HHS 201 Introduction to Human Services Wk3-D1

6.1 Social Welfare Programs and Policies

Social welfare programs encompass those goods and services that a society believes to be a collective responsibility. They include Social Security, public assistance, food stamps and food vouchers, medical care, housing and housing subsidies, child care, unemployment and workers’ compensations, veterans’ benefits, and personal social services.

The major health and welfare systems in the United States are patchy, uneven, and scanty. The term social welfare system implies a sense of order, comprehensiveness, and rational planning. But that is not the way things are. In fact, the social welfare system is more like a patchwork quilt. Bits and pieces of theories, interventions, and funding are patched together to form programs and helping agencies.

Of course, this system differs from a quilt. A quilt comes together as a whole piece to keep someone warm in bed on a cold night. The system does not serve everyone’s needs equally. It is always in the process of being pieced together and is also increasingly being ripped apart. Despite its status as what has been called a “reluctant welfare state,” the U.S. programs of assistance have raised millions of people out of poverty, given medical care to the poor and the aged, provided compensatory education, and provided food, housing, and cash assistance to the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. We discuss some of these programs here.

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)

Politicians score points by being “tough on welfare” and “tough on crime.” Sometimes they link the two issues, as if being on welfare were a crime. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) has drawn fierce fire in the anti-welfare war. It is a program that provides income to families with dependent children, generally headed by a single parent but also available on a limited basis to two-parent families. About 95 percent of the single parents are women.

Cash assistance to needy families was part of the Social Security Act of 1935. The program was first called ADC (Aid to Dependent Children) because parents were not included. Mothers were not included until 1950, and unemployed fathers were not included until 1965, when the name of the program was changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Until 1996 the federal government set guidelines and shared program costs with the states; the states set benefit levels. Everyone who was eligible was entitled to assistance. That is no longer true. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 ended federal control over AFDC and gave the states block grants to run their own programs. By ending the entitlement status of AFDC, the federal government, for the first time in sixty years, no longer guaranteed that it would help families in need. Conservatives in Congress proclaimed a victory; liberal senator Edward Kennedy, who voted against the bill, proclaimed it “legislative child abuse” (Edelman, 1997). Journalist Bob Herbert called it “officially sanctioned brutality” (Herbert, 1996).

The state programs that were held up as models for other states to copy were the more punitive ones. The most outspoken advocate of dismantling welfare was Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, who was appointed director of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by President George W. Bush in 2001 (and resigned in 2003). He implemented the “W-2” program in Wisconsin, which called for replacing welfare with work. In this program, women were required to work when their children reach 12 weeks of age and there was a two-year time limit for supported work or community service (Miranne & Young, 1998). The program was more successful at kicking people off the rolls than helping families. During the recession, 40 percent of Wisconsin’s children received food stamps.

In April 2008, Wisconsin scaled back its workfare program and began a pilot program called Real Work for Real Pay, where participants in real jobs earned a pay check and were trained to develop job skills (Crisp, & Fletcher, 2008).

The Wisconsin TANF program was sued in 2010 by Legal Action of Wisconsin, Inc., the American Civil Liberties of Wisconsin, and the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP, on the grounds of discrimination on the basis of race and disability in the administration of the W-2 program. A study found that there were significant racial disparities in sanction rates for alleged failures to comply with program requirements. Both Latino and African-American program participants were sanctioned at a higher rate than white program participants. The settlement of the lawsuit required administrators of the W-2 program to ensure that qualified individuals with disabilities receive reasonable accommodations, which may include job training and supports for a longer time period than what is typically afforded, sign language interpreters, or in-depth services from the Wisconsin Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010).

Time Limits

There was no time limit on AFDC, but the Personal Responsibility Act set a lifetime time limit of five years in which people could receive assistance. Some states set shorter time limits than the federal limit. States are free to set no time limit at all if they want to pay for the program out of state funds after the federal time limit is up, and Maine did that. The law does not require that assistance be in the form of cash. It can be in the form of vouchers. Some states even turned over the program to counties (Edelman, 1997).

Workfare

After two months of being on welfare, recipients are required to find a community service job if they have not found paid employment. Community service work is usually menial work, such as raking leaves, picking up garbage, or washing dishes in a school cafeteria. In some cities, workfare workers have replaced regular workers. Although the law prohibits the direct substitution of welfare recipients for currently paid workers, some localities have circumvented this requirement by not renewing expired employment contracts with paid workers. In many localities, low-wage workers were displaced by workfare “trainees” working off their welfare benefits at less than the minimum wage—sometimes as little as $1.50 an hour (Cooper, 1997). In mid-1997 in Baltimore, 1,000 workers had lost jobs to welfare trainees, despite the fact that city workers had only two years before won a city ordinance guaranteeing a living wage to anyone employed under contracts with the city (Cooper, 1997).

The largest workfare scheme in the United States was the Work Experience Program (WEP) in New York City. Only 5 percent of WEP participants found jobs (Crisp, & Fletcher, 2008). Thousands of New York City workfare participants did the work once done by higher-paid city workers (Greenhouse, 1997). They were exposed to hazardous working conditions, including limited or no access to protective clothing, toilets, and drinking water. They sued the city and in August 1997, a state Supreme Court justice ruled that the city was obligated to provide these necessities (Greenhouse, 1997). In July 2001, the federal government sued the Giuliani administration in New York City, charging it with doing too little to protect women in workfare jobs from sexual and racial harassment by their supervisors. The Giuliani administration said that welfare recipients in the city’s workfare program were not employees and had no legal right to protection from sexual discrimination or sexual harassment in the workplace (Greenhouse, 2001). Unions fought this discrimination, and workers won some rights given to regular employees.

Four New York Times reporters looked at the Work Experience Program (workfare) in New York City and found the following: Workfare didn’t lead to full-time jobs (Finder, 1998), many participants took the place of full-time workers (Greenhouse, 1998), mothers faced acute lack of day care (Swarns, 1998), and tough workfare rules were used as a way to cut welfare rolls (Toy, 1998).

A study of workfare programs in the United States, Canada, and Australia, found that “there is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even increase unemployment by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers. Workfare is least effective in getting people into jobs in weak labour markets where unemployment is high” (Crisp, & Fletcher, 2008).

Education and Training

Prior to the 1996 legislation, states were able to allow activities that helped prepare people for work, such as job training, education, or rehabilitation in substance abuse programs or disabilities. However, the 1996 legislation has a much narrower definition of what constitutes work-related activities. Only a year of education and training is allowed, and it must be directly related to a specific job that does not require a bachelor’s or an advanced degree. States could allow more education if they paid for it out of state funds. Maine used state funds in its “Parents as Scholars” program to support some TANF recipients in four-year college programs.*

*The Patsy Takemoto Mink Fellowship each year gives scholarships of $2,000 to assist low-income women to achieve an educational objective. The fellowship is named for the woman who represented her native Hawaii in the U.S. Congress. She fought against welfare reform in Congress. Her daughter Gwendolyn Mink, author of Welfare’s End, established the fellowship, along with Patsy Mink’s husband, to honor her deceased mother.

Gwendolyn Mink believes that welfare should go beyond helping low-income mothers care for their children. It should also open opportunities to education at all levels, and provide child care as well as assistance in overcoming personal barriers to employment. Mink explained that the Fellowship is a small nonprofit and reaches only a handful of women a year. The Foundation can be reached at http://www.patsyminkfoundation.org/.

No more than 30 percent of a state’s recipients can be in education and training. Outside this 30 percent, mothers could still undertake training, but only if they first worked or looked for work at least 20 hours a week.

During the 1996 welfare reform debate, the majority of policymakers treated work and education as if they were entirely different concepts. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas put it this way:

Work does not mean sitting a classroom. Work means work. Any farm kid who rises before dawn for the daily chores can tell you that. Ask any of my brothers and sisters what “work” meant on our family’s dairy farm. It didn’t mean sitting on a stool in the barn, reading a book about how to milk a cow. “Work” meant milking cows. (Congressional Record, 1995)

Senator William Armstrong of Colorado expressed the same sentiments a decade earlier, asserting:

People on welfare ought to work, work, work … because it is good for the soul, because it is fair to the taxpayers, because it rankles people who are paying taxes to support these programs to see people who are recipients not get out and work. (Davis, M., 2010)

Senator Gramm’s comments indicate that he believes that work is hard, messy, maybe painful and involuntary; education, on the other hand, is pleasurable and self-directed. Congress and the executive branch “have continued to draw a tight line between work activities and educational pursuits… in part to show that they are tough on welfare and welfare recipients and that welfare is not simply a ‘college scholarship’ program that allows low-income people to leapfrog over the struggling middle class” (Davis, 2010). In 2010, the conservative political scientist Lawrence Mead echoed Senator Gramm’s sentiments when he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives that “the main thing the American people want out of welfare reform is for more adult recipients to go to work and stay there. They would oppose any policy change that allowed more recipients to go to school in place of work, especially when ordinary taxpayers not on aid lack the same opportunity… Advocates have to be reminded that the main point of the work test is not to help out the recipients. It is to discharge a debt to the society” (Mead, 2010).

It is an artificial division to draw a sharp distinction between work and education. Cooperative education combines the two by providing practical work experience with study. Community colleges, with their flexibility and responsiveness to local communities, embody the idea that work and education are intimately related. The influential educational theorist John Dewey subscribed to this approach to learning.

Only former recipients with at least a two-year postsecondary or vocational degree are likely to escape poverty by earnings alone. Since the Personal Responsibility Act was passed, there has been a precipitous drop in college enrollment among welfare recipients. This massive exodus of recipients from college does not bode well for their future ability to climb out of poverty. People with college degrees have less than a one in fifty chance of being poor compared to one in five for those without.

Very few TANF recipients have access to education and training. A 2010 study found that nationally less than 8 percent of “work-eligible” adult TANF recipients were engaged in education or training activities (U.S. House of Representatives Committee, 2010). The training that recipients did get was largely very short-term training, often lasting three months or less. When Kentucky had more than 30 percent of recipients enrolled in vocational education, it faced penalties from the federal government. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 that reauthorized TANF increased their work participation rate targets for states and imposed a new and demanding requirement that all hours of participation be extensively verified and documented. The attendance and documentation requirements have proven so burdensome that TANF case managers are less likely to refer clients to education activities in general and college in particular (King-Simms, 2010).

Case Example

I started going to school to get my GED two years ago, then started college classes. My case manager said that a degree in culinary arts wasn’t acceptable, so I switched to an AA degree, working part time and going to school full time. My case manager said I could only get childcare for the time I was working, not in school, and that I would lose my TANF. I said that wasn’t a possibility and we could not live off of food stamps and medical benefits. I had to be really persistent and very vocal to get the benefits my family needs.

I work 19 hours a week, but the requirement is 20, so I have to do one hour of community service. Here is my typical day. I get up at 5 a.m. and get my daughter ready and we are on the bus by 6 a.m. It takes 3 buses and 2 hours to get us to the daycare, then me to college. I work from 8 to 10 at the college, and then to class from 10 to 12. Instead of a lunch break I go to the work source office for an hour of community service and then back to school. If it’s Tuesday or Thursday I go to class from 1:15 to 3:05; if it’s Monday, Wednesday, or Friday I go back to work from 1:30 to 3:30. The buses home take 3 hours, because of the afternoon schedule, so my daughter and I get home at 6:30, unless we have to stop at the store for groceries, then it’s 7:30. We have dinner, bath time, and my daughter is in bed by 8. I stay up until 11:30 or 12:30 doing homework, then get up at 5 a.m. to start it all over again.

It’s hard because I don’t have support. Being a full-time student and working 20 hours a week is hard on me and not fair to my daughter. Single parents have the hardest time because we don’t get the chances others have. Please remove the barriers to education so I can finish school and build a better life for my family. (Young, 2010)

The changing structure of the economy over the last twenty years has placed a growing premium on education and training beyond high school. Those who have at least a two- or four-year college degree have seen their earnings hold steady (and for women, rise) while the earnings of those with only a high school diploma have dropped substantially—for men, by about a third. High school dropouts are the worst off—their earnings have fallen almost by half (College Board 2005). A 2007 study found that 41.5 percent of adult TANF recipients have less than a high school degree, and more than half have exactly a high school degree. Less than 5 percent have any post-secondary education (McSwain, & Davis, 2007).

Case Study It’s Not Because We Made Bad Choices

I work as a home health aide and have to get up at 4:45 in the morning to be to work by 6:30, three days a week. I’m also trying to finish a program to get my associate’s degree in nursing and am looking for an apartment so I can get out of the homeless shelter where I live. I’m looking for a place, but it’s hard to find anything. I only make $200 a week, and most two-bedrooms are $700 a month. I tried to find a studio, but most landlords don’t want kids in a studio. I also need to buy a car to be able to get back and forth to school (I’ve been borrowing a friend’s car but can’t for much longer) and welfare keeps giving me a hard time—telling me I don’t need a car and I should be saving money. But I live in Lowell and go to school in Lawrence, and I have a 4-year-old! Do you know how hard that would be to get back and forth without a car and still do the housing search and all the other things we have to do at the shelter?

We have to turn in forms that list where we looked for housing each week, and we have to have twelve—no matter what. If the landlord doesn’t return your call, it doesn’t count. Even if there are only six listings in the paper, they tell you that’s not enough—that you have to try harder. It’s so degrading. You know, besides being homeless, we have other issues, and we should be treated with respect. I have low self-esteem, and it’s really hard to keep myself going, but they just keep piling more things on us. There are all these mandatory meetings that you have to go to even if they don’t have anything to do with you. Like going to these employment sessions on how to get a job. I already have a job! But I still have to go because it’s mandatory. You know, anybody could end up in this predicament—it’s not because we made bad choices. That’s the way life is. Some people are lucky, and some are not. And a pat on the back would be so much better than constantly putting us down. (Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, 2000)