recipients from even applying, a practice institutionalized in Sunbelt City's "Diversionary Workshop...

...But that is its virtue— it allows marginal workers or people with other demands upon their time to refuse work, if only for a while...

...some of those men, angered when faced with government intervention, cut off contact with their child and ended support entirely...

...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...

...Not only are women forced to endure yet another level of state intrusion into their most personal decision making, they are compelled to make contact with men who may be a danger to them (as some predicted...

...They are people here, and although some are indeed noble or pitiable, most are not...

...For her, the important ones are a caregiver tax credit, child care supplements, paid family leave, a living wage, progressive change in the tax code, job training programs, and public works projects...

...Agree or disagree, Nadia has certainly internalized at least part of the message of welfare reform, and simple judgments about the "morality" of her behavior are hard to make...

...What makes this such an impressive feat and contributes to making it such an insightful tale, is that she brings into play those data-driven studies I mentioned, and more, but does so in the context of introducing us to the women who must face the rule changes, live by the eligibility guidelines, avoid the sanctions, and wait under the axe of time limits...

...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...

...Monique admits to having a child expressly so that she could collect welfare...

...The new supplements that came with the PRA—child care, transportation subsidies, training, and education—she judges a success...

...I bequeath percent of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...Now, with the long-postponed reauthorization of welfare reform again in the air, we have a formidable array of data by which to evaluate it...

...Even the toughened child-support enforcement provisions of the PRA, which had much broader support than the rest of the bill, have proved to work much differently in practice than in theory...

...But what's missing from these evaluation studies is what makes Sharon Hays's Flat Broke with Children so welcome: here we see the impact of these new laws on the lives of those who have to confront them, the women and children receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF...

...In some cases, dependence is responsibility...

...Part of what makes Hays's biography of these women and our time so useful and so credible is that she refuses to ignore these cases, as welfare advocates can be inclined to do...

...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...Hays visited the welfare departments of two cities, here disguised as Arbordale (a midsized Southeastern city) and Sunbelt City (a Western metropolis) over a period of three years, from December 1997 to January 2001...

...Hays brings us so fully into welfare mothers' lives that we have some sense of how such decisions are made...

...There has been no clear consensus, but all seem to have been important...

...More even than that, though, Hays pulls further back and confronts the larger and harder questions about the logic of reform, measuring the purported policy goals against their actual effects as administered and experienced on the ground...

...Hays shows how the PRA, in the way it is implemented in welfare offices, punishes independence or responsibility among women, rewarding, instead, docility and compliance, just as the charity reformers of earlier eras practiced what has been rightly called a form of social control...

...She spent about 600 hours with some 50 caseworkers and 130 welfare mothers...

...I AYS CONCLUDES with the obligatory policy recommendations...

...98 n DISSENT / Fall 2003...

...Some women are made worse off, because the fathers of their children did support their child, with what they could, when they could...

...TANF is her paycheck and her due...

...that is, how the discretion available to caseworkers can undermine policy...

...Deference and obedience are, after all, important qualities for many low-wage workers...

...Yet Hays refuses to make welfare mothers noble or virtuous or pitiable simply because of their poverty...

...These cases offer cold comfort to any relief opponent who reads the book, for Hays shows us women pinioned by the society in which they live, yet inculcated with its values...

...FLAT BROKE WITH CHILDREN: WOMEN IN THE AGE OF WELFARE REFORM by Sharon Hays Oxford University Press, 2003 304 pp $30 SINCE THE PASSAGE of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRA), there has sprung up a cottage industry of studies trying to evaluate the outcome of what New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "the most regressive and brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction" and Michigan governor John Engler hailed as "the beginning of a new, empowered life for aid recipients...

...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...But it's more than that, as she observes: If we really want to include welfare mothers as active citizens, full-fledged participants in society, and the social equals of both men and the middle class, it doesn't make sense to use bureaucratic mechanisms to mentor and inspire them...

...Hays also shows us the practice of what Michael Lipsky has called "street-level bureauDISSENT / Fall 2003 • 9 7 BOOKS cracy...

...I wonder though, if those caseworkers' fears had been realized, would the conventional wisdom still be that welfare reform has succeeded and would we be moving, as we are, toward making the law even harsher...

...The result seems effortless (surely an indication of hard labor) and can be, at moments, a revelation, even to someone for whom this is familiar terrain...

...For although reform rhetoric has focused upon the dependence of women, especially black women, it is in fact their independence, from men and from "dirty" work, that seems the real target...

...Or, the caseworker might grant assistance to women who should, by rights, not receive it (say, someone particularly polite and deferential, or a friend of a cousin...

...They are very much in the minority, but they are there...

...To see so fully the ambivalence of caseworkers, to hear their assessment of the real effectiveness of the policy, and to witness their efforts to manipulate it and reshape it to their own values and desires in the service of other women is instructive, and even heartening...

...Moreover, as Hays makes clear when taking us through, with Holly and Cassandra, the lengthy paternity questionnaire, "even though it is the one portion of the welfare law that seems to be holding fathers accountable, one immediately notices that it is mothers who are initially forced to endure these regulations...

...p ERHAPS THE SIGNAL accomplishment of the book, however, and the lesson for other researchers and advocates, is the complexity, the subtlety, and the intellectual honesty with which she deals with her subject...

...Others have tried to calculate the effect on wages and unemployment rates of this new flood of workers into the market (also no consensus yet...

...All the women Hays met thought that welfare reform was generally a good thing (or said they did), though it was complicated: they were grateful for the new monies allocated for transportation assistance, high school equivalency or computer classes, and child care BOOKS subsidies (when they could get them...

...They wondered, in all seriousness, if there would be riots in the ghettos or a mob attack on the welfare office...

...Instead, the 108th Congress and the Bush administration will likely exacerbate the very worst features of the PRA—its restrictions on state flexibility, its strict work requirements, and its ill-spent funding for abstinence education and marriage promotion...

...They espoused very common understandings of the work ethic that belie patronizing notions that we must teach it to them...