Introduction

      Gripped by a severe recession in late 2007, the United States suffered the most sustained and extensive wave of job destruction the country had seen since the Great Depression. Over the next year and a half, unemployment topped 10 percent, and the number of Americans facing long-term joblessness set new records. Poverty rates climbed above 15 percent, and the Census Bureau reported that more Americans were poor than at any other time in the nation’s history.

      The recession ended in 2009, but the hardships did not. By the end of the decade, the median American family had lost twenty years’ worth of accumulated wealth and drew an income more than $5,000 below the median a decade earlier. Five years into the recovery, six in ten Americans said that the recession continued to affect them personally; four in ten said that someone in their household had lost a job.¹

      Americans confronted these hard times with a reconfigured social safety net. Decades in the making, it was the product of intense political battles in Washington that saw policymakers replace core elements of the New Deal welfare state for poor families with a workfare system designed to more actively promote and reward employment among the poor.² The modern workfare state was built piecemeal, beginning in the 1960s and culminating in the welfare reform legislation signed by Bill Clinton in 1996. At the time, policymakers and poverty experts were divided over workfare’s likely outcomes—and the early evidence was mixed. But the system went largely untested until the Great Recession of 2007–9 and the slow recovery that followed. The experience of American economic hardship in these years is therefore not only the story of a particularly severe and sustained downturn. It is the story of the failings and flaws in the nation’s new work-conditioned safety net.

      Media accounts of the Great Recession focused on the rising economic insecurity of middle-income families faced with the loss of jobs, homes, and savings. Less attention was paid to the population of poor and near-poor Americans who confronted far harsher circumstances. Their numbers were disturbingly high even before the recession. By 2010, the Census Bureau reported, approximately one in three Americans (100.5 million) were poor or near-poor—and four years into the recovery, the numbers were no better: 32.5 percent of Americans (101.8 million) were poor or near-poor in 2013. Roughly half of these (52 million) were in families with incomes above the poverty level, but by less than 50 percent. It is these near-poor families (more than one in six Americans) who are often a single medical emergency or jobless spell away from poverty.³ Many were already struggling in low- or medianwage jobs, and the recession hit them the hardest: blue-collar unemployment increased at nearly three times the rate of white-collar unemployment.⁴

      The collapse of the labor market in the recession left many families with nowhere to turn. In the Great Depression, images of unemployed Americans standing in line for bread captured the depth of need. Where were the “bread lines” of the Great Recession? They were formed by the millions who could not find work but had exhausted or failed to qualify for unemployment benefits, who waited in line (or online) to plead their cases.⁵ They included the hundreds of people lined up at the county fairgrounds in west Tennessee for boxes of free food, and those in upstate New York and elsewhere who attended “grocery auctions,” where food past its sell-by date was sold off at steep discounts.⁶ They included the one in