Sharon Hays
Professor of Sociology and Studies in Women and Gender
"Flat Broke with Children; Women in the Age of Welfare Reform"

Back in 1996, then President Clinton signs into law the most dramatic reform of welfare since we have seen since its inception in 1935. The more I heard about this law, the more I knew I had to study it. When I hear congress proclaiming, as they do in the law reforming welfare, that marriage is the foundation of a successful society; that single parenting and poor mothers raising their children alone are representative of a crisis in our society; and that the image that welfare reform, this is how congress puts it, would end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting work and marriage. I couldn't imagine that too many congressional members have spent a whole lot of time in the world of poverty. I couldn't imagine that they spent a whole lot of time in welfare offices. And, it seems strange to me that they were prescribing a set of values, it seems to me, for a group of people whose circumstances they didn't necessarily understand in the first place.

So it seemed to me kind of important that it was kind of important to figure out exactly what was going on there, and exactly how this reform this reform would play out. I think that people should recognize that welfare reform says something not only about the poor in American society, but about the values of he nation as a whole. That it's important to recognize that welfare reform is responding to massive changes in working family life that have affected all Americans. And then that it's important to recognize welfare mothers and children as the most economically and culturally disadvantaged members of this society, are in fact then, the walking representatives of social inequality and of the impact of massive changes in working family life.

And to the extent then that welfare reform is a kind of response to these changes and that inequality, I'll argue, that it is in fact a contradictory and incomplete response. And that in thinking through its problems, hopefully, we can actually think through how we might better address the problems of work and family life in American society today, as well as the problem of social inequality and what it would mean to be a more inclusive society. Let's say, one that would actually include welfare moms and their children as full social members.

To figure out the cultural message of welfare reform and how it would play out inside welfare offices, I spent three years inside of two welfare offices. One in a medium sized town in the south that I call Arbordayle. And another in a vast metropolitan area in the Southwest that I call Sunbelt City. And within those context I interviewed case workers and clients at all levels. I hung out at staff meetings. I went to all of the kinds of eligibility and ongoing meetings that welfare mothers are required to attend. I went through all of the forms that they have to fill out. I spent a lot of time hanging out in waiting rooms and figuring out exactly what was going on there. And then, I interviewed welfare moms, mainly in their homes, and spent a lot of time hanging out in poor neighborhoods and housing projects.

In order to tell you what I experienced in the world of welfare, I think that it's important to say: who are welfare recipients. As much as I think most people here know who welfare recipients are, I want to say a bit more about this. I always remember my editor as he reads the first chapter of the book, which is all about women, and he writes in the margin "when did welfare become about women." And I thought to myself, "oh my God, there's actually people there who don't know that welfare is about women." So, welfare clients sit in particular social group. There are approximately 5 million nation wide today. There were 12 million at the inception of welfare reform. They are all desperately poor at the moment that they enter the welfare office. In order to be eligible for welfare they have to have incomes that are less than one half of the federal standards for poverty, and most of them have far less than that.
The adult welfare recipient are overwhelmingly women; 95% of adult welfare recipients are women, and this is no accident. They are a group of single parents, and they are also disproportional non-white. Welfare recipients are about 1/3 black, 1/3 Latina, and 1/3 white. And the number of non-whites in the welfare roll seems to be creeping up since reform.

So, all of these people live well below the national standards for poverty and their welfare checks were never devised to bring them above that poverty line. The average welfare payment for a family of three, and I really want you to think about this, is about $350 a month. A mother with two kids raising them on $350 a month. That these particular groups of people are so poor as to need to go to the welfare office is no accident or historical footnote. The fact is, most single parent families are headed by women. Single parent families headed by women are the poorest of families in American society today. Single parent families headed by women are disproporationally non-white, and non-white families are disporportionally poor. Hence, what you see then is a set of linkages. A set of particular social groups that are the most disadvantaged members of this society. So when you look at the welfare roles what you are looking at is the feminization of poverty, the racialization of poverty, and the juvenilization of poverty. It is important always to remember that children outnumber adults in the welfare roles by more than 2:1.

So, and when you think about this set of linkages, race, class, and gender, it's also important, the socialist in me always want to remind people that when we look at something like welfare rolls we're not just looking at just at a matter of individual choices, what we're looking at is structured and systematic social inequalities. And those social inequalities, I would argue, follow from major changes in working family life, persistent racial and gender forms of inequality, and rising rates of income inequality in American society. Sorry, so that's the bad news starting place.

What does it look like inside the welfare office? It looks like lots of contradictions. There's a way in which, you know, my first choice would be to just tell a single story because that would be nicest. Especially now that it's George Bush, I could just scream at George Bush endlessly and say, you know, it's just awful, it's horrible, people are falling over and dying. But the truth is, inside of the welfare office you see all kinds of contradictions. You see both hope and fear. You see both a system of rewards as well as a system of punishment. And you see real successes as well as incredibly disturbing defeats in the lives of welfare mothers. Now, as it turns out overall, the story is not a pretty one but nonetheless I want to be clear that there are in fact positive things that have taken place in the welfare offices since reform.

Okay, everyone here knows the rules, right? Remember, this is like an old story. You think this is over, right? Okay, right, there were all these lazy, good for nothing mothers on welfare and then we were going to get them to go out to work. And the way in which we were going to do that is we were going to put time limits on welfare receipts, and then we were going to set up a set of rules and then they would all know that they were supposed to go out to work and everything would be fine. The image here, and I like the image here because I thought about it, and especially since the proclamation of the success of welfare reform. The image here is a set of clear headed case workers, and a government machine that simply inserts the appropriate rules, inserts the set of rewards, punishments and time limits, and then the welfare mothers who have been sitting around wondering what they should do are told that they should go out to work. And they stand up, smooth out their clothes, and say "oh work, right, of course," and then they go off to work, get of welfare rolls and everything is fine. There is a way in which the newspaper headlines years after welfare reform seemed to confirm this story: the welfare rolls are going down, everyone is getting jobs, phew , nothing bad happened it all worked out just fine.

At the very same moment that newspapers were telling those cheerful stories about welfare mothers getting jobs and the smooth transition through welfare reform, in fact, I was in the welfare office and there was nothing like this smooth and simple story going on there. When in fact what was happening is that a tremendous numbers of welfare case workers are forced to take on a tremendous new set of rules and regulations and somehow try to integrate them into what is already an incredibly complex and impossible system. So if you look at the rules and regulations of welfare reform in welfare offices, literally, it looks like books like this (holds hands up about one foot apart indicating a thick book) and they read like the instructions of how to work with your computer or how to do that Japanese toy. That was before welfare reform, and they got a new book that looks like this (holds hands 3 feet apart), literally. So everyone has their manuals of how they are supposed to behave with clients after welfare reform. This was no smooth transition, I can tell you, people were clueless. You can walk into a welfare office today and, the odds are, you will not find a single case worker who knows all the rules of welfare reform, or how to institute them. So people walk around the hallways scratching their hands, asking, "so, what am I supposed to do in this case?"

There is a frantic sense, because the rules of welfare reform are actually not only demanding, but become increasingly demanding over time. This is built into the law from the start. So just as case workers are conquering the first set of rules that they have to face, they are faced with a whole new set. The case workers start out very hopeful; "Things might work out, this might be a good idea, we've been doing the same thing for years, this might work." And more, and more, they become increasingly frantic and discouraged. By the time I left the welfare office 3 years later, first of all, nearly half of the case workers had quit their jobs. Those who remained tended to be somewhat, if not fully, resigned to the inadequacies of reform. Many already started to establish plans for basically subverting whatever rules the Bush administration might come up with. That's the good news, by the way, if the Bush administration passes welfare reauthorization, you can expect large numbers of welfare case workers to ignore it.

How was it for the welfare client? Now, for the welfare clients walking into the welfare offices, I guess I want you to try to imagine what it's like to be so desperately poor that you're forced to go to the welfare office. There's nobody walking in there thinking, "oh, well this will be a good time, maybe this afternoon I'll go and apply for welfare." People who apply for welfare are desperate, and they are mothers with children. So, to the extent that welfare reform brought with it, certain kinds of supportive services that meant to make it easier for welfare mothers to care for their children and to find work, which included whole systems of child care subsidies, transportation subsidies, and new income supplements if you got a minimum wage job and you have three kids, the welfare office would still provide you with a small check for a short period of time. I can tell you that for welfare mothers this was good way. There's no other way , as much as I want to say, "oh, it's just dismal," it was good news. The kinds of real supports that came with welfare reforms, were in fact experienced up close and personal as an image that it may be true that the nation is actually supporting poor. Now, the kind of hopefulness, however I don' want to be unclear about this, I just want to be fair, that mothers walked into the welfare office with, was not the same, however, as the way in which they came out the other end. The reality is that over time those kinds of supplements and help, with childcare, transportation, and income support, turn out to be insufficient. And this is why case workers become increasingly resigned, and for welfare mothers this means that overtime they become increasingly desperate.

Part of their desperation, and to understand how all of this works over the long term, it's kind of important to understand the kinds of rules and punishments that welfare recipients face within the welfare offices. Turns out that the first thing that you see when you walk into the Alberdayle welfare office is a big red sign that's two feet high, and about 12 feet long, and it reads: "how many months do you have left?" This image that everyone is on a time clock and that they must move with great speed into jobs is fulfilled through every rule and regulation of the welfare office. So that according to the new rules of welfare reform, and these vary somewhat state to state, but the overall image is the same, is that the first thing you must do is go on a job search. Forty job contacts in thirty days, and remember, you have two kids on average with ages three and six, that you must put on child care while you go on this job search. You then attend a series of life skills and job preparation courses where you learn how to interview for a job and how not to chew gum at work, and how to manage your budget so that you can make it on a minimum wage job. And if you haven't found a job after a forty or forty-five day period you will be placed in a training program or in an unpaid work placement that your case worker chooses for you, or with you, and if that doesn't work out, and if you should somehow fail to attend everyday of your training, your life skills classes, your complete, your job search, check in with your case worker, etc, etc, etc, you will be sanctioned. The system of sanctions is actually crucial to the system of welfare reform. This is the form under which welfare mothers and their children have been punished for their failure to follow the system of rules instituted by reform. The punishment is that you must go a month or longer without a welfare check, and while you are going without a welfare check your months, you're months, are still ticking away towards your lifetime limit on welfare.

It turns out over the long haul that this whole system of rules and punishments is very effective is training the poor that the idea is that they should get out of the welfare office as quickly as possible in any way that they can. When you look inside of the welfare office and you see it as an image of the nation's value, so far you have an image that says "well hell, if we give women just a little bit of childcare and transportation help, and maybe a little income supplement on the side, we can send them all out into the workforce with their two children and they will all be just fine." If I have mother's in the audience they wont have any trouble figuring why this scenario doesn't quite work. A little bit of transportation and childcare help on the side is not all today's single parents need to manage the requirements of work and family, let alone the realities of low wage jobs in America.

So, has welfare reform been successful? The first two-three years of welfare reform it was all over the news. Some of you may remember this, actually, the New York Times, you can pretty much count on them publishing at least three or four times a week. The poor were at the center of discourse in this country. This, for those of us who care about inequality, was a really interesting phenomenon in itself. To see the poor in headlines in the New York Times on a regular basis. They have, by the way, disappeared. you will no longer find them there in the pages of the New York Times. And why? Because Americans have been convinced that welfare reform was a success. Now this, of course, as someone who's been there, I'm very interested by that. And I call this, in fact, the basis for my severe case of cognitive dissidence. I suffer, because the sad reality is that given income of inequality of American society today, given race and gender discrimination at work today, given the realities of single parenting, and given the population of welfare recipients (40% of them without high school diplomas, 50% of them have been the victims of domestic violence, 50% of them either suffer from serious physical disabilities or serious mental health problems, and all of them have children to care for) given these realities and given the reality of low wage jobs in America society today, the sense of hope that I saw in the early days of welfare reform has disappeared. It is no longer there, and the reality now is lots, and lots of desperately poor mothers with children trying to find the next low wage job so that they will not have to back to the welfare office.

This is what the success of welfare reform looks like. And if you read the numbers, the ones that get used for success, you can actually figure this out. There is this idea, 60% they say, 60%, of former welfare recipients are now employed. Well guess what, the vast majority of that 60% do not, are not, getting fulltime jobs that are year round. Two-thirds of them will have lost those jobs in under a year. I want you to imagine what kinds of jobs they are. The average wage of employed welfare recipients overall is $7 an hour, but the average annual wage is a better indicator of what's going on. Because, in fact, they are not because they are not employed year round full time, the result for former welfare recipients who are employed, remember our success stories, is an average annual wage, before taxes, of $10,000 a year to take care of you and your two children. That's the good news. There are 40% of welfare recipients who have no work at all. We do not know where they are. It's really important for you to know this; we don't know where they are. Forty percent of people who have come off the welfare roll cannot be identified as either employed or on welfare, or otherwise, apparently a member of American society at all. Now, the truth of the matter is, we know those sixty percent are losing their jobs all the time. So those forty to sixty percent are actually moving in and out of low wage jobs all the time. And it's some smaller percentage that has found no work, and are not returning to the welfare office.

And this, is the bottom line disturbing reality. Is that when we recognize that the welfare rolls have been cut in half, the fact is, that the rate of desperate, welfare level poverty (that one half below the federal standards for poverty) has declined by only 15%. To turn those statistics around, this means, that, of Americans who are desperately poor living half under the federal poverty line, it used to be that 84% of them received welfare help. It used to be that one in eight children in American society got support from a welfare check. now, less than half of them do. They are getting no support, they are not rising above the poverty line. The fact of the matter is that they are too angry, ashamed, or frightened to return to the welfare office. I want you to think about that. That is what welfare reform has most effectively done. Not raise families out of poverty, but to keep families form returning to the welfare office.

A few stories of mothers that would be considered successes under the terms of welfare reform. Remember the idea is to get them into jobs, or otherwise off the welfare roll. Sarah: one example of a diverted potential client. she was the fulltime caregiver for her grandchild on a lung machine, and her terminally ill father, as well as her two relatively healthy young children. The welfare office demanded that she find work. There was no one else to care for her father or her grandchild. She refused, she was sanctioned, she disappeared. We don't know where Sarah went.
Celia: was diagnosed with cancer. She had a two year old and a four year old. She was working at the local photo-mart. She asked if she could be allowed time off in order to get the chemo and radiation treatment her doctor was demanding she begin immediately. Her boss, of course, told her she was replaceable and hence would lose her job if she left work. The welfare office had no dispensation for people in her position, and she was told that if she did not find another job she would be sanctioned. She disappeared.

Andrea: $5.75 an hour, three kids. She had managed to stay off the welfare rolls for six months, but her phone had been turned off the month before, she was unable to pay the rent bill for the coming month. It was still late fall when I met her, and she was absolutely terrified about her winter utility bill.

I guess I'll stop with her, sorry, see I can't help, they were, they're there. When I think about the welfare, the results of welfare reform, those women are with me and they are part of my severe case of cognitive dissidence. when it comes to the language of success of welfare reform, you recognize that all of those women are part of the success story, they are off the welfare roll.