The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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out, provided little basis for building consensus on what should replace it. Liberal welfarists saw AFDC as inadequate and degrading; conservative workfare advocates saw it as overly generous, too costly, and pauperizing. As a result, despite the president’s efforts to ensure that FAP contained something for both conservatives and liberals, his repeated attempts to reach out to one side succeeded primarily in alienating the other.
The policy agenda of business leaders, policymakers, and others in the conservative camp focused on the need to limit benefits and tighten work requirements, rein in rather than expand the welfare state, and, above all, avoid a guaranteed income. After an extensive outreach effort by the administration, some business organizations pledged grudging and conditional backing.49 But the strongest voices in the business community opposed FAP. It was not true welfare reform, in their view, and demanded far too little of the welfare poor. Karl Schlotterbeck of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned the House Ways and Means Committee that FAP contained “the beginning of a national guaranteed income arrangement,” and Chamber members fanned out in Washington to lobby against it.50 In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Paul Henkel of the Council of State Chambers of Commerce concurred: “We support welfare reform but not guaranteed income.” He urged lawmakers to take steps to “[tighten] up work and training requirements for welfare recipients.”51
Business leaders particularly opposed FAP’s provisions for the working poor. They worried that any guarantees of cash assistance for these workers might lead them out of the workforce and onto the welfare rolls. The answer to the problem of working poverty, Schlotterbeck insisted in Senate testimony, was economic growth, not welfare-state expansion.52 In a full-page advertisement in the midst of the congressional debate in April 1970, the Chamber of Commerce decried FAP as a tool for higher taxes and a plan that “would triple our welfare rolls. Double our welfare costs.”53 Many state and local government officials joined conservatives in expressing skepticism about FAP, objecting in particular to its projected costs.54
Above all, conservative leaders feared the plan was a “gigantic giveaway which could further reward the indolent,” said Representative Lawrence Williams (R-Pa.),55 and that it would “make the whole nation into a welfare state,” according to Senator Russell Long (D-La.).56 A number of conservatives felt particularly betrayed by what they saw as the administration’s mis-characterization of FAP as a tough work-based program. Columnist James Kilpatrick spoke for many conservatives when he wrote in early 1970, “President Nixon served up his welfare proposals last August, wrapped in a package of pretty rhetoric and tied with a bow of conservative blue. Sad to say some of us who should have known better were fairly swept off our feet. I hereby repent.” Although Nixon originally emphasized “the idea of ‘workfare’ instead of welfare,” a closer look at FAP showed that of the nearly ten million recipients on the rolls, the vast majority would be exempt under FAP because they were children, elderly, mothers of preschool children, sick, or disabled. As a result, Kilpatrick said, “only 500,000 prospects remain for the work-or-starve demand” that was so appealing to him and other staunch workfare advocates. Worse yet, the plan to aid the working poor would double welfare rolls and costs. These newly assisted working-poor families, he argued, “would be the permanent poor feeding like parasites on the body politic unto the end of time.”57
Liberals were also disappointed by FAP’s plans for the working and welfare poor. Many were initially drawn to FAP by the rhetoric of expanded entitlement and the promise of an “income floor” under all poor families. FAP looked good “at first blush,” acknowledged Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in 1971, then at Columbia’s School of Social Work. But as liberal reformers took a second look, they saw that its main initial effect was to assist the needy in some of the nation’s poorest regions, such as the South, where existing benefits were quite low. FAP offered virtually nothing to welfare families in the industrial, high-benefit North and West—where recipients were most numerous and well organized—except a new work requirement. Liberal activists expressed their frustration with FAP’s hollow promise of an income floor to their congressional allies, through an organized campaign of phone calls, letter writing, public hearings, and private meetings.58
FAP missed its mark with liberals in part because support for the working poor was not a top priority for the liberal welfare reform coalition in the late 1960s. In the politics of labor rights and social provision after the New Deal, much of the organizing and advocacy for workers remained distinct from advocacy for the poor on public assistance. And liberal activists who were focused on the economic conditions of workers—such as trade union leaders—had serious concerns about the FAP strategy of income guarantees.
Labor objected to the gains that might accrue under FAP to employers paying low wages, through the combined effect of the work requirement and a government wage supplement for the working poor. Just as business leaders shared Anderson’s worries that FAP would diminish workers’ incentive and imperative to work, labor leaders shared Shultz’s concern that it would eliminate employers’ incentives to raise wages. A week before Nixon released his plan, AFL-CIO president George Meany declared flatly, “The AFL-CIO vigorously opposes the use of federal funds to subsidize the employers of cheap labor.” Three months later, the United Automobile Workers voiced concern that FAP would “freeze present wage levels, and subsidize the sweatshop employer.”59 Labor leaders were worried in part about the ripple effect of depressing wages throughout the nation’s wage structure. As a political strategy, therefore, they preferred regulations aimed at business—such as boosting the minimum wage—over increased spending strategies aimed at poor and near-poor workers. Some labor leaders also wanted a government-backed employment guarantee, one that would make the federal government the employer of last resort for all those unable to find work. This, they argued, would aid workers and tighten the job market.60
Although their concerns about FAP’s proposals for the working poor were pointed, the liberal coalition directed its strongest opposition at FAP’s provisions for the welfare poor. Many in the social work community backed the principle of a federally provided income guarantee, but they objected to the administration’s work measures as too punitive, and to FAP’s benefit levels as far too low.61 In its ninety-eighth annual meeting in June 1970, the National Conference on Social Welfare called for an adequate, federally financed income maintenance program for the poor—then sent telegrams to Senate members demanding passage of a plan with benefit levels more than triple those of FAP.62
Welfare recipients and rights advocates organized under the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) were the most vocal in their opposition. After sustained mobilization against the 1967 WIN amendments, the NWRO became the leading critical voice on the liberal left in the FAP debate. The organization wanted a minimum income of $5,500 for a family of four (not the $1,600 income floor proposed in FAP). This would bring the income of a mother with three children to approximately 50 percent above the poverty line, though it would still leave them in the bottom quarter of family incomes.63 The NWRO also objected to FAP’s work rules for welfare recipients. There was a logic behind the organization’s position. The NWRO’s base was heavily Northeastern and urban, and its active core was composed of African American women activists. Two-thirds of its members were from nine industrial states, with a particular concentration in New York City. Not coincidentally, current welfare recipients were concentrated in the Northeast and California. Nixon’s FAP offered little to this constituency. By one government estimate, the net income—in cash and in-kind benefits—of a welfare family of four living in public housing in New York City at the time was $5,665. The NWRO’s demand of $5,500 therefore reflected, in the view of organizers, nothing more than a principled refusal to take a step backward.64 This was a logical extension of the welfarist entitlement principle, but it smacked of unreasonable demands to the administration and to conservatives.
Liberal members of Congress shared the view that any proposed reform should ensure gains for families currently on welfare. The administration pointed out repeatedly that FAP would help the nation’s poorest welfare recipients, particularly in the South, and that it would expand assistance to many new recipients. But the fact remained that it would only raise the benefits of approximately 10 percent of current recipients. This led Fred Harris