The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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he testified before the House in 1970: “Apart from the ten percent of AFDC families now living in the seven states making the lowest welfare payments, will any existing welfare family be better off?” Richardson’s answer confirmed many liberals’ primary reason for opposing FAP: “No.”65
FAP’s work requirement, moreover, did not play well among liberals. If conservatives read less into Nixon’s workfare rhetoric than the Nixon administration intended, then liberals read more into it—seeing a tough and punitive demand. Some used familiar arguments to challenge the premise itself, particularly for mothers of young children: these parents, they argued, were entitled to remain home to care for their children, if they so chose. Many of these advocates accepted the value of encouraging and creating opportunities for work—but like many New Deal welfarists a generation earlier, they believed work should be voluntary, and that any work obligations should not undermine the basic safety net. Testifying on behalf of three national religious bodies, John Cosgrove told Congress, “Mothers of school aged children should be given the choice of taking care of their children or accepting jobs or training.”66
In addition to challenging FAP’s work requirement, a number of liberal lawmakers and advocates demanded a debate on the consequences of pushing AFDC recipients into the existing low-wage labor market and the terms under which they would be integrated into it. It would be unconscionable, Representative Ronald Dellums (D-Calif.) argued on the House floor, to “provide an incentive for people to get off welfare” and have them join the “40 percent of the labor force in America who … earn between $5,000 and $10,000 a year and … are the working poor.”67 Incentives to work, they suggested, should come from better conditions and guarantees in the job market—not from punitive policies imposed by government. Abraham Ribicoff, former secretary of HEW and now a Democratic senator from Connecticut, pushed for “a strong program of public service employment” in jobs with good working conditions and “opportunities for career advancement.”68
Liberal advocates concurred: “Persons should not be referred to jobs paying less than the Federal minimum wage,” Cosgrove told Congress, and FAP should “be accompanied in special legislation by a higher minimum wage with broad coverage; renewed efforts to end discrimination, a fully-funded low-income housing program; and recognition of the Federal Government as the employer of last resort to ensure that there are in fact jobs for which people would be trained and to which they could be referred.”69 Absent safeguards regarding wages and conditions, the work requirement “would only serve to create a pool of cheap labor,” testified other liberal and labor leaders, undermining wages and working conditions for all workers.70 AFL-CIO legislative director Andrew Biemiller also demanded that Congress protect welfare recipients facing work requirements by including provisions stating that the employment must be suitable and that it must pay either the prevailing or the minimum wage, whichever was higher.71
The heated racial politics of welfare further undercut Nixon’s effort to build support for FAP. The larger civil rights community wavered between quiet skepticism and open hostility toward the Nixon plan, swayed in part by the NWRO’s staunch opposition. Leaders of black social service organizations such as the Urban League—already suspicious of the conservative president—were reluctant to support his plan.72 The NAACP did not actively oppose it but would not actively support it, urging significant changes. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights took a similar stance, underlining concerns about work requirements.73 Black leaders sought to expose the implications of FAP’s work requirements for disproportionate numbers of poor minorities. The black press, along with civil and welfare rights leaders, condemned the expanding effort to force welfare recipients into the job market. A columnist for the Greater Milwaukee Star summarized the concern: “What recourse would there be for Blacks who say they are too sick to work? Who will be the judge? … Why can’t some mothers remain in the home to raise their own children? … What guarantee does the Black recipient have that he will not be forced to take all of the dirty and sloppy jobs available in the sweatshops of industry?”74
On the question of work requirements, as on other issues, Nixon thus faced a gaping divide in perception and political positions. Both welfarists and work-farists had coherent conceptions of how to combine work and welfare, but their strategies served fundamentally different ends. Conservative workfarists believed welfare recipients should be required to work in order to reduce reliance on government aid; liberal welfarists argued that recipients had an entitlement to cash assistance and that work should be voluntary. And for different reasons, neither side was drawn toward policy compromise for the welfare poor by FAP’s proposals for the working poor. The Nixon administration’s attempts to mollify both sides on the work question thus proved unable to win over either. On the one hand, Moynihan repeatedly insisted to liberals that the FAP work requirements were not onerous and did not undermine the entitlement of assistance for poor children. He argued that it was all that was politically possible at the moment, and should be seen as a critical step forward, holding out the prospect of building a new kind of antipoverty politics across lines of race and employment status.75 On the other hand, President Nixon, in a speech before a conference of Republican governors in April 1971, highlighted the other side of FAP. Displaying his conservative credentials, he said:
I advocate a system which will encourage people to take work. And that means whatever work is available. It does not mean the attitude expressed not so long ago at a hearing on welfare by a lady who got up and screamed: “Don’t talk to us about any of those menial jobs!” … Scrubbing floors or emptying bedpans is not enjoyable work, but a lot of people do it—and there is as much dignity in that as there is in any other work to be done in this country—including my own.
Within hours, the NWRO had fired off a terse press release: “You don’t promote family life by forcing women out of their homes to empty bedpans. When Richard Nixon is ready to give up his $200,000 salary to scrub floors and empty bedpans in the interest of his family, then we will take him seriously.”76 Welfare recipients and other liberals emerged more firmly opposed to the president’s plan—and conservatives were no more convinced that his commitment to workfare was serious.
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FAP’s fate was ultimately decided in a protracted legislative battle that extended over two congressional sessions, from 1969 through 1972. More than once, FAP passed the House, and there was a point at which the measure seemed within a hair’s breadth of winning congressional approval. The House Ways and Means Committee first held hearings on the proposal in the fall of 1969, and FAP won the vital (and in many respects surprising) support of Wilbur Mills. FAP was, in his view, a preferred alternative to the revenue-sharing proposals that were then under consideration, and the plan’s work provision assuaged many of his concerns.77 Once Mills threw his weight behind the bill, he steered it to easy passage when the House took up the measure the following spring. More than 80 percent of Mills’s fellow Southern Democrats voted against FAP despite his support. Nonetheless, FAP passed the House floor by a vote of 243–155 on April 16, 1970, and prospects in the Senate looked good.
Two weeks later, however, the Senate Finance Committee brought the auspicious early progress to a halt. Chairman Russell Long (D-La.) led the opposition, joined by John Williams of Delaware, the ranking minority member. In a critical round of hearings in April 1970, committee leaders struck a conservative, workfarist position. Lawmakers charged that the plan contained particularly powerful disincentives to work, because it retained the automatic link created under AFDC between eligibility for cash assistance and access to the new and expanding in-kind programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. This automatic link meant, in effect, that when a family earned enough wage income to reach the “cutoff” notch, they immediately lost a significant source of benefits. The extra dollar of earnings that placed the family beyond the eligibility point cost far more than a lost dollar of cash assistance: it also meant the family would lose linked benefits such as health insurance and food aid. This created a logic to earn less than the cutoff point, the senators argued.78
This “notch effect” plagued the existing AFDC system as well. But conservatives worried that FAP was worse, because it threatened not only to persuade current recipients to stay on welfare but also to draw current workers