Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine

(and continues to allow) employed welfare recipients to keep two out of every three dollars of their earnings instead of having their welfare grants reduced a dollar for every dollar earned through employment. The transitional medical and child care benefits set up by the earlier reform measures of 1988 allowed women to keep both Medicaid coverage and child care subsidies for a year after they exited welfare for work.

      If properly applied, Work Pays would allow women who work for minimal pay and limited hours to retain eligibility for cash assistance and to raise their income levels. The transitional benefits, if granted as indicated in written policy, would ensure that families would not lose medical coverage for at least a year after a mother became employed.

      I asked each respondent detailed questions about each of these welfare rules. Fewer than half of the women described the Work Pays program or the transitional benefits as they were laid out in written materials at the welfare office. Most women assumed that they would be cut off from all benefits as soon as they took a job. They did not realize that the written regulations stated that, on the basis of the Work Pays program, they should have been able to keep a portion of their cash assistance grant (unless their earnings were so high that they were no longer income eligible) and that, on the basis of the FSA of 1988, they should receive transitional child care and Medicaid benefits for one year.

      When she was a teenager, Pauline Garett worked in a fast-food restaurant. Fast-food jobs are low-paying and often part time. They are thus exactly the type of employment Work Pays and transitional Medicaid and child care benefits were designed to encourage by subsidizing the low wages and adding work supports. However, Pauline did not see this potential, as her response demonstrated when she was asked if she would take a fast-food job at age thirty-three after years of not being employed:

      No, I would take something that would give me a little bit more money to pay my bus fare to get there. Really, I would have to be careful what kind of job I take. I know right now, if I took a job and it didn’t work out and [had] no kind of [medical] coverage for my kids—’cause Public Aid, they gonna snatch that right away as soon as I report it to them—they take that from me, and say a job paying like five or six dollars, it’s not gonna make it. ’Cause I got to pay my own expenses on my own, pay for me to get to the job. Still, I need something to cover me, some kind of [medical] coverage for my kids, so I don’t know.