The Workfare State. Eva Bertram

to understand both the sources of policy change, and the persistence of a work-based approach despite evidence of its shortcomings as a safety net.

      To existing literatures on welfare state retrenchment and economic inequality, the story of workfare offers analytical leverage in understanding late twentieth-century changes in the U.S. welfare state and their implications. Recent comparative scholarship on models of social provision has posited an affinity between workfare and the new political economy of contemporary capitalism, with its increasing demand for “flexible” labor.²⁶ Few of these works, however, focus attention on the political development of workfare in U.S. public assistance—on how, when, and why this turn took place. This book suggests that the origins of workfare in the United States may have as much to do with the local and highly stratified Southern labor markets of the past as with the “flattened and flexible” global labor market of the twenty-first century.

      Other scholars have leveled compelling new challenges at old assumptions about U.S. welfare-state retrenchment, with a focus on the 1980s and beyond.²⁷ Recent works have pointed to patterns of expansion in some policy areas even in periods of fiscal constraint, and to trends toward a new market-oriented “enabling” paradigm for social provision.²⁸ This account seeks out earlier architects of the conservative turn in U.S. welfare policy, and it examines the interaction effects between social programs to better understand the transformation. It demonstrates that conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s relied on programs developed by Southern Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s to build the political compromises and coalitions needed to achieve their aims. This approach redefines the relationships between antipoverty programs. The EITC, for example, is conventionally seen as an exception to the retrenchment in public assistance exemplified by AFDC’s dismantlement: it expanded even as other programs faced serious cutbacks.²⁹ In fact, the enactment and expansion of the EITC enabled conservatives to win moderate support for cuts in AFDC, and the EITC was thus used politically to facilitate AFDC’s decline. Implicit here is the notion that retrenchment and reconfiguration may be two sides of the same coin: one model of income assistance was dismantled as another was constructed, offering one explanation for why some programs grew and others declined in a period of conservative ascendancy. Although opponents of the New Deal welfare state have at times undermined social welfare programs by cutting budgets, they have also achieved their aims by creating new programs, or turning the purposes of existing programs toward conservative ends.

      The story of workfare’s origins also speaks to recent debates on the political sources of economic inequality. Prominent accounts have focused on the role of voters and political parties, arguing, for example, that low-income Americans have fared better when elections yield Democratic rather than Republican administrations, based on income distribution data under varying conditions of party control.³⁰ But this metric may miss a deeper story. Workfare illustrates how particular Democratic-led social policies have reinforced or even exacerbated inequality over time. Other scholars in the inequality debate focus on the role of organized interests and institutions in policymaking. They argue that policy choices affecting income distribution are shaped more decisively by mobilized economic interests and structural advantages in the political environment than by the actions of individual voters or parties.³¹ The complex role of different factions within the Democratic party, and their alliances with organized interests and like-minded Republicans in the development of workfare, lends evidence to this claim.

      The case of workfare also engages larger theoretical debates about the sources and mechanisms of institutional change and stability. By showing how incremental shifts in the operation of public assistance over time came to redefine and undermine the original purposes and trajectory of social programs such as AFDC, for example, this analysis broadens conceptions of “path dependence.”³² The workfare case also sheds light on recent debates over “submerged,” “delegated,” “hidden,” and “shadow” policymaking in American politics. The development of workfare relied on the use of tax incentives and other pro-market policy tools to win passage of favored social programs by centrist or conservative Democrats—from Louisiana Senator Russell Long to President Clinton. These “submerged” or “hidden” policy tools arguably undermined support for broader redistributive efforts at key moments, in part by obscuring the role of government in providing benefits.³³

      In focusing on federal policy and the role of work and labor markets, I do not mean to deny other frameworks for understanding the politics of public assistance. This book focuses on a significant, untold story about policymaking over time; as a result, the spotlight is on the role of political elites, mainly at the national level. Other actors have played vital roles in welfare politics, including welfare recipients, the civil rights and women’s movements, business interests, and state and local officials; though not the focus of this study, their contributions to the politics of public assistance have been established in numerous accounts.³⁴

      Particularly on the subject of AFDC, there are rich literatures on the gender and racial politics of reform, and this book is indebted to many of these works. Gender analyses have exposed the ways welfare policies have been fueled by attempts to regulate and control the behavior of single mothers eligible for AFDC. Welfare has not only failed to provide adequate income for their families, but it has also been used systematically to undermine their rights and liberties regarding marriage, reproduction, and child-rearing. Race-centered scholarship demonstrates how welfare restrictions, rules, and cutbacks not only targeted nonmarried mothers, but were often racially motivated. My account argues that historically, welfare reform has been driven by political-economic factors in addition to and often in conjunction with race and gender.³⁵ Preoccupied with preserving regional labor markets with social hierarchies intact, Southern lawmakers led the charge to rewrite federal policy in the 1960s to impose work requirements on poor single mothers in AFDC, for example; this was a critical turning point in the gendered struggles over welfare rights and work obligations. They also provided the decisive template (the EITC) in the 1970s for addressing problems in the low-wage workforce, one that circumvented rather than challenged the deep racial and gender disparities in rates of unemployment, job tenure, wage mobility, and access to job-related social protections that continue today.³⁶

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      This book has been animated by more than the scholarly conversations it engages, however. From the outset, my central interest has been to understand the staleness of the contemporary political debate on poverty and public assistance. For more than thirty years, the poverty debate has been framed largely by the question of how to move single mothers from welfare to work. Declining numbers on the welfare rolls are still used, by conservatives and liberals alike, as evidence of the success of federal antipoverty policies.³⁷ This book recasts the debate to focus on the economic security of families under the workfare system. Doing so demands attention not only to welfare families, but to the far larger population of poor and near-poor families who are the targets of workfare.

      For politics and policy, the questions raised by the workfare state are pointed. Federal policy now seeks to address family poverty by tying income assistance to employment. How successfully is it achieving this aim? Is a strategy of conditioning the social contract for poor Americans on employment the best way to ensure basic economic security for these families?

      The evidence to date is not encouraging. Viewed in the context of other wealthy nations, the record of the United States in addressing poverty is abysmal. Poor families with children put in more hours at work than their counterparts in any other rich country. The United States also leads these countries in the number of workers who hold low-wage jobs. At the same time, the United States does far less than other wealthy nations to reduce poverty through social expenditures and tax policies. In countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Finland, government transfer programs and taxes reduce the poverty rate by more than 20 percentage points. In the United States, it is a mere 9.7 points. So poor Americans work more, but more remain in poverty than in other wealthy nations (17.3 percent of Americans were poor a decade into the 2000s, measured by the shared international standard, compared with an average of 9.9 percent in twenty-three of the wealthiest nations). Comparisons of rates of poverty among children are particularly disturbing. As a percentage of national income, the United States spends about half as much