Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine
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like picking up prescriptions for her at the pharmacy. The last straw came when Bethany was accused of stealing on the job.
People were stealing out of the safe. Things was missing out the storage room. People’d walk off with candy or whatever. . . . Then me and . . . this other coworker, we was like new to the job, so it was like . . . trying to point the finger at us. And it’s like, “Wait a minute! Hold up, I’m not going through this!” I told my brother, “I’ll leave the job before I sit up here and be ridiculed like that.” And we come to find out it was two people that had been working there all along. We was like, “See?”
When the true culprits were apprehended, it was too late for Bethany. The incident cemented her belief that she would never be treated fairly by her supervisor. She quit. Bethany’s distrust in people in two separate settings—the welfare office and the workplace—conspired to pull her out of steady employment and back toward the welfare system.
As the scholar Francis Fukuyama points out, trust is a “lubricant” for action, while distrust stalls it.5 If persons or institutions are indeed trustworthy (a condition that often seems unmet in Bethany’s world), trust in them opens up opportunities and distrust closes off opportunities. For low-income mothers like Bethany, distrust is a barrier to taking the actions the wider society wants them to take—voluntarily leaving welfare, finding work, using child care, getting married, involving their children’s fathers in family life, and relying on kin rather than government for support. Low-income families who frequently face material and other hardships are in great need of the opportunities that trusting might bring, such as gaining a foothold in the labor market, accessing nurturing child care services, or partnering with those who may share the challenges of raising children in poverty. And yet, as it turns out, they find themselves in circumstances that do not promote trust. While they need trust’s benefits, they are unlikely to trust. Distrust can be a powerful force in guiding key life decisions. But this factor, with its profound and wide-ranging consequences for low-income mothers, has been too long overlooked.
In 2005, ten years after my interview with Bethany, I visited Susan Schiller’s brick row house in a Chicago low-rise public housing project. Her living room was painted a peeling dark greenish-brown. Its first-floor windows, which were immediately adjacent to the sidewalk and unadorned by curtains or shades, afforded no privacy. While Susan and I talked, several neighbors stuck their heads right into one of the windows to say hello as they walked by. Susan, a white woman in her early forties and the single mother of four children (only two of whom were still under eighteen), had decorated the room with her children’s sports trophies. At five foot ten, she was tall and attractive, though she complained about all the weight she had put on over the years. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, who was even taller than Susan, popped in and out of our conversation in order to affectionately tease her mom.
Susan, like Bethany, had a long work history interrupted by several stints on welfare. She had left her most recent job in a desperate but failed attempt to gain control over her fifteen-year-old son, who had gotten caught up in gang activity and was now incarcerated. She was looking for work and scraping by with help from her oldest son, a twenty-four-year-old who worked as a medical assistant and lived in his own apartment nearby, and her boyfriend, who made under $10 an hour as a forklift driver.6 Luckily, since she lived in public housing, her rent was dropped to zero during the times she had no earnings.
Susan also did not place much faith in caseworkers. She suspected that a caseworker’s main goal was to “cut [people] totally off,” and since she felt caseworkers made it as unpleasant as possible to be on welfare, her wariness led her to try to avoid welfare as long as she could. She wanted to save the months she had remaining on her time-limited welfare clock because “Who’s to say when hard times will come?” (She defined these potential hard times as worse than now, when she was “hurting” but still had “a roof over [her] head.”) But that left her dependent on jobs in which she also at times distrusted both her supervisors and her coworkers and her supervisors distrusted her. As with Bethany, Susan’s distrust in the workplace served to interrupt periods of employment. Susan had been fired from a job selling food at a large arena after being accused of stealing a hot dog. Susan denied stealing the hot dog and suspected that really her boss wanted to get rid of her after she had refused to spy on a coworker who she feared would retaliate.
They don’t screen their employees. Anybody can work there. You can just get out of prison and work there. . . . So they have a lot of people who rob them. That’s just constant. So, what they’ll do is they’ll spy on you. . . . [There was] this girl that was a couple registers down from me, and [my supervisor] said that she knows she’s stealing and she wanted me to watch, and I said, “It is not my job. I’m not watching her and telling you nothing.” That could cause a lotta stuff [meaning retribution]. Because, like I said, they’ll hire anybody. “If you know she’s stealing, then you have somebody else watch her. That’s what you have . . . supervisors for. . . .” Then she got mad.
It is hard to know what exactly happened at the arena and who was at fault for what, but it seems fairly clear that mutual distrust played some role.
Bethany Grant and Susan Schiller are just two of the ninety-five women I spoke with about raising children and making do in poverty. Many of the other women also brought up the topic of distrust in caseworkers and work supervisors and described how it related to their welfare and work outcomes. But lack of trust played a role beyond welfare receipt and employment patterns. Other women talked about distrust in relation to other outcomes, such as whether they signed up for child care, got married, allowed their kids’ fathers into their kids’ lives, or relied on their family and friends for help. In fact, there did not seem to be any important outcomes in their lives that the women discussed without referencing how their trust or distrust in others played a role.
When I interviewed Bethany in the mid-1990s, I was a doctoral student writing a dissertation on how attention to the full context of low-income mothers’ lives helps us understand how women in poverty make decisions about welfare use and getting jobs. I explored women’s experiences not only in welfare offices but also in workplaces, and with child care providers, boyfriends and husbands, and family and friends. When I conducted these mid-1990s interviews, I was not looking for the presence of distrust and I did not ask specifically about it. I simply wanted to know how various settings, such as welfare offices or child care markets, influenced women’s choices about welfare and employment. But once the interviews were completed, I was struck by how many women talked about their suspicions of others’ unreliability and by how these suspicions arose in almost every area of women’s lives. While each of the contexts I studied had its particular impact on the women’s experiences, I came to see a familiar pattern: the women distrusted many of those whom they encountered, and their distrust was a key ingredient in shaping their behaviors.
A year after I completed the 1990s interviews, and hence between the time I talked with Bethany and the time I met Susan, a major piece of federal legislation designed to change low-income women’s decision making was passed. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), or welfare reform, as it is more commonly known, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 22, 1996, and was implemented in 1997. Its goals were (and continue to be) to promote quick exits from the welfare rolls, employment, marriage, paternal involvement, and reliance on kin rather than government. To do so, it created time limits on welfare benefits (hence Susan’s concern over her welfare “clock”), work requirements, and funding streams for child care subsidies and marriage promotion programs. It removed disincentives to marry and made paternity establishment mandatory for the receipt of benefits.
In the immediate post-reform era, a flurry of research activity sprang up to examine welfare reform. Although I had moved on to work on other topics, I followed the new welfare reform literature with interest, eager to see how the experiences of women navigating the worlds of welfare and low-wage work since reform differed from those of the women I had studied before reform. As time wore on, however, I came to see that little comparable work was being produced. There were many quantitative studies designed to identify the effects of reform,7 and some key qualitative studies had looked at specific aspects of reform—how post-reform