During the George Bush administration, the expansion of federal food programs took place quietly. Reimagining food stamps as a work support was a technocratic response to long-term economic trends in the labor market that began in the 1980s. Throughout this period, manufacturing jobs, which provided stable work and middle-class wages for large numbers of working-class families, disappeared. These jobs were largely replaced by service-sector jobs that are lower paid and less secure. The kinds of jobs available to working-class households include care work of various kinds—cooking; looking after children, the ill, and the elderly; and house work.
Broad changes in the labor market also had an enormous impact on the ways that Americans eat. Changes in the American diet over the past several decades have spurred concern over public health, obesity, and diet-related disease, which became central issues shaping food policy in the Obama era. The commodification of household labor has created a huge pool of cheap “help” that even low-income families can access. These cheap forms of help range from fast-food restaurants and processed, prepared foods in the grocery store to the proliferation of daycare centers and home health aides. These growing industries are the mainstay of employment growth in the United States, producing thousands of new, poorly paid jobs for the American working class. As Susan Thistle writes, “The conversion of women’s domestic tasks into work done for pay has been the area of greatest job growth over the past thirty years” (Thistle 2006, 102). She argues that almost two-fifths of the increase in jobs since 1970 was due to market takeover of household and caring tasks. Some of the most remarkable growth has come in the food service industry, as Americans of all income levels increasingly eat food prepared outside the home. The factory-like production of fast food has been the key to lowering the costs of prepared food and putting it in reach of even poor households (Thistle 2006, Fantasia 1995, Schlosser 2002, Levenstein 1993). Even more rapid growth has taken place in the realm of routine domestic care for the sick, elderly, and young, and “the commercialization of women’s domestic realm will continue to provide the bulk of new employment over the first decades of the twenty-first century” (Thistle 2006, 106).
As women moved into the labor force in large numbers, the commodification of domestic labor has produced a strained, stratified patchwork of market, familial, and state systems of care. But as Mona Harrington has argued, “We have come nowhere near replacing the hours or quality of care that the at-home women of previous generations provided for the country” (Harrington 2000, 17). As caring labor is increasingly commodified, we are confronted with the question, how much can we reorganize forms of care without imposing significant costs? As Sylvia Federici points out, “The degree to which the marketization of food production has contributed to the deterioration of our health (leading, for example, to the rise of obesity even among children) is instructive” (Federici 2012). Reliance on commodified forms of care for low-income households—fast food and prepackaged foods in particular—are increasingly understood as contributing to ill health and producing new forms of social instability.
Led by Michelle Obama’s efforts, the Obama administration emphasized the role that programs like SNAP could play as both a work support and a public health intervention. However, in the face of the entwined crises of care, economic insecurity, and public health, the Obama administration’s efforts to transform food programs were largely symbolic. For example, his administration changed the name of the food stamp program to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to emphasize the nutritional impact of the program as part of the 2008 stimulus bill. This change was part of a broader push by Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to tackle rising rates of childhood obesity and diet-related disease. The emphasis on health and nutrition that defined the Obama administration’s approach to food policy and was reflected in the passage of improved nutrition standards for school lunches and the program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). But these narrow, targeted interventions failed to confront the power of a loosely regulated food industry to flood consumer markets with unhealthy foods. Nor did they do much to improve low-income households’ purchasing power in ways that might enable them to afford healthier but more expensive food.
Obama-era concerns with health and well-being were grafted onto a food safety net that was structured first and foremost to encourage and support low-wage work, not to ensure a universal right to adequate, healthy food. President Obama’s commitment to work-first welfare was in line with previous administrations, reflecting the staunch political consensus of welfare reform as a success. His approach to poverty and food insecurity was largely compatible with the organized interests of the business community that have dominated national politics since the 1980s. He attempted to give states greater flexibility in how they implemented work requirements for safety net programs in 2012. These efforts met a swift and furious backlash, with presidential candidate Mitt Romney running ads claiming that Obama was trying to “gut welfare reform.” The Obama administration immediately backed off these minor changes, and Obama defended his record of helping to implement work requirements in Illinois as a state senator, signaling his strong commitment to work-first welfare despite his administration’s vocal concerns with public health (Ball 2012).
THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION
In the 1970s, profits began for fall for industrial manufacturing in the United States. Firms responded by pursuing a spatial fix, lowering labor costs by moving production to areas of the globe where labor was cheaper. Today, the growing sectors of the US economy have no spatial fix. Care of the elderly and sick, housekeeping, and the retailing of food and other consumer goods cannot be moved offshore. Since there is no spatial fix for these sectors, elites have pursued what Collins and Mayer have called a “relational fix,” creating new categories of people within the working class who are more vulnerable to exploitation and who can be excluded from basic economic rights. Collins and Mayer argue that workfare and welfare reform were part of the creation of a race to the bottom in service jobs that tracked with the global race to the bottom in manufacturing (Collins and Mayer 2010). The institution of workfare, along with an undermining of immigrant labor rights and the creation of a large population of formerly incarcerated people who can be legally discriminated against in the labor market (Alexander 2010) exerts downward pressure on the wages and rights of all wage workers. This domestic race to the bottom has taken the form of both stagnating wages and salaries as well as increasingly informal labor arrangements—including many occupations in what is now called the “gig economy”—extremely short-term jobs, such as Uber drivers, with no formal relationship between employers and employees. The lives of the families in this book are intimately shaped by this race to the bottom. As I assisted people in applying for food stamps and accompanied them to welfare offices, packed bags with them in the food pantry, and shared meals with them in the soup kitchen, they shared their sense of slipping further behind. For many, the stable lives they yearned for felt increasingly out of reach.
Across the political spectrum, welfare reform continues to be heralded as a success precisely because TANF, the cash assistance program for poor families, continues to enroll far fewer people today than it did when reforms were passed. Success is never measured by how many people actually moved into work or escaped poverty, but how many are moved off of the rolls. The assumption is that if people are no longer receiving assistance, then they must be working. But the reality is that there are a growing number of Americans who are disconnected from both the labor market and state assistance. Six million people in the United States had no access to any income other