Feeding the Crisis. Maggie Dickinson
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has grown steadily since 1996 (Blank and Kovak 2008). Further, growing numbers of both men and women find themselves outside of or on the edge of the paid labor force and are struggling to find a way back in.
After a huge spike beginning in 2008, the unemployment rate slowly returned to pre-recession levels. In September 2018, unemployment stood at 3.7 percent, or 6.1 million people who wanted to work, but were not employed. However, the official unemployment rate only captures part of the story. The labor force participation rate—the percentage of US residents who are currently working—suggests a less rosy economic picture for American workers. The number of people who are actually working has remained far below pre-recession levels. Only 62 percent of all adults were employed in 2017—down from 66 percent in 2007. Labor force participation rates began to rise in the early 1970s as middle-class incomes stagnated. Women, including mothers of young children, began moving into the labor force in higher numbers. Labor force participation peaked at 67.3 percent of the adult population in 2000 and has been declining ever since. In the wake of the recession, labor force participation remains at a thirty-eight-year low. Men’s participation in the labor market has steadily declined since 1950 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016). Low unemployment rates don’t tell the full story because they don’t count all the people who have given up on a labor market that has little demand for more workers.
Further, unemployment numbers tell us very little about the quality of the jobs people encounter when they enter the labor market. Employment numbers don’t just count standard employees, with regular full-time jobs. This number includes anyone working, even if they only work a few hours a week and earn next to nothing as underemployed freelance or contract laborers. Freelance and contract workers grew from 10.1 percent of all workers in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015, and nearly 40 percent of people in these jobs have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Within the part-time labor force, 6.4 million would have preferred full-time work (Katz and Krueger 2016). Even as the labor market has grown tighter, with record low unemployment rates, wages have stayed flat (O’Brien 2018).
There is a disconnect between an official economic recovery and the overwhelming sense of economic insecurity that is palpable among people at welfare offices and food pantries across the United States. This economic insecurity has become a driving force in US politics. Downward mobility runs the risk of creating a dangerous political instability. Just as the safety net has been drawn more tightly around the idea of work, workers like Nigel and the other families we will meet in this book are getting their legs kicked out from under them. Employers are abandoning their commitments to even basic tenets of the employer-employee relationship.
Work, as a system of distributing necessary resources to the bulk of the US population, has begun to fail in a range of ways. The commonsense belief that work is a way out of poverty is at odds with the reality that work has never been a particularly effective mechanism for distributing wealth, particularly for racialized populations living in the United States. For generations, African Americans and exploited immigrant laborers have been relegated to low or nonpaid, degrading forms of work that did not provide enough to sustain families with dignity and security. These insecure and exploitative labor conditions have become far more widespread in the twenty-first-century US economy. Many full-time workers no longer earn enough to afford basic necessities like food and shelter. The food safety net has been reconfigured to subsidize poor workers and exclude those who do not work, just as work itself has become more nebulous and less secure. The next chapter tells the stories of two families as they navigate the new terrain of a growing food safety net targeted to the working poor in an era where work itself is being redefined.
CHAPTER THREE
The Carrot and the Stick
Nydia, a thirty-five-year-old Puerto Rican woman with a bright smile and an infectious laugh, applied for food stamps at the local welfare office in North Brooklyn after the birth of her second child. She worked full-time and had planned on taking a full twelve weeks of unpaid maternity leave. Like many mothers, she cobbled together funds from her vacation, sick days, and savings to cover the expense of not working for three months. Her husband was “doing odds and ends,” as she put it, working in construction. Together, it should have been enough to get them through twelve weeks without Nydia’s paychecks. But a few weeks into her leave, her husband tore his rotator cuff and had to be in sling for a month. With both of them out of work, Nydia suddenly felt desperate. “I never felt the way I felt when I applied for food stamps. It was not a good feeling. I was like, holy moly, how am I going to feed my kids?” She considered cutting her maternity leave short and going back to work, but her mom convinced her to apply for food stamps instead so she could have more time at home with her son.
Nydia and her mother arrived at the local welfare office early in the day to make sure theirs wouldn’t be a wasted trip. The lines at the welfare office often snaked down the block. It wasn’t unusual to wait for several hours in the dingy waiting rooms before being told there were no appointments left for the day and to come back tomorrow. Nydia and her mother weren’t taking any chances. They were there right as the office opened. After waiting for several hours, Nydia finally got in to see a caseworker, whom she described as “mean” and “talking down” to her.
Caught between the conflicting goals of restricting welfare for unemployed applicants and expanding food stamp use among the “working poor,” front-line employees often see their job as policing the boundaries between those who genuinely deserve help and those who are trying to defraud the system. They rely heavily on official documents like tax forms and pay stubs to evaluate whether the applicant is eligible. Applicants face skepticism and suspicion as caseworkers try to make sense out of the extensive documentation that accompanies each application, which includes information documenting residence, income, expenses, assets, and citizenship status.
Lester Towns, a middle-aged African American man who works at the North Brooklyn welfare office processing food stamp applications felt that applicants “don’t want to put income down.” He continued: “They don’t want to put their bank accounts down. They don’t want to fill out anything that they feel that’s gonna make them not receive food stamps.” This was echoed by Tish Taylor, an African American woman who has worked in the welfare office for over twenty years. “We’ve been working here so long,” she said, “we know how to pull it out, the stuff that gets them in trouble. We know certain things, so we question it.”
Eligibility specialists probe clients about two main issues: household composition and income, which both determine whether a household qualifies for food stamp benefits and how much it will receive. Clear documentation of income, especially with pay stubs, is one of the easiest ways for workers to make sense of a client’s case. Clients who have no work or unstable work, work off the books, or receive some other form of irregular income are subject to far more scrutiny and have to document their income with letters written by either an employer or the applicant. Taylor described her interactions with these clients: “We say, ‘Bring the pay stubs,’ and when the client says they don’t get pay stubs, we get a letter, which we know is a fraudulent thing.”
Nydia’s caseworker quickly discovered that her husband and children were already in the computer system because they received health insurance benefits from the state. Nydia had health insurance through her job, but it wasn’t very good and it was expensive to cover her children under this plan. She and her children’s’ father are not officially married, though they have lived together for fifteen years. Since he does not have a regular income, he and their two children qualify for public health benefits through the Medicaid program. This raised a red flag for the worker who began questioning why Nydia and her husband weren’t officially married.
Nydia was put off by this line of questioning and responded, “That’s none of your business. He’s the father of my children.” With tensions rising, the case worker pointed out that, “a lot of these cases are fraud.” This accusation upset Nydia and she started crying right there in the food stamp office. “And then when I started crying, I felt humiliated. That’s how I felt. And I was like, oh no. Heck no.” She pulled herself together and told the caseworker, “I’m not here because I want to be. I’m here because I need help. You know, I need help to feed my children. I’m not asking for no cash assistance. I have a job and I plan on going back