Abstract
Based on ethnographic and interview data collected at two welfare to work offices, this paper explores the various meanings that welfare-reliant women give to paid work. Although studies show that welfare-reliant women support work requirements and believe that welfare receipt should be temporary, even Progressives often fail to see the multiple meanings work has for poor women, and how similar these are to the meanings most Americans attach to work. Not only do poor women want to work for basic economic survival, but they view paid work as a means to family security, a path to fulfilling personal aspirations, and as their civic responsibility.
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Notes
See Iverson & Farber 1996; Sandfort et al. 1999; Seccombe et al. 1999; Scott et al. 2000; Scott et al. 2001. For a more general discussion about welfare-reliant women’s mainstream values, see Hays (2003). In addition, Hochschild (1995) argues that most poor Blacks continue to believe in the ideology of the American Dream: that hard work and perseverance will lead to “success.” Similarly, Wilson (1996, p. 181) found that people living in inner city ghettoes share the American work ethic, and the belief “that people can get ahead in life if they try.” And Newman (1999) shows that low-wage workers in some of New York City’s poorest, most ghettoized communities hold onto mainstream values about work.
Of course, neither Conservative nor Progressive discourses are monolithic. There are significant variations among Conservatives as well as among Progressives. There are also numerous “Moderate” discourses (arguably including those of the Clinton administration), none of which I address here. For the purposes of this paper, I refer to a singular Conservative discourse and a singular Progressive one; I have tried to capture the dominant strands of these discourses to best represent both ideological camps.
Bullock provided welfare-reliant women with a list of 20 policies that she coded as ‘progressive’ or ‘restrictive.’ She then had her respondents rank each policy on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1= “strongly disagree” and 7= “strongly agree.” While welfare recipients clearly favored “progressive policies,” giving them a composite score of 5.66, their disapproval for “restrictive policies” was less overwhelming, with a score of 3.78—close to the neutral score of 4.00.
See, for example, Broughton’s (2001) Jobproject. However, given that only 1.1% of federal and state TANF dollars were spent on education and training in 2005 (Center for Law and Social Policy 2006), such programs are rare—and now they are rarer still. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, passed and implemented in 2006, reset the caseload reduction credits from 1995 to 2005 levels. The previous caseload reduction credits, based on caseload decline since 1995, had made the 50% participation requirement meaningless in most states, however now all states must ensure that 50% of their welfare to work participants are engaged in federally approved work activities. To do this, states like California must adopt the federal regulations that only allow participants to pursue education or training full time for 12 months. (See PRWORA, Section 407; CLASP, 2002; Lower-Basch et al., 2006).
Although I use the acronym CCC, I only studied and am therefore only referring to two of the four welfare offices within the county.
Among the many CalWORKs proposals in Governor Schwarzenegger’s 2007–2008 budget bill is a proposal to end this safety net for children.
One of these interviews included a shorter interview with my primary interviewee’s daughter who had recently become a mother and welfare recipient as well.
According to the Urban Institute’s National Survey of America’s Families, the median wage for employed former TANF recipients was $8.06 an hour in 2002. Based on this figure, a woman that worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year would make $16,764.80, putting a family of three just above the poverty line ($14,348), or a family of four just below the poverty line ($18,392). However a full third of these workers were employed only part time (Loprest 2003; U.S. Census Bureau 2003).
Quotations have been minimally cleaned up to make them more readable. Eclipses are only included when substantive words have been omitted.
Wendy refused to drop out of school once her 18 months of education had been used up; she chose instead to face a sanction and finish her degree. I met several other women during the course of my research who made a similar choice. Wendy lived in low-income housing, which only required her to pay one-third of her income each month, and worked a government subsidized job (work study) that also did not count toward her required work hours, in order to survive.
Cruikshank (1993) has argued that self-esteem is a technology used by the state to make people more governable. This is an interesting and important line of thought. The issue of self-esteem is regularly manipulated in welfare offices and a lack of self-esteem is often blamed as an underlying reason for women’s poverty (Broughton 2003; Korteweg 2003). Instead of acknowledging the structural realities and inequities of race and class in the U.S., self-esteem is a convenient and timely scapegoat used by the state and individual welfare instructors. However, I do not believe that the idea that work will bring greater self-esteem has been planted in welfare-reliant women’s heads by welfare workers. This is not to say that they have not been influenced by worker discourses. But one need not enter a social service office to encounter the notion that hard work and independence (i.e. working towards self-sufficiency) bring with them self-esteem, or self-confidence, or a general feeling of self-worth. And most of these women have worked before; they know that they feel better about themselves when they are employed.
See Weigt (2006) for an important discussion of the competing normative discourses poor single mothers face and utilize—about family, mothering, and work enforcement. Weigt critiques these discourses, linking them to the prevailing neoliberal ideology, and argues that they blame individuals rather than social structures for inequality and poverty.
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Acknowledgement
I wish to thank Michael Burawoy and Jennifer Sherman for their support and invaluable comments on various drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to editor Javier Auyero and the anonymous reviewers whose detailed and insightful comments helped to shape this paper.
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Woodward, K. The Multiple Meanings of Work for Welfare-Reliant Women. Qual Sociol 31, 149–168 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-008-9091-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-008-9091-3