The distrust exhibited by the women I interviewed both before and after welfare reform similarly stemmed from “the experience of the individual and the group.” Sometimes the experience was direct experience with the potential trustee. Sometimes it was experience not with the potential trustee but with people in the same role as the potential trustee (different caseworkers or different boyfriends, for example). Sometimes it was the experience reported by others in the community, such as mothers or friends. Sometimes it was experience reported more distantly in news media or rumor. Sometimes, it was a self-protective approach that mothers drew upon preemptively to combat potential disrespect or mistreatment—a worldview or strategy based not on first-hand experiences or others’ reports about the specific current situation but more generally on collective experience about how things go for those in poverty.
But even in this latter circumstance when the women’s distrust was not based on specific experiences, it was very much rooted in structural circumstances. The mothers I interviewed sat at the bottom of the U.S. stratification system, in terms of both their material resources and their prestige. Coming from that position, they pulled distrust out of their “toolkits” to defend themselves against the stigma of their position and the threat of further material deprivation.66 A distrustful stance served as an armor to shield them from a world in which they had little other protection. And sometimes, perhaps, the power to withhold their trust was their one and only means of wielding power when they controlled so little else.
Many trust theorists argue that trust or distrust comes from calculating expectations about potential outcomes of an interaction.67 That is, people take into consideration what they know about their interaction partner’s interests in the particular social context and what they have observed about the partner’s behavior in order to calculate the chances that the partner will reliably come through for them. In other words, they make calculations about whether their interaction partner is trustworthy. These calculations dictate whether a taxi driver decides it is safe to pick up a particular fare or whether a bank gives a particular client a loan.68
Much of the distrust that the women I interviewed expressed was indeed based on their collecting information about their interaction partners and, from it, making the calculation that their partners were not trustworthy. This information might be based on direct interactions themselves, similar past experiences, or the experiences of others they knew.69
One of the key factors on which people base expectations about trustworthiness is whether they believe their interaction partners share their interests.70 Because of the women’s disadvantaged structural position both in several of the contexts I study and more generally in U.S. society at large, their interests were often at odds with those of their interaction partners. In the five settings studied, low-income women found themselves interacting either with people who held power over them or with people who shared their powerlessness. When interacting with those who held power over them, they rarely felt they shared interests. For example, caseworkers’ interest was in moving them off the rolls as quickly as possible while theirs was in maintaining benefits or in moving off only when stable jobs could be found. Similarly, employers’ interest was in maintaining a flexible, cheap, and easily replaced low-wage labor force while theirs was in securing stable employment with advancement opportunity.
When the women were interacting with those who were in a more equal structural position (informal child care providers, boyfriends, friends and family), the likelihood that they would share interests was greater and thus the potential for trust was greater. However, their shared powerlessness in relation to the outside world, that is, their mutual relegation to the bottom of what I have called the U.S. stratification system, often meant that their interaction partners were scrambling to survive and hence could not be relied upon to take their interests to heart. The desperation that powerlessness creates means that everyone must be out for him- or herself at times. For example, the workers in Sandra Smith’s book Lone Pursuit did not help their unemployed peers find jobs at their workplaces for fear that if these peers did not perform well it would reflect badly on them and they would risk losing jobs they needed to survive. As much as they might wish to help their friends and family members, they did not trust these others to behave acceptably at work.71
THE STRUCTURES THAT WELFARE REFORM DID NOT FIX
I have described the women I interviewed as disadvantaged in two different kinds of structures. In U.S. society at large, what we might call “macro-level structure,” they were at the bottom end of the class system. They had very little income, lived in dilapidated apartments in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, had few options but to send their children to underfunded schools, and mostly had education levels below those required for jobs that pay a living wage. Welfare reform did not change these facts. The women I interviewed before reform did not differ on these dimensions from the women interviewed after reform.72 The quantitative studies reviewed above provide evidence that welfare reform did not change these facts for many other low-income women as well.
Welfare reform changed policies about the delivery of cash assistance. It did not ameliorate the forces that create inequality on the macro level. Most notably, it did not change the fact that globalization and increasing technological skill demands have eroded wages for low-skill workers.73 Income inequality has grown dramatically since the late 1970s. The rewards of economic growth have been concentrated primarily on those at the top of the income distribution.74
Low-wage jobs do not provide enough income to lift families out of poverty. When I conducted both my pre- and post-reform interviews, if a woman worked full time and full year in a minimum-wage job, she would still be significantly under the poverty line. This was true not only for a mother of one or more children but even for a single adult. In 2004, 60 percent of families below the poverty line contained at least one worker, and 28 percent contained at least one full-time, full-year worker.75 Low-wage work is not an automatic ticket out of poverty.
Welfare reform also did not adequately address insufficient labor demand. While many assume that anyone can always get a job “flipping burgers,” that is untrue, especially in urban areas of concentrated poverty. Anthropologist Katherine Newman discovered that in central Harlem there were fourteen applicants for every opening at the fast-food restaurants she studied.76 Even those who find jobs may discover that their employers do not reliably offer enough weekly hours to guarantee stable income or to allow welfare recipients to meet their required number of work activity hours.77
In addition to not addressing these macro-level structures, welfare reform brought no change to the structure of the contexts in which women must choose whether or not to trust—often called meso- (or middle-) level structures.78 Here too the women I interviewed found themselves, at both time periods, in a disadvantaged position. Welfare reform established financial incentives for low-income mothers to find jobs and provided for a limited number of subsidized jobs, but it did not create any substantial changes in the way workplaces operated. Since low-wage jobs usually require few hard skills, low-wage workers are easily replaced. Their dispensability gives them little power to demand fair treatment.
Some night-shift employees of Walmart and Walmart’s subsidiary Sam’s Club, for instance, have been locked in stores overnight, in part to inhibit theft by employees. As a result, workers have been unable to escape even during emergencies. Sam’s Club worker Michael Rodriquez learned of this problem when his ankle was crushed by a fellow employee driving an electronic cart. It took over an hour for a manager with a key to arrive at the store and release the pain-wracked Rodriquez. Similar events have involved a worker having a heart attack and expectant fathers delayed from attending their children’s births.79 Academic researchers have further documented the poor conditions and indignities of low-wage work.80
Welfare reform did not restructure workplaces. It did more directly affect the organization of welfare offices, but it left key problematic structures in place. Most notably, it