Lead
December 1999

Welfare 'reform' deepens poverty, stirs resistance

What is the state of the poor in the U.S., three years after Bill Clinton joined with Republicans to dismantle the welfare system? It had provided a safety net, at least for most mothers with young children. A draconian new system is causing poverty to deepen, even though the growing economy has gobbled up some welfare-leavers into low-wage jobs. People who are trying to get or retain public assistance face enormous obstacles. While there have not been mass strikes or uprisings against the cuts, welfare rights groups are growing and fighting back.

New York City rocked with singing, stomping and hand waving during the final leg and rally of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign's "March of the Americas." Nov. 1. Participants ended their 32-day walk from Washington, D.C. to the United Nations by demanding enforcement of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights' guarantees of a living wage, food, education, health care and housing for all. It was truly a "March of the Americas," with participants from Canadian and Latin American poor people's organizations, as well as welfare rights, workers, homeless, community and deaf groups from all over the U.S. and some from Europe. About 100 people, speaking 11 languages, marched the whole 400 miles.

The march and other multi-organizational national demonstrations challenge the dominant ideology's acceptance of poverty. One former welfare recipient told us, "We are at a serious crossroads in human history, symbolized by the extreme gap between the haves and the have nots. At the March of the Americas, people were bringing their case before the court of justice."

WELFARE REFORM = WELFARE REPEAL

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 did not reform welfare so much as repeal and deform it. The law eliminated many kinds of grants, placed life-time time limits on receiving assistance, and mandated workfare for everyone-New York City is starting to require it from recipients who are HIV-positive, as well as the disabled.

The maximum life-time period one can receive federal assistance is five years, but some states have instituted shorter time periods; it is two years in Massachusetts, and people are already being thrown off. The Boston area welfare rights group Survivors, Inc., told N&L, "The women we meet at the welfare offices are hanging on by their fingernails, many of them homeless or almost homeless, many of them having been kicked off welfare because of time limits and having no other source of income." The new law also prohibits assistance to pursue full-time education or training, so that now the average recipient-a young woman with young children-in order to have any chance of a decent-paying job, must try to squeeze in schooling along with workfare and other welfare requirements.

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a leader in instituting workfare, has imposed more and more harsh and humiliating requirements on welfare recipients, while removing 400,000 people from public assistance since 1995. As much as 35 hours a week of workfare (called WEP) are mandatory for some recipients, leaving them no time to search for a job or go to school. On Jan. 1, unless stopped by the courts, Giuliani will institute a policy of refusing beds in shelters to homeless people who have not complied with workfare and other requirements. Of course, being homeless, they are likely not to receive mail advising them what they are required to do, but the shelters' computers will know how to keep them out. "His Honor" even threatened to take away the children of parents who lose their shelter rights, on the grounds that the children no longer have shelter!

New York City has been rebuked by the federal government for interfering with people's right to apply for food stamps, Medicaid and SSI (federal programs, but you apply for them at local welfare centers), and for failing to supply translators for the city's large foreign-born population. Maureen Lane of the Welfare Rights Initiative told us, "There has been some relief from Giuliani's changes in welfare through suing him, but that is the only way."

Giuliani continues to cut the city's unionized work force and replace it with recipients, who do the same work, mostly as janitors, sanitation, and parks workers, but receive only their old welfare benefits. WEP workers, who number 40,000, began extensive self-organizing campaigns about three years ago, and won a few improvements in working conditions. But the push to unionize WEPs (against the law) has fallen flat. Labor unions are not even trying, although they are supporting some of the WEP workers' demands, including two bills in the City Council, one to give WEP workers a grievance procedure and the other to create 10,000 "real" jobs for welfare recipients.

WEP Workers Together! sponsored one of the bills. They told us, "We go to work sites and speak to people. We push their grievances with the site supervisors, and we form neighborhood groups that meet monthly. WEP workers' main complaint is that they are not paid. The second is that the regular employees let them do all the work. They are sent on job interviews where 60 people are sent for two positions, and the positions require skills they don't have. It's a backward circle."

ACORN in Brooklyn also organizes WEP workers at about 100 work sites. On Nov. 23 ACORN conducted a bus tour of four WEP sites, asking the supervisors to sign a workers' Bill of Rights and ending up at City Hall to lay wreaths for the WEP workers who have been killed on the job. Another group, Make the Road by Walking, in Bushwick, Brooklyn-mostly Latino recipients-filed a federal complaint and a law suit to obtain translators at the welfare centers, and started a "Campaign for Respect" at one center, with ten demands ranging from cleaner centers to real job opportunities.

Michigan's harsh laws-it recently imposed a requirement, temporarily halted by a federal court, that recipients be tested for drugs-have also generated their opposite, a group called Welfare Warriors. Their recent campaigns include sending bills to President Clinton for their unpaid labor in raising children, and sending smashed clocks to Congress to dramatize the need for a moratorium on the five-year lifetime limit on welfare. Dottie Stevens of Survivors, Inc., told N&L, "The changes in the welfare system since 1996 make it much more punitive. Welfare was never sufficient income for an adequate standard of living. The effects of these regulations are more homeless, higher malnutrition rates, more violence, suffering and death. But the welfare rights movement in Massachusetts is growing now in spite of the obstacles to receiving welfare. It includes students and community organizations as well as individuals who are homeless or about to become homeless, joining organizations to fight for their survival."

LEAVING WELFARE FOR WHAT?

President Clinton and the states are bragging because the welfare rolls have dropped from five million families in 1994 to 2.7 million at the end of last year. The politicians imply that these people left welfare for decent jobs. Clinton recently toured "pockets of poverty" around the country to assure the residents they will be helped by increased investment in those areas. The big lie in both cases is that poor people benefit from the low-wage, no-benefit jobs they are forced to take. The only beneficiaries are the capitalists, while the people who are cut off welfare, unable to get on it, or forced into workfare while on it, end up as bad or worse off than they were under the old system.

Whether or not they are employed (and "employed" loses meaning when those receiving public assistance must work full-time for their benefits), many poor people are sinking more deeply into poverty. The 1996 changes in the law have not caused the expected increase in the number of people living below the poverty line, only because we are in a period of economic upswing, so a portion of the people leaving welfare are able to find jobs, ranging from a third in New Jersey to 75% in Florida. But getting off welfare into paid work is nothing new. Despite all the racist, sexist propaganda about lazy recipients, most recipients always went in and out of the job market, depending on the state of the economy as well as their personal circumstances such as having small children.

The expanding economy lifted some people above the government's poverty line last year, but there are still 34.5 million people below it, and many experts believe the real rate is higher. Regionally, the only drop in the poverty rate was in the South. The poverty rate for African Americans is 26.1%, over twice the U.S. average. The percentage of children living in poverty is 18.9% nationally-13.5 million children. The number of people below the poverty line does not tell us the depth of poverty. The evidence is that the poor are getting poorer. Welfare rights groups all over the country report that private food pantries are unable to meet the demand, and homeless shelters are bursting at the seams.

Nationally, half the families kicked off welfare recently have become homeless, and a third of former recipients report that within a year after leaving welfare, they do not have enough to eat. Former recipients who are forced to take minimum wage jobs often become poorer because they lose Medicaid, food stamps, and child care benefits (for those on workfare), while their expenses increase. A national study of women with children who left welfare in 1995-97 showed that those who got jobs were no better off than other low-wage women, that is, still poor. Moreover, a third of the leavers returned to welfare, and a quarter lacked any means of support.

THE FACE OF POVERTY

Poverty has a female face. Two-thirds of poor adults are women, and an estimated 88% of homeless families are headed by women. The vast majority of low-income mothers experience severe physical and/or sexual abuse and assault in their lifetimes. Gwendolyn Mink discusses the 1996 federal welfare act in WHOSE WELFARE? (Cornell Univ. Press, 1999, p. 171): "Flouting the ideal of universal citizenship, the act distinguishes poor single mothers from other citizens and subjects them to a separate system of law. [They] forfeit rights the rest of us us enjoy as fundamental to our citizenship-family rights, reproductive rights, and vocational liberty-just because they need welfare."

Moreover, if they find jobs, women can expect to earn just 73% of men's salaries. These factors have spurred some feminist groups, including the National Organization for Women, to take an active part in welfare rights struggles.

Poverty is more prevalant among African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans than among whites. And most statistics on poverty and wages do not even include undocumented immigrants, who may work for less than minimum wage, and are excluded from nearly all forms of public assistance.

What keeps people in poverty or plunges them deeper into it, are low wages. We are in a period of sustained economic growth, but neither the increases in national wealth nor the demand for workers is reflected in higher wages. With labor unions broken or coopted and welfare no longer an option, working people lack the power to withhold their labor in order to force wages up. In fact, real wages (what you can buy with your pay check) have fallen for the past 25 years by about 12%. Household income has risen only because so many more women and students are working than previously, and so many wage-earners are forced to work two jobs.

What can we do to re-organize this anti-poor, anti-worker society?

The demands of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, like those of other groups who advocate the redistribution of wealth, strike us as abstract and ineffective rallying points. Moreover, the Campaign's analysis of poverty is quite wrong, treating the gap between rich and poor as if it were caused by the rich refusing to "share the wealth." We mislead people if we reinforce the idea that there is a fixed "pie" to be shared, or that capitalism can be permanently reformed so as to eliminate poverty. In fact, capitalism's drive to expand and increase profits makes it inherently at war with working people. Reforms last only as long as workers' movements (including the unemployed) are strong enough to force them on the system. (See Betty Reid Mandell, "Falling through the Safety Net: Women and Children First," NEW POLITICS, Winter 1999.) The only real solution is to destroy capitalism and replace it with a worker-controlled system of production for human needs.

These issues belong in discussions of welfare rights. Appeals for fairness within an anti-human social-economic system will not win "human rights," and the next economic or political crisis can wipe out whatever we do win. To reform the law-to keep people on welfare a little longer, to raise the minimum wage or obtain grievance procedures for workfare-is only one aspect of fighting poverty. In order to transform this society, we need to understand how it functions and to explore the possibility of a new human one.

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