Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine
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trusted various others, only to learn themselves through experience over time that this trust was unwarranted. This process indicates that they had not inherited cultural values that led them to reject these outcomes. Instead, they reported that their experience of the structural contexts of the welfare office and other settings had produced their skepticism about whether they could count on caseworkers, bosses, boyfriends, and others to come through for them. Like Liebow’s “streetcorner men” and Edin and Kefalas’s single mothers, for these women structural forces and not cultural values appear to guide the behaviors that those observing from afar have deemed undeserving.41
THE STUDY AND THE ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
The findings in this book are based on a total of ninety-five interviews with two different sets of women in Chicago, one before welfare reform and one after.42 I interviewed twenty-six women in 1994–95, before reform was passed. Another sixty-nine women were interviewed in 2004–5, after reform was fully in place.43 All of the women had at least one child under the age of eighteen and either were receiving welfare or had received it in recent years. The women varied in age, race and ethnicity, education level, marital history, and number of children. Some had received welfare for long periods, some for only quick stints. Some seemed to have made stable transitions into the labor force, some had made initial forays that seemed less assured of permanence, and for some, finding employment appeared to be only a distant hope. In short, while my qualitative nonrandom samples cannot represent the full population of low-income women in Chicago (and, while one might expect some similarities to other large urban areas, Chicago cannot represent other geographical locales, especially rural ones), I was careful to include a wide variety of women from different backgrounds who were at different points in making welfare-to-work transitions.44 This latter variation allowed me to hear about both current welfare and current employment experiences from the women I interviewed. I thus feel confident that I have tapped the experience of a varied group of women in each time period.
I draw primarily on the interviews themselves, but to provide additional information that might help to interpret findings, I and my graduate student assistants did spend more informal time with a handful of women in each time period, allowing for follow-up and more in-depth observation of the challenges they faced in daily life. I was also able to conduct some informal observation at some of the job-training sites and welfare offices where respondents received services and where I also spoke with personnel.45
Chapter 1 provides a more in-depth overview of how U.S. policy has addressed low-income mothers over time, what welfare reform actually did, and what we know about reform’s effects. It then moves on to treat trust and distrust in more detail. It concludes by discussing the role of structural factors in creating the circumstances that produce distrust.
The detailed findings of the study are given in chapters 2 through 6, each of which covers one of the five contexts in which I studied distrust. Chapter 2 focuses on women’s interactions with caseworkers in the welfare office. It is through caseworkers that women learn welfare rules and access welfare benefits. The nature of a woman’s relationship with her caseworker determines in part her understanding of welfare rules and whether she believes they will be followed reliably. While some women praised supportive caseworkers, most described caseworkers who paid inadequate attention to their needs and treated them with hostility. As a result of these difficult interactions, many women in both time periods either did not know official welfare rules or suspected that caseworkers honored only the rules that were not in a recipient’s favor. Both the lack of communication of welfare rules and the distrust that they would be properly implemented undermined voluntary incentives designed to entice recipients into the labor market. Distrust thus inhibited women’s positive response to voluntary incentives. Mandatory policies such as time limits, however, were more effective, since they were in line with women’s view of caseworkers as unsupportive.
Chapter 3 explores women’s experiences in the workplace as they interacted with supervisors and coworkers. The workplace is an arena in which both employers and employees face uncertainty. As other scholars in the sociology of work have suggested, but as is not sufficiently recognized in studies of policy, employers do not know which employees will perform reliably and be trustworthy and which will not.46 Similarly, employees do not know whether employers will treat them fairly. Women in low-wage jobs often feel their supervisors (and sometimes their coworkers) mistreat them and thus do not trust that they will get a fair shake at work. Surprisingly, this distrust led women to quit their jobs not only before welfare reform, when they could reliably replace wages (at least in part) with welfare benefits, but also after reform, when no such financial guarantee was in place. Quick turnover in jobs was thus due not only to factors outside the workplace, such as insufficient child care or transportation challenges, but also to traits of the workplace itself—in this case, the conditions that produced employee distrust of supervisors.
Chapter 4 investigates the arena of child care. The post-reform group described the same inability to trust the quality of child care providers available as the women interviewed before reform. Women after reform sometimes felt forced by work mandates to use care providers they did not trust, but they tended to stop these arrangements eventually. Women in both time periods interrupted their labor market participation because of their distrust in their children’s care providers.
Chapter 5 treats women’s relationships with the fathers of their children and other romantic partners. Many women reported they could not trust the fathers of their children or other romantic partners. Even though some women were romantically involved with men, they often kept partners at arm’s length, and their suspicions kept them from marrying the men in their lives. Despite welfare reform’s removal of several marriage disincentives and its rhetoric about the value of marriage, distrust still forestalled marriage.
Chapter 6 addresses women’s relationships with members of their kinship and friendship networks. This was the arena in which women trusted people the most. Many women considered family members and friends priceless allies. Still distrust was present. Some friends and family members used drugs and alcohol to excess, others promised to take care of children but went out to party instead, while others constantly asked for money or food or, worse yet, took it without asking. Women who felt they could not trust network members went to great lengths to keep such people out of their lives and away from their children. Untrustworthy network members not only represented a lost source of potential support but could drain households of resources, time, and peacefulness. Chapter 6 also explores whether the kinds of resources that kinship and friendship networks provide women have changed since welfare reform. It shows that women interviewed before reform drew more on their networks for job information that helped them get ahead, whereas women interviewed after reform were more likely to draw on their networks for resources like money or child care that helped them survive day to day. In both time periods, there was a relationship between women’s trust in their networks and their ability to draw support from their networks.
The Conclusion urges reformers to think more broadly and deeply than they have about how distrust is produced and what its consequences are for low-income mothers. It pays particular attention to the ways in which policies designed without regard to the importance of building trust (such as welfare reform) may fall short of their intended goals.
Each of the book’s chapters tells a story of distrust. The details differ depending on the particular arena of low-income women’s lives examined in that chapter, but the general process is strikingly similar throughout. By watching this process play out five times in five separate contexts, we begin to see clues that something about the structure of the context itself—about the incentives and constraints that other people and institutions in it were facing—made the women keenly aware that their interests were not the same as the interests of these others and made them deeply suspicious of the others’ trustworthiness. The women were not uniform in their distrust. Some distrusted only some people in each arena, or only people in certain arenas. And certainly many women did experience trust in others at times. But across all the women and all the contexts, there were distinct patterns of distrust. Welfare reform certainly made changes, but it did not change the circumstances that produced distrust or the inhibiting effects of distrust described by women in poverty.