Work-Welfare Programs

FOR NEARLY 60 YEARS, the United States provided its low-income families with cash aid, albeit in limited amounts insufficient to lift them out of poverty. In order to qualify for aid, parents merely had to pass an income means test. Some documentation was required and a few behavioral mandates were enforced (such as children had to be immunized), but no other reciprocal compliance with welfare obligations was expected. Cash aid programs were thus called “entitlement” programs. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was the chief cash aid program.

From the 1950s to 1970s, state welfare caseloads in the United States experienced dramatic increases, despite relative prosperity and increasing governmental supportive services (such as counseling, job training, and investments in employment opportunities). The typical welfare client was depicted in the media and by politicians as a lazy, criminally minded, amorally lascivious, single African-American woman with multiple children who was a threat to social order. From this unfair, racially discriminatory portrayal of welfare clients, policy evolved requiring clients to demonstrate commitment to mainstream norms of social civility coupled with a willingness to work.

In the 1980s, theory developed around the need to place welfare clients in employment in exchange for aid. The Theory of Labor Force Attachment, or more commonly, the work-first model, argues that welfare clients are dependent on cash aid and therefore lack any ability to become economically self-sufficient. In their dependency, welfare clients become, at best, apathetically non-employed. At worst, they become criminal. In order to protect social order, welfare clients must be forced to work, since they will no longer actively seek [Page 1183]employment. Work must be made a priority, with punitive sanctions a real threat in cases where the client fails to participate in employment activities. Time limits must be set to ensure that clients do not maintain long-term dependency on welfare. Because welfare clients under the work-first model would be too busy working or seeking work, they would no longer be able to choose complacent non-work or criminal behavior.

Children of working welfare clients would benefit from the employment of their parents simply because they would learn the value of hard work, as other children do. Finally, the work-first model of welfare is posited on the belief that no real barriers to employment exist for the welfare client other than the internal belief of the client that jobs do not exist or existing jobs do not benefit the client sufficiently for the client to take the job.

The work-first model of welfare was pilot-tested under several state welfare demonstration programs. One such program was in Riverside, California, in the early 1990s. While welfare clients who were required to participate in the work-first model originally seemed to do better than clients in a normal AFDC program in finding employment and leaving welfare, six months later, those clients fared no better than the AFDC clients in maintaining employment or avoiding welfare dependency. Other studies of welfare clients disprove the central tenets of the work-first model, namely that welfare clients are deviant from the norms of society. For instance, no study to date has provided reliable evidence that welfare clients are criminally inclined, sexually promiscuous, or otherwise threatening to social order. Further, studies of welfare employment trends show that welfare clients work when able to and turn to cash aid only when necessary, belying the notion that clients inappropriately depend on cash aid in lieu of employment.

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