The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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the work requirement out of the FAP proposal and passing a version of it in separate Social Security legislation. The aim, in his view, must be a workfarist one—namely, to “make productive citizens out of nonproductive citizens.”46 Dubbed “WIN II” because they revised the initial WIN rules, the Talmadge amendments were signed into law in December 1971.47
As a political maneuver, the amendments had an immediate effect on the balance of forces in the FAP struggle. Passing the work requirement independently of the other elements of the FAP package significantly reduced FAP’s appeal to conservatives when the administration came back with a revised version of the bill. The work requirement, as Representative John Byrnes (R-Wisc.) explained, was “what some consider the sweetener.”48 With WIN II, conservatives got the “sweetener” without having to swallow the rest of the package. Scheduled to take effect on July 1, 1972, WIN II was on the books during the Senate’s final deliberations on FAP.
As a policy initiative, WIN II had a deeper and enduring impact on the politics of welfare. Work obligations of various forms had been imposed on welfare recipients at the state level for decades. But federal policy from the New Deal to the Great Society had not formally conditioned assistance on a work requirement.49 WIN I had imposed the first federal mandate that states create work and training programs, and refer any “appropriate persons” to them. WIN II established a more sweeping standard, requiring all adult recipients, except those explicitly exempted, to register for work, under penalty of loss of benefits. By removing the reference to “appropriate persons” and eliminating state officials’ discretion in determining who met this qualification, the law significantly widened the categories of recipients considered eligible for work and included mothers of school-age children.50
The new law also had greater enforcement power: states would lose a portion of their federal funds if they failed to refer at least 15 percent of their adult recipients to the program by mid-1974. Exemptions, loopholes, and lack of funding would limit the reach and impact of the Talmadge amendments, as they had with WIN I. Nonetheless, WIN II was markedly tougher than existing law, and its passage signaled the rising frustration in Congress over the performance of WIN I.51 In the long run, WIN II would help facilitate the shift to workfare by affirming a new evaluative measure for AFDC’s success: moving recipients from welfare to work. Once virtually all adult recipients were judged work-appropriate, and once states were expected to establish programs that moved recipients from welfare to work, policymakers began to focus increasingly on how well AFDC was meeting this aim.
WIN II signaled two additional trends, both of which prefigured the conservative position in the policy debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Programmatically, the measure took a decisive step toward equating the aim of encouraging self-support with being “tough” on work requirements. Among other things, this meant elevating “work-first” approaches over those designed to strengthen the long-term employability and earning power of jobless recipients. WIN I had been designed in part to encourage recipients to pursue formal education and training to improve their prospects for employment. In some cases, for example, it included support for recipients to attend college. In a move that foreshadowed the dominant approach to workfare reform in the 1990s, WIN II changed the emphasis from boosting the long-term employability and skills of welfare recipients, to immediate referral to available jobs (“work-first” plans). The shift was in part a response to studies indicating that immediate placement and on-the-job training were more effective at reducing AFDC caseloads. Under WIN II, states were to spend at least one-third of WIN funds on on-the-job training and public service employment.52
The passage of the Talmadge amendments also marked a trend toward escalating work requirements even in the face of policy failure. This would emerge as a defining pattern in the politics of welfare and work. Faced with evidence that previous attempts (such as WIN I) were failing to move recipients into the workforce, policymakers responded not by reassessing the strategy but by escalating it, imposing more and tougher requirements. As evidence mounted of WIN I’s failures, members of Congress from both parties were largely silent on the obstacles posed by the weaknesses in the low-wage labor market and the characteristics of the recipient pool, electing instead simply to tighten the rules. Studies of WIN I showed, for example, that only a fraction of recipients were judged appropriate for work by local authorities. The remainder were ill, needed at home, without childcare, or considered otherwise inappropriate for training. Lawmakers’ response in WIN II, however, was to impose further restrictions, in part by eliminating state and local discretion to determine whether recipients were appropriate for referral. Similarly, policymakers were confronted with discouraging evidence on training and placement rates. Some 400,000 people were enrolled in WIN I by mid-1972, when WIN II took effect; only about 25 percent of these finished training. In the end, only 52,000, less than 2 percent of the total pool, actually held jobs. Faced with this evidence, the response of lawmakers was to sidestep the challenge of training and education, and shift the emphasis and expectations to immediate job placement.53
WIN II thus put into place the first piece of the new workfare regime by strengthening work requirements for AFDC recipients, and established significant political precedents. The measure promoted self-support by being “tough on work” and elevated “work-first” approaches over those designed to strengthen recipients’ employability and earning power. With the two WIN amendments, the central measure of AFDC’s success began to shift decidedly from the welfarist aim of reducing family poverty through income support to the workfarist aim of moving recipients from welfare to work—and policymakers began to chart the program’s less-than-impressive record in doing so.
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The next major policy initiative pulled from the administration’s FAP proposal and passed independently was an expanded program of assistance for the poor elderly, disabled, and blind. Approved in October 1972, the new Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program would appear, at first glance, to have little to do with a turn to workfare in public assistance or with the retrenchment of AFDC decades later. But SSI was essential for whom it excluded. The program broke apart the “trio” of New Deal public assistance programs and more narrowly defined which poor Americans should receive income assistance without work obligations. SSI wrote into law the conservative answer to the question of which Americans are poor because they cannot work and erased the New Deal definition.
Under New Deal welfarism, programs for the categories of needy Americans deemed “unemployable”—the elderly, the blind (and later the disabled), and mothers with dependent children—were inscribed in the Social Security Act.54 The institutional relationship between these programs provided a measure of political protection for AFDC by linking the fate of its recipients to those of the aged and disabled poor. Federal administrators routinely developed reforms, rules, and expansions that would apply to all of these programs in the decades after the New Deal.55
SSI reconfigured public assistance by creating a new program for only two of the three original recipient categories, those physically unable to work due to age or disability. Poor families were left out.56 SSI marked a significant expansion of the welfare state: the new program served greater numbers of needy within its specific categories, was federally administered, and provided a floor of assistance. But it also marked an exclusion of the largest and most controversial group of unemployables, dependent children and their caregivers.57 Politically, this set SSI on the path of institutional growth in subsequent years—and AFDC on the road to contraction.
Conservative Southern Democrats in Congress again provided the primary impetus and strategy for “hiving off” of FAP the provisions that became SSI, as Jennifer Erkulwater’s historical study of the program de-scribed.58 Congressional support for the Nixon administration’s provisions for the elderly and disabled poor emerged early, in both House and Senate responses to FAP.59 Leaders of poor Southern states had a long-standing interest in increased federal assistance for these needy populations. As Mills observed in the 1970 FAP debates, “I think we would all agree … that the adult public assistance recipients, the old, the halt, the blind, are most deserving of any additional help that we can give them.”60 Mills and Long differed in their approaches—Mills had consistently argued that aid to the elderly poor through