The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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medical prescriptions.7 They included young people attending church youth groups in the Rio Grande Valley, who asked why they should finish school if the best they could hope for was low-wage work—and their parents, who told local priests during weekly confessions about the economic pressures straining their marriages, as partners blamed themselves and each other for the failure to make ends meet.8 And they included parents dropped from the welfare rolls in Arizona, who described the measures they took to put food on the table and keep the lights on: “They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners—all with children in tow.”9
During the Depression, bread lines formed not only because jobs had disappeared but also because there was no federal safety net for those left stranded. The New Deal response to this collective experience included the creation of unemployment insurance and limited federal public assistance programs for certain categories of poor Americans, under the 1935 Social Security Act. Seventy-five years later, poor families in the Great Recession could turn to a combination of old and new programs stitched together into a safety net that was increasingly conditioned on work.
The story of a Delaware family profiled in a New York Times piece illustrates how this new safety net fails to protect families when work fails.10 Well before the recession, Joe Parente found himself unemployed after a serious back injury forced him out of his job as a pipefitter. He successfully completed a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repair, only to find there was little demand for his new skills. He sought disability benefits, but could not qualify without undergoing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test he could not afford; nor did he qualify for Medicaid. The family of five got by thanks to his wife Kristen’s job as a waitress—until she was laid off in January 2009, when the recession hit Wilmington. She had always been able to find a new job quickly, but not this time. Nor was she eligible for unemployment insurance under Delaware’s rules.11 The Parentes had long viewed government assistance as something for people who “didn’t want to work.” Now they found themselves seeking food stamps and cash assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which had replaced the New Deal entitlement program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). TANF provides temporary cash support to parents who meet the program’s work requirements, but there is no guarantee that an eligible family will receive that aid. After a long wait, they received an allotment of food stamps and $475 a month in cash assistance. TANF’s work requirements meant that each parent had to apply for forty jobs a week and Kristen had to attend “job readiness” classes—even though the family’s poverty had nothing to do with the will or readiness to work. Because no work was available, Kristen was also mandated to volunteer at a community agency. She was fortunate enough to receive a job offer at the agency, but they still needed a “small stipend from the government” to make ends meet. Even then, the family’s resources were not enough to solve their housing problems.
The Parentes’ experience captures many of the dilemmas of the workfare state. The family diligently pursued various forms of assistance, from unemployment benefits and cash assistance to job retraining and readiness classes. Time and again, despite their best efforts, they fell through the gaps in the work-based safety net. Although the Great Recession heightened the challenges faced by millions of families like the Parentes, the underlying problem pre-dates the downturn. It is rooted in the conjuncture of a deteriorating low-wage labor market in the United States and a work-based system of social protections. For many poor and near-poor families, the experience of poverty and economic insecurity is a three-sided trap, defined by a lack of assistance for the nonworking poor, inadequate support for those in low-wage jobs, and few exits from the low-wage sector to middle-class jobs with more robust social protections. How did we end up with a safety net that provides so few buffers against a crisis like the Great Recession?
The shift to workfare is arguably the most significant transformation in the U.S. welfare state of the past fifty years. Yet its dimensions, causes, and consequences have not been fully explored. Workfare is often narrowly used as shorthand for programs that require work of welfare recipients, but these policies are part of a much deeper shift in the approach to federal aid for the poor. Public assistance programs created in the New Deal had always been restrictive and inadequate, and many families combined wage-earning and welfare—but federal aid for the poor was not conditioned on work. Welfare provision rested on the logic of need-based entitlement for certain vulnerable groups unable to fully support themselves through employment. And over its first three decades, the policy trajectory was toward gradually expanding coverage and increasing benefits for eligible poor families.12 With the turn to workfare in the 1960s, a formal link was forged between work and public assistance in federal policy, and higher levels of aid began to flow to the working poor while aid for those outside the labor market diminished. By the end of the 1990s, the logic of federal cash assistance for the poor had shifted. The majority of the nation’s income assistance was now conditioned on employment, and the aim was to promote, require, and reward work among poor families in the low-wage labor market.13
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This book is about the politics of the transformation to workfare. Its central argument is that the policy change was driven by a political split and struggle within the Democratic Party over the ends and means of antipoverty assistance. The outcome was a system of social protections that tied most public income assistance to private employment—precisely at the moment that deindustrialization and global economic competition made low-wage jobs less effective at providing income security and stability. Three core claims in this argument link developments in the Democratic Party, in Southern politics, and in the U.S. labor market. Together, they explain how and why political leaders rewrote the social contract for poor families between the 1960s and the 1990s. And they place these decisions about public assistance squarely in the context of the rising job instability and wage stagnation that began in the mid-1970s and continue today.
The first claim is that workfare was fundamentally a Democratic project. It grew out of divisions within the party over the trajectory of public assistance. New Deal welfarism was always contested, even among Democrats; it was a product of political compromises, and was circumscribed by the patchwork character of the 1935 Social Security Act. New Deal public assistance programs for discrete categories of poor Americans (the elderly, blind, single mothers with children, and later, the disabled) emerged as the weakest link in the chain of social protections provided under the act, both institutionally and politically. Unlike social insurance programs (such as Social Security and unemployment insurance), public assistance programs were designed for certain needy groups deemed “unemployable.” Institutional authority and funding obligations for these programs were divided between state and federal governments. Public assistance thus embodied a thin concept of entitlement—always qualified, often distorted by state-level program administrators, and politically vulnerable. Yet within these constraints, New Deal welfarism nonetheless defined a role for the federal government in public assistance and established a basic framework for providing aid as an entitlement. Many liberal advocates during and after the New Deal hoped to expand this need-based welfarist ideal into a broader social safety net over time.14
In the early 1960s, however, a conservative faction of the Democratic Party began to construct a workfare regime alongside New Deal welfare programs. By the 1990s, workfare would eclipse New Deal assistance for poor families. Although Republicans were important allies at key junctures in the decades-long process of change, both the policy models for workfare at the federal level and the political decisions to adopt new workfare policies were crafted primarily by Democrats.
The book’s second claim is that Southern Democratic leaders in particular played a pivotal role in constructing modern workfare in these years. This is a story of how the South—the region with the nation’s highest levels of poverty and inequality and least generous social welfare policies—won the fight to rewrite America’s family assistance policy in the decades between the Great Society and the 1996 welfare reform.15 The role of Southern legislators in constraining New Deal welfarism at its creation in the 1930s is familiar to historians.16 What is striking in this study is the role of subsequent cohorts of Southern conservatives and centrists in constructing a workfare regime on the