Julie was apprehensive about having to go to the welfare office, and she was unprepared for what happened during her first meeting with her caseworker. As she explained on the phone that same evening in an agitated voice when I asked her how it went, “Oh, it was a big problem. The caseworker, Ms. Driscoll, was very mean and she was very disrespectful. She said she doesn’t care what happens because . . . she’s tired of young women coming to her asking for welfare. She said she’s going to retire soon and she’s settled, but my life’s just beginning and I’m already asking for welfare.”
Julie was clearly very upset and spoke quickly and forcefully, repeating over and over, “She was so degrading” and “She acted like the money is coming out of her pocket.” Julie reported that Ms. Driscoll had just started attacking her at the beginning of the meeting, saying, “Why can’t you get a boyfriend who has a job?” When she first started the meeting and was looking over Julie’s case file, Julie reported, Ms. Driscoll said, “What’s changed since the last five years [the last time Julie was on assistance]? Oh, I know, you have another kid—and you can’t even support the one you have.” Julie was speechless. “I don’t know why she has to get into my personal life—who my boyfriend is and what I do with my spare time. It’s almost like they want to know when I go to the bathroom.” Julie’s final summary of the meeting was simply, “It was forty-five minutes of hell. It was terrible. She doesn’t like the people that need the help.”
Throughout the long application process, Julie dealt with others in the Public Aid office.1 She found some to be just like Ms. Driscoll and others refreshingly pleasant. But as Ms. Driscoll remained Julie’s caseworker, Julie’s overall impression of social interaction at the office was that it was belittling and uncooperative.
Like Julie, most women interviewed for this study perceived the majority of social interactions between themselves and caseworkers in the welfare office to be adversarial. Women at both time periods reported that caseworkers did not take the time to explain rules clearly and that they treated recipients disrespectfully. Many women said they had trouble getting or keeping benefits to which they believed they had a legal right. Such experiences engender distrust.
This distrust interferes with the intended incentives of specific welfare policies. Not only the specifics of welfare benefits and rules but also the philosophy of welfare policy is communicated through caseworkers.2 Since the women receiving welfare in my study tended to see these messengers as the enemy, they tended also to report to me that they were suspicious of welfare policy’s promises and intentions. Thus they did not trust that promised benefits would accrue in practice. They believed that their interests were directly at odds with those of the welfare office—that is, that their own interest was in retaining benefits, while the main motivation of the welfare office and its personnel was to move them off the welfare rolls.3
I begin this chapter with an overview of how welfare offices and welfare policies differed before and after welfare reform. What did not change was the fact that the women I interviewed reported hostile relationships with their caseworkers at both time periods. I then discuss two reasons why these hostile relationships are a breeding ground for distrust. First, communication in the client-caseworker relationship is poor, resulting in women not knowing or understanding official welfare rules and benefits. This is a problem because even when caseworkers follow rules appropriately and cut a woman’s benefits legitimately, a woman who does not understand the rules will feel she has been treated unfairly and, as a result, will distrust her caseworker. Poor communication about rules and benefits also generates distrust because it leads women to feel that their caseworkers are holding out on information they should be giving them, for instance about available work supports like transportation subsidies. Second, even when women do know about rules and benefits, they do not believe that the caseworkers with whom they have hostile relationships will actually follow the official rules and deliver benefits appropriately. Hostility leads to distrust that caseworkers will make good on the welfare office’s promises. As a result, women are less responsive to voluntary incentives to enter the labor force than they would be if they believed promised benefits would be delivered. I conclude with a discussion of how the structure of the welfare office, particularly the lack of shared interests between caseworkers and clients, promotes distrust and how such distrust might be addressed.
WELFARE REFORM AND THE WELFARE OFFICE
Today’s low-income women who receive cash assistance interact with a welfare office and with caseworkers who must operate under the goals and incentives set forth by the 1996 reforms. For a long time, welfare policies have been trying to move recipients into the workforce, leading caseworkers to stress that benefits should be seen as temporary supports. The welfare reform act of 1996 dramatically stepped up such efforts.
A Preference for Sticks over Carrots
The 1996 welfare reform legislation was not the first policy with the goal of moving low-income women into the labor market, but it shifted the emphasis from encouragement to force. As discussed in chapter 1, less than a decade before welfare reform was passed, the Family Support Act (FSA) of 1988 attempted to reform welfare as well. As implemented in some states, the FSA did create work requirements for certain groups of recipients, but they were not applied as broadly and were not as onerous as those created by the 1996 policy. Most importantly, the FSA did not impose time limits on benefits. Hence, the 1996 reforms focused more on mandatory “sticks” to force recipients to find jobs, whereas implementation of the 1988 legislation, especially in certain states, relied more heavily on voluntary incentives, or “carrots,” to draw recipients into the workforce. Two of the voluntary work incentives instituted by the FSA were to provide low-income mothers who left welfare for work with a child care subsidy for one year and to grant continued Medicaid coverage, also for one year, after the transition to work. Before the passage of the 1988 legislation, Medicaid had been available to low-income families only if they fell into certain categories, one of which was being a cash assistance recipient. As a result, most parents who left welfare for low-wage work, which rarely provides insurance benefits, were faced with immediate loss of medical coverage for themselves and their children. FSA’s transitional Medicaid benefits thus removed one disincentive for welfare recipients to find employment.
Another major voluntary incentive, called the Work Pays program, was instituted in the state of Illinois in 1993. Prior to the implementation of Work Pays, a welfare recipient’s monthly assistance grant was docked one dollar for every dollar that she earned through employment. This effectively meant that earnings were taxed at a rate of 100 percent, which created a disincentive to enter the labor force.4 The Work Pays program changed this rule, instead allowing recipients to keep two out of every three dollars of earned income. Illinois was able to supersede the federal dollar-for-dollar reduction rule because in the early 1990s, before the 1996 welfare reform bill was penned, President Clinton liberally granted states waivers to experiment with welfare rules. This state-level experimentation provided ideas for policy innovation and evidence of policy effects that were eventually used as support for federal reform. Illinois received a waiver in 1993 to run Work Pays, and the program has been in place ever since.
Several carrots still exist (and existed at the time of my post-reform interviews) in Illinois alongside