Caseworkers have not faced a penalty for these types of errors either before or after reform.85 Instead, caseworkers have incentives to shed clients from their caseloads. One can hardly blame overworked and underpaid caseworkers from responding to such incentives. In her study of Boston-area welfare offices, Celeste Watkins-Hayes finds post-reform caseworkers under enormous pressure to meet the demands of welfare reform.86
Studies have also shown that clear communication between caseworkers and welfare recipients was a problem before reform when recipients had trouble understanding welfare rules.87 A post-reform study finds that one of the reasons recipients are sanctioned (penalized through benefit cuts for not meeting requirements) is that they do not understand, and hence do not appropriately follow, welfare rules. This finding suggests continued problems in the communication of rules.88
Reform similarly fell short in making structural change in the child care market. It created child care subsidies that made it somewhat easier for mothers to afford child care, but it did not address either the supply or the quality of child care services. Instead it has focused almost exclusively on giving low-income mothers subsidies so that they can go out and buy child care of the same quality that existed before reform, when mothers claimed that care of acceptable quality was nearly impossible to find in their neighborhoods. In fact, in the period between reform’s passage and my last interviews, funding for child care doubled but only 4 percent of that funding went into quality improvements in the supply of child care.89 The other 96 percent went toward helping mothers pay for the same low-quality care that had existed prior to reform. And since the subsidy levels are dramatically below the market rate for many child care providers, it mostly only helps mothers buy the least expensive forms of care.90 Researchers have found that low-income mothers’ lack of confidence in the quality of child care they can access has limited their ability to go to work since reform.91
Reform removed some disincentives and created some incentives to marry. As long as their family income is low enough, married couples are now eligible for the main cash assistance program. Prior to reform, they were not eligible. Welfare reform also created a small pool of money for marriage promotion programs, including relationship-training classes that strive to teach low-income people the value of romantic unions and strategies for preserving them. Finally, by removing the permanence of cash assistance, which gave women some small degree of economic independence from men, welfare reform increased the value of marriage if a potential spouse can provide income to the family.
But despite these changes, welfare reform did little to change relationships between men and women (and boys and girls). Multiple researchers have documented that relationships between low-income men and women, including those in the post-reform era, can be marked by distrust and hostility.92 These characteristics of gender interaction can start as early as adolescence.93 Several studies show a relationship between women’s distrust in men and women’s choice not to marry.94
Reform also did not change the structural circumstances of low-income men’s lives, particularly the inhospitality of the labor market and the ever-present enticement of the drug trade and other illegal activities. It is thus not surprising that welfare reform has had little or no effect on marriage rates.95 As low-income women’s education and employment levels rose over the 1990s, low-income men’s actually fell.96 Women were pushed into the labor market by welfare reform and were also told that marriage was a solution to poverty. Yet as women pursued employment as a means to self-sufficiency, marriage appeared a less promising route given the declining economic prospects of men. Both men and women consider men’s employment a precondition for marriage.97 Unemployment rates are particularly high for low-income African American men, as are incarceration rates.98 In 1999, for instance, the risk of imprisonment for African American men who left school before getting a high school degree was 60 percent.99 Having a conviction record creates additional barriers to labor market entry, and incarceration itself removes men from family life. In addition, men’s incarceration lowers the probability of marriage.100
Women’s social networks were a key source of support for them both before and after reform.101 However, the need to care for network members also drains women of time and resources, making it harder to maintain a foothold in the labor market. Researchers have shown this to be true both before and after reform.102 Reform was accompanied by rhetoric about transferring responsibility for poor families from the government to their own communities, but as a policy focused on individual low-income parents it did not invest in those communities. Thus the structure of communities themselves and the resources within them were untouched by reform. In addition, by treating welfare recipients as individuals rather than as members of social networks, reform missed an opportunity to capitalize on the potential power of networks to share resources.
What do these policy shortcomings have to do with the trust levels of low-income mothers? The answer is, a great deal. Because welfare reform did not make fundamental structural changes on either a macro or a meso level, the social contexts in which low-income women’s social interactions occur have remained relatively constant before and after reform. So, for example, before reform, Bethany probably went to caseworkers who had caseloads that were too big to manage effectively. These caseworkers were not sanctioned for being uncommunicative or for inappropriately denying benefits.103 The caseworkers Susan met after reform were, if anything, more burdened than they had been before reform. Now caseworkers face increased pressures and have greater incentives to get people off the rolls, even if this happens because of poor communication regarding benefits or inappropriate denial of them.104 In short, for both low-income mothers today and their counterparts in an earlier policy regime the structural setup is one in which caseworkers and recipients have opposite interests and probably feel equally (although differently) oppressed. These conditions produce hostile relationships between caseworkers and recipients. The nature of these relationships creates distrust of caseworkers on the part of recipients (and, undoubtedly, vice versa).
Social interactions in workplaces are similarly shaped by structural conditions. Bethany and many other women before reform held low-pay, low-autonomy jobs that often led them to feel mistreated by—and therefore distrustful of—their supervisors. For some women, this dynamic led to quick turnover. Susan’s experience in post-reform workplaces was no different.
Similar stories, detailed in the chapters to come, characterize each of the five settings I discuss. The creation of distrust is related to how the interactions between actors are structured in the specific setting, and none of the settings I examine has changed dramatically since the implementation of welfare reform in the 1990s. Mothers struggling to raise children in poverty today are thus just as likely as similar mothers in an earlier time period to distrust and shy away from potential opportunities in almost every setting in which they find themselves.
| TWO | “The Way They Treat You Is Inhumane” | |
| CASEWORKERS AND THE WELFARE OFFICE |
It was forty-five minutes of hell. It was terrible. She doesn’t like the people that need the help.
—Julie Callahan
’Cause, like Public Aid kind of makes you feel like you just panhandling almost, might as well say. The way they treat you. They just don’t treat you right. You go up to them office and they all cold . . .