No win...facing the ethical perils of welfare reform

Withorn, Ann

ABSTRACT

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, or `welfare reform; is highly controversial public policy. In every state the 'devolution' of federal entitlements has created intense debate and new legislation, either presaging the national changes or in response to them. In addition to being a source of deep political conflict, welfare reform has also created immediate and continuing dilemmas for the people who try to work within the new rules and for those struggling to change them.

The author reviews the context for understanding welfare reform as an ethical problem for the whole society, and uses examples drawn from her work as a teacher and welfare rights activist to illustrate the day-to-day problems that welfare reform forces upon women who use the system and workers whose job it is to help them. Finally, possibilities for responding at different levels are presented.

It's a no win situation and I'm angry. I'm wondering where everybody else is who is angry People think this situation is like a movie, but it's real. It's about me. I know I'm not shit . . . but I have to break out of the boxes that are killing me. We have to get together or we are all lost ....

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, otherwise known as "welfare reform" is public policy at its most controversial.

It is "the worst thing President Clinton has done," according to former policy advisor Peter Edelman, husband of Marian Wright Edelman, Executive Director of the Children's Defense Fund (1997). Conservatives, however, describe it as "One of the few real accomplishments of the last Republican Congress. . . The new law substituted wishful thinking about job training and public service employment - both elements of the failed Clinton plan - for a hard-nosed emphasis on getting recipients into jobs, any jobs. " (Besharov, 1997, p.28).

But many women who have been trying to use welfare to support themselves and their families, to keep body and soul together in the face of abuse and to get the education they need to find a job they can afford, view it as "A crime. . . it's all wrong to threaten us . . . why don't they help us?" Still, President Clinton, and welfare bureaucrats across the country, are convinced that "there is no more debate, we now know that welfare reform works" because it is deemed responsible for a precipitous decline in caseloads (by an average of almost 30%) across the nation - even if no one can say where the women and their children have gone, or whether they are better off (New York Times, Oct. 16, 1997, p.1).

And the debate goes on. In every state - now that a major federal entitlement has disappeared to become part of a broader "devolution" of responsibilities there have been intense policy debates and new legislation, either presaging the national changes or in response to them. For better and for worse, national and state media keep an ongoing "media watch" on the story (Nieman Foundation, 1997; Flanders, 1995, Ryan, 1996). Conservative and liberal politicians alike speak glibly about the successes and failures of welfare reform, but most have yet to instigate serious policy discussions about the impacts of a complex set of federal and state changes: an abandonment of federal entitlements; an absolute time limit on eligibility for benefits of at most five years and less in many states; family caps in many states that keep children born while on welfare from ever receiving benefits; mandatory work requirements for many recipients just to receive benefits; and many more.2

In addition to being a source of deep and dividing political conflict, welfare reform has also created immediate and continuing dilemmas for the people who try to work within the new rules that have "ended welfare as we know it," and for those struggling to change them. Before reviewing the context for understanding welfare reform as an ethical problem for the whole society, I will present a few examples that come from my work as a teacher and welfare activist in Boston to illustrate the kinds of day-to-day problems that welfare reform is forcing upon women who use the system and the workers whose job it is to help them.

After presenting the stories and explaining their historical context, I will try to examine how we can begin to respond, at different levels, to the dilemmas imposed upon all of us by what for so many of us seems to be an ill-conceived, dangerous and cruel "reform."

The following are pseudonyms for women I know directly. I met them through welfare rights organizing or heard them tell their stories at the innumerable meetings and speakouts held in response to welfare reform, or they are students on welfare at my college who are seeking to make sense out of their lives and their work. Only one woman, "Mary," is someone whom I have not met but just heard spoken about by a sympathetic worker who "worries for her" and tells her story as a caution to others.

Mary had been enrolled in an adult high school diploma program. She was frightened by the time limit and workfare rules and overwhelmed by what she experienced as harassment from the welfare department. She left the rolls simply by mailing back the card the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) sent out asking recipients to "check below" if they wanted to close their case. Without follow-up from the department or advice from anyone, she took the first job she could find without thinking clearly about whether it would support her and her children.

It could not

She couldn't pay her rent and manage all the expenses. She lost her housing and ended up in a shelter, worse off than when she started. And, because her youngest child was less than two, she wasn't even yet subject to the time limit that she so feared for another year. But now she is so depressed, she's not sure she can manage.

clarissa has been on welfare for long enough, and her children are old enough, to be subject to MasS sachusetts' two-year time limit. She now receives a monthly notice of how many months of eligibility she has left She avoided thinking about her plight for awhile. She didn't finish high school and has been trying to finish a GED, but now has to do twenty hours a week of "community service" and try to keep watch over her very difficult older son. She doesn't know if she can find ajob or not by the time limit and is sure that she can't find ajob that will allow her to support her three children. She fears that the stress may drive her to be a worse mother, or to drugs or back to the father of her kids who beats her when he gets -in a mood."

Susan got pregnant by a sweet-talking neighbor who has since disappeared. She didn't believe that abortion was right, so she had the baby. Because she was on welfare at the time, her baby is not eligible for any income benefits because he is subject to the family caps rule. Now Susan can't help herself from being angrier at the baby than she should be - because of the mess the father le her with, because he looks so much like his father and because she doesn't have any extra money to care for him. Her sister is willing to take him as a foster child if Susan gives him up voluntarily. But she feels tom; it doesn't seem right And her sister has her own troubles.

And it is not only recipients who face dilemmas, it is workers at all levels.

Pam works in a basic education program that is part of a small Catholic community shelter for homeless and battered women. She hates the workfare policy that forces women under extreme stress to also work twenty hours a week in return for their basic income grant after 120 days in a shelter. She and her program have been providing signoffs for women and not really requiring them to do "work" except to pay attention to their children's needs and provide support to each other. But she worries that she is breaking the rules and could get the women and her program in trouble.

Carla knows that, for now at least, the DTA where she works is so focused on getting eligible clients to work and reducing the welfare census that they are willing to overlook ways in which the rolls are being reduced that make the numbers look good but only temporarily exclude eligible clients for bureaucratic errors. She knows she can keep clients ineligible for both workfare and the time limit by allowing them to temporarily selfidentify as "disabled" while they await an Supplemental Security Income (SSI) review, which can take months, or even years. She has colleagues who drop clients for missing documents just to keep their numbers low, but she knows she has allowed women to claim disability status who will never pass an SSI review. She is confused and unsure of whether to say something to her colleagues or to stop her own generosity.

Maria, a former recipient herself, is an administrator at a local community college where a lot of women on welfare attend school She knows that some students are too stressed out to really show up for their workstudy jobs, even though the jobs provide them with a little extra money and fulfill their workfare requirements. She has tried to get folks into assignments that are possible, but often the plans never pan out. She knows that if she reports the problem students, they may lose their workstudy and be in trouble with DTA - but other students do meet their requirements. She has always been an advisor to the women on campus who are on welfare, but now she fears getting involved," because the stakes have gotten higher.

Patricia is a social worker and an HMO therapist, working with teens. A sixteen-year-old mother on welfare, Jeanie, is a client who is becoming extremely anxious in complying with the rule that she can only receive benefits if she lives at home. For complex reasons, she and her mother don't get along. Staying at home makes Jeanie feel more and more inadequate. Jeanie wants to live with a friend, not in the group home that is the only permissible option she has if she wants to keep receiving assistance. She has asked Patricia to help her make her case to live with her friend, even though the rules are very clear against it, but Patricia isn't sure what her role is what the rules are, and whether Jeanie might face some sanction if she talks directly with the DTA.

Marwilda runs a small communitybased service agency. She has made it a point to hire women from her community at the best pay her contracts with the state allow. She hired Elena to work in the agency's small daycare for seniors program, ajob Elena was happy to take to leave welfare behind. But now she is finding it diffcult to juggle the demands of her job with those of her two children, especially her teenage daughter. And the salary and benefits do not cover all the expenses she now has because her rent was raised at public housing, and she can no longer get food and fuel assistance. Elena has been unreliable almost from the beginning of her six-month probationary period, and Mariwilda feels that she can't stay but she doesn't want to send Elena back to welfare because she will have only another year of eligibility and no time for another training. Mariwilda knows Elena really needed more training when she came to the agency, so she is now nervous about hiring anyone else from the same program.

A Step Back: Who's on Welfare and Why?

It may help to remind ourselves that these are not isolated problems. Mary, Clarissa, Susan, Jeanie, and Elena are joined by the approximately fourteen million women and children across the nation who were on welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC) when Congress passed welfare reform in 1996. They struggle with poverty, battering, educational disadvantage, a risk of substance abuse, and a world that is falling apart. And, since at least 1996, they are simultaneously caught in a situation where they must fear losing the primary source of economic stability in their lives - even as that source has itself become a cause of shame and mistreatment that they often experience as more abuse.

At least 15% of the people in the United States are poor, but a majority of poor adults do not use AFDC to help them reduce the effects of poverty, perhaps because the stigma and bureaucratic hurdles keep them from asking for assistance or because they have not been informed that they might be eligible.3 Partly due to the fact that many states severely limit the eligibility of two-parent families to receive welfare, only 6% of the adults who receive AFDC benefits are men. Rather, the families on AFDC (now Transitional Assistance for Needy Families, TANF, or a state variant) are headed by women who seek assistance after the backup systems of men, jobs, and extended family have failed or been used up. The benefit levels they received have averaged around 60% of the poverty level (not including the value of Medicaid).

The average family on welfare consists of a mother and two children, and 1 % of the current population are teen mothers. Fifty-five percent of all women on welfare do not have a high school diploma. Most women have been employed before requesting assistance.

Most women (68%) use welfare to help them through an immediate crisis and are off in less than two years. About half who leave welfare find it necessary to return at a later date when jobs end or prove impossible to keep in the face of life pressures. The total time spent on AFDC for those who ever receive it averages about six years. Many studies show that if health benefits and child care were available and secure no matter what job one held, the long- and short-term reductions in welfare rolls would be significant. Still many researchers and almost all low-income women and community-based service workers know that personal circumstances will always leave a significant number of single mothers unable to combine parenting with employment (Edin, 1997; Albelda and Tilly, 1997; Katz, 1989; Gordon, 1991).

Been Down so Long It Looks Like Up to Me: The Roots of Today's Dilemmas

"Welfare reform" didn't appear out of nowhere. An overview of the history can create a clearer context for understanding our current dilemmas, beginning with a recognition that the United States has been a nation where the existence of poverty itself seldom justified policy. The dominant view has long been that both rural and urban poor families should view their poverty as noble, as a temporary badge of honor, that would surely go away quickly because it would stimulate hard work, independence, and initiative. Being "poor, but proud" and not asking for any handout except perhaps the chance to get a job has been a deeply rooted "core value" of American society( Katz, 1996, 1983; Schram, 1995)

Instead, it was pauperhood or the asking of help for oneself or one's family - that has been historically and currently viewed as a problem. And only some paupers have ever been seen as deserving of aid by right. Some veterans, people with some disabilities, some elderly, some widows -- almost all of whom were white -- could begin to claim benefits by the beginning of the twentieth century. But it was not until the depression of the 1930s that national policies began to guarantee some national rights to assistance - and even these were tainted with profound class, racial and gender bias (Abramovitz, 1996b; Gordon, 1994).

"Welfare"(AFDC - originally just ADC, Aid to Dependent Children) was an especially unloved program and was never proclaimed as a social advancement the way that other parts of the broad Social Security Act of 1935 that housed it were ballyhooed (Katz, 1996; Gordon, 1994). It was targeted for the "undeserving" poor: namely women regarded as violating society's most basic rules by seeking assistance for their children as single mothers, abandoned wives, and women whose male partner does not provide adequate support (Abramovitz, 1996b).

Almost since its inception, then, welfare was in the process of being "fixed" by some group or another -- usually those opposed to any entitlements for low-income families headed by a woman, but sometimes also by those wanting to provide more security for such mothers and children.

Congress and state legislatures tried to undermine the possibility that AFDC would lead to expanded claims for rights - not even including funds for the mother until 1950. In the 1930s and 1940s, Southern states explicitly refused aid to black women to keep them working as field and domestic help. In the 1950s and 1960s, welfare systems across the nation denied aid to many single mothers and women of color with policies that equated unwed motherhood with unfit motherhood. Civil rights, women's and progressive activists in the 1960s and early 1970s saw AFDC as the basis for expanding civil rights into "welfare rights"(Piven and Cloward, 1987; West, 1988) On the other hand, conservative critics gained a increasingly wider audience since the 1980s by arguing, as Governor William Weld of Massachusetts proclaimed, that welfare was a "social blasphemy" that undermined "family, faith, and the work ethic"(Weld, 1995).

The disputes over the direction of reform were not trivial. They reflected deep differences within the society regarding what is owed to poor women and their children. After all, despite its flaws, AFDC had gradually evolved into something like a third option for single mothers - it was a real alternative to either attaching oneself to a male worker, sharing his wages and benefits, raising the kids, and hoping he provided for her old age or to placing herself in a discriminatory job market while trying to meet her own and her children's needs. At the cost of great social stigma and personal humiliation, "welfare" offered women the option of receiving below-poverty level income plus medical care, food stamps, and sometimes housing subsidies - to care for their children at home. But since so many in the broader society never accepted any such option, women on welfare found themselves combating both the deep work ethic that viewed wage labor as the only source of social legitimacy as well as what Mimi Abramovitz calls the "family ethic," whereby husbandless women are a threat to moral society if they seek to survive on their own terms (1996; Schram, 1995).

The direct roots of today's punitive welfare reform began with the first mandatory work programs in the late 1960s. These work programs - forerunners of today's workfare -- never met their own goals, due to child-care shortages, labor market barriers, and lack of funds to implement needed employment training and social services. But their coerciveness sent a message about what would happen to poor women in the future: not only would income support be less than poverty level, but women would be forced to attempt to meet unattainable goals in order to make political points.

Later, Reagan's 1982 welfare cuts served not to help women become employed but to eliminate backup welfare assistance for many women who were "working poor"(Withorn, 1996). The goal was to isolate AFDC recipients by assuring that few low-wage workers would think of welfare as a benefit to help them with their increasingly precarious situation instead it became something that "others" got and they didn't. In 1988, bipartisan reform moved even farther in tying assistance to employment, rather than providing it as a basic economic safety net for families in need (Abramovitz, 1996a; Katz, 1996).

Finally, in 1996, a Republican Congress was able to eliminate AFDC altogether, in collaboration with a Democratic president who had campaigned on a promise to "end welfare as we know it." The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, aka "welfare reform," provides government dollars that dictate unpaid employment (workfare or "community service employment") in exchange for benefits within the allotted time limits, but it does not allow for significant training or educational support. The policy is explicitly that of "Work First" meaning women should get a job, act like "regular Americans," and then themselves finance the training or educational programs they need to advance. It asserts that "working poverty" for families is fine; it symbolizes "independence," and it is absolutely the only option women have after their time limit for receiving assistance is up. It also allows states to control the childbearing and parental behavior of poor women through family caps, financial penalties for poor school attendance or inadequate inoculations, and rewards for Norplant implantation or marriage.4

Taken together, the provisions of federal and most states' welfare reforms institutionalize the notion that all mothers need only a brief respite from a failure in the job market or a bad relationship before they can support themselves through employment. Gone is the conception that public policy should offer a means by which underemployed, unemployed, or never-employed women can minimally provide for their families when they find "affordable employment"- i.e. jobs that provide adequate wages, benefits, and time for family care - unavailable. Old ideas that children, at least, have "rights" to welfare when in economic need are simply denied. Assistance is to be offered only as the absolute worst option and always to be justified only as a temporary, "transitional benefit." In short, families whose major problems were always a complex mix of economic and personal insecurity have been rendered even more unstable.

Guidelines for Defensible Practice within an Unethical Domain

Given the new rules and current climate of opinion, lowincome women and the workers who assist them in many settings all must engage in some highly creative thinking in order to cope as humanely as possible. As the earlier front-line examples suggest, and the contextualization above argues further, the pace and direction of reform have left many people confused and in danger of acting precipitously, or of becoming paralyzed by fear and frustration.

Below are some suggestions for how all of us, at different levels, can begin to cope and act in the midst of painful situations. They come from my own practice as a welfare advocate and activist, as well as a social policy analyst, but reflect only the beginnings of a strategy. They are also informed by scores of discussion over the past two years with recipients, workers, and activists about what can be done - discussion, unfortunately, which still leaves most of us struggling for acceptable answers, and the worst sanctions have not even happened yet.

Rule One: Don't panic. Slow down. Know all about situations and about the real rules and the possible options.

Mary is not the only one to panic and give up the benefits she needed in the face of welfare reform and bureaucratic harassment. Indeed, a local welfare rights group in Massachusetts issued a flyer early in the fray with the message, "Don't Panic: There is Still Help," to counter such reactions. In spite of how bad the consequences of welfare reform are, recipients, workers, and advocates can benefit from slowing down, finding out exactly what all the rules are, and refraining from giving advice or acting until all the rules have been checked and double-checked, and all the possible options explored.

Clarissa, for example, might explore whether the long-standing problems she had with schooling - the problems that now keep her from being employable in spite of time limits - stem from an undiagnosed disability, which, if documented could free her from the ticking clock and allow her access to additional services to help her find appropriate education, services, and employment. However, before pursuing this route, Clarissa will probably need the assistance of a worker like Pam, in the Catholic shelter, to explore the implications of declaring herself "disabled" when her learning problems may spring instead from the poor schooling she received in urban neighborhoods.

Because both the situations people find themselves in and the new rules are so complex, recipients must learn not to believe automatically what they hear from friends and even from workers, whether friendly or not. They should always "take a buddy" with them when they visit the DTA office, just to have four ears hearing the rules and two voices asking questions.

Workers in all settings dealing with recipients must welcome such assistance from others, be extremely careful to be properly informed, and not to act, even with the goal of helping, until they are sure if their interpretation of the rules is correct. They must insist on training that at least allows them to understand the new rules. And recipients should be encouraged and prepared to appeal rulings that hurt them.

Of course, a big part of the problem with welfare reform is the very fact that the system is so complex that we find it hard to trust ourselves and fear believing anyone, even ourselves, who claims to know the rules. And in Massachusetts, at least, the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) has started to penalize recipients who file "too many" appeals.

One small way to eliminate some of the paralyzing dilemmas is for recipients and supportive professionals to demand more clarity in the rules, and certainly, to make sure that recipients rights to appeal are protected and easily acted upon. Another is to fight the office consolidations that are "justified" by reduced caseloads - a long, tiring commute to an inaccessible office makes it much harder to remember one's questions and discourages recipients from even going to clarify or protest rules that hurt them.

Rule Two: Never act alone, but be careful who you talk to.

Recipients like Mary, driven by fear to precipitously leave welfare; Clarissa, faced with perpetual unemployment after an impending time limit is imposed; Jeanie, the anxious teen mom; and Susan, the reluctant mother of a "family cap" baby have no chance if they try to decide how to act alone. They need each other, and others. Similarly, helpful workers like Pam, in the shelter; Carla, a sympathetic worker at the welfare department; Maria, at their college; and Patricia, therapist at the HMO, cannot think they can "solve" problems alone - they will need to explore options with women seeking help and with other sympathetic workers. Legal and professional advocates who want to "change things" likewise must carefully choose strategies and tactics in collaboration with low-income people and concerned workers.

Since there are few good choices possible with these rules, the only hope is to find people to talk to - to weigh the consequences and think through all the options together. A mother like Susan may be forced into a situation that can be technically called "fraud," as she tries to get monetary help from a new boyfriend in order to care for her "uncovered" new baby. She needs to talk with other recipients, and maybe a trusted community worker, in order to figure out the risks. And, if she decides her child's needs make the "fraud" worth it, her associates can help her defend herself. If a worker like Pam helps Clarissa continue school by offering a workfare sign-off as "sanctuary," she needs to talk with other staff to be sure all are willing to take a risk, and with Clarissa to be sure she knows the possible consequences.

Similarly, a staff member like Maria may decide to form a "students on welfare support group" and allow people to join it as a work study "job" - in order to offer an opportunity for students to help each other and learn how to help others in their communities. This may help Maria feel that she is behaving responsibly, but someone at her college should know and help her define the project so that, if possible, the institution will defend it. And, Maria should talk with the women who join the group about the risks everyone is taking.

Talking with others also helps everyone keep finding the strength to go on in spite of the weight of the "moral pain," caused by the situation.

Rule Three: Document the problems and the abuses. Those of us who have worked in the "welfare world" for years are constantly amazed at how little our fellow citizens know of either the life situations faced by the poorest families or of the impossible choices created by laws and rules. Welfare officials, bent on proving that the reform is a success, can paint lovely pictures of how well everything is going, how wonderful it is that people are off the rolls, and how effectively the system is operating. Politicians and the general public want to believe such stories, because then they can shut their ears to the advocates and label them as "pessimists" and "alarmists."

One way recipients, workers, and academics can try to handle the seeming impossibility of their dilemmas is by "telling stories." The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, for example, has begun a national project of documenting welfare reform stories like Mary's as human rights abuses.5

When recipients like Clarissa tell their stories about the impossible odds against them in churches, at school parent meetings, or to the Welfare Reform and Human Rights project, there can be a ripple effect. People can begin to think that time limits on benefits may not make sense, for children at least, or that keeping women from higher education in order to do unpaid "community service" is counterproductive. When friendly workers, teachers, and advocates encourage women to write their stories down, to go public, to write to the media and to legislators, they do both the women and themselves a service by helping women gain strength through advocacy for themselves, and find the opportunity to make new contacts.

Workers at every level can tell about the injustices and the impossible conundrums created by the new rules, at least in some staff meetings, and in classes they take, or at social gatherings. By sharing the stories, they may find unexpected options and sources of support in their quest to act properly. Most surely, by speaking up, they protect themselves from becoming numb to the pain of their work and the bad choices forced upon them. They may even find ways to share stories with media or sympathetic policymakers, perhaps at the many "speak outs" and forums that are being sponsored across the country by advocacy groups.

Finally, academics, especially, have a role to play in asking for more "stories" from welfare agencies. It is a national scandal that few, if any, states are making serious effort to find out what is happening to women and children who drop off the rolls - even as bureaucrats and politicians across the country trumpet the success of welfare reform exactly because those numbers have declined. We have obligations to ask for nonintrusive but accurate studies regarding what is happening to children subject to family cap rules, or as a result of the innumerable "sanctions" that are being imposed on recipients who cannot meet "community service commitments," or to teens who aren't living in the right place. In Massachusetts, for example, we have "unofficial" intelligence that the one part of the welfare caseload that is increasing is the number of children placed in "voluntary" care of the state. If this is true, we need to know and to question what are the circumstances that are creating such an increase within a "successful" welfare reform initiative.

Together with the stories uncovered by advocates and independent researchers, such information may create a telling picture of the real ethics of welfare reform.

Rule Four: Seek solutions outside the system.

Clarifying and being trained to know bad rules can only go so far. Sharing stories still may not help Clarissa on the days she feels forced to break the rules and stay away from her workfare job in order to stay home to make sure that her teenage son doesn't get into trouble. Patricia still has to help Jeanie figure out where to live and her supervisor has no clue. Oftentimes, the only answer is to look beyond the situation to find political help, not just a professional referral. A call to a local advocacy group may tell Clarissa how to find Pam, so that she can receive sanctuary at the shelter. Anyone involved in welfare work should start preparing a list of what is being called an "underground railroad" of professionals willing to do what has to be done to protect low income families.? A welfare advocate at an Alliance for Young Families can perhaps help Patricia figure out a strategy for helping Jeanie, even though it will involve getting more involved than Jeanie's job description allows and may mean that she has to advocate with her as well as help her cope.

Mariwilda, on the other hand, might decide to call a meeting through her local human service providers organization and even include some of the local businesses that might hire recipients. Perhaps among them, they can begin to pressure the system to give recipients more thorough training. Maybe some other program might even have a job that will work better for Elena. But again, it will require Mariwilda to do far more than she would normally do for her employees, and there is only so much time.

In Boston, for example, the local poverty program, Action For Boston Community Development (ABCD) now sponsors two openagenda monthly meetings - one for providers and one for recipients - where each constituency meets with advocates and legal service attorneys to inform themselves about the implications of the latest rules, how to fight them case by case, and how to support lobbying efforts aimed at changing the laws.

Going to the press, or testifying publicly at legislative hearings or speakouts, as mentioned earlier, are other ways people can point out the deep traps built into the legislation as well as get help with individual problems. Here, advocates and enthusiastic workers have to be careful to make sure that when a woman chooses to "go public" with her story she is protected from punishment and is prepared to pay the consequences of what can become unwelcome media or bureaucratic scrutiny. Susan, for example, may not wish to seek broader attention to her problems with her "family cap" baby, because, to do so may hurt the child and his family.

Similarly, some advocacy groups are beginning to discuss going to local churches and community groups with demands that they pledge a set amount of money per family and thereby "adopt" a certain number of families reaching the time limit. The debates over the strategy are powerful. On the one hand, some advocates feel that it might force churches, community groups, and individual citizens to see the human face of welfare reform, and to admit to their own privilege and social obligations and even to envision better alternatives (Enhrenreich, 1997). Others, however, feel that to go to the private sector is playing into the anti-government logic that helps undergird welfare reform. They argue that society has an obligation to use the resources it collects through taxation to help its neediest members and that we all have legitimate claims on the state, which must be made or the very notion of "civic obligations" is diminished (Albelda and Tilly, 1997, Withorn, 1997).

Rule Five: Begin to imagine and publicize better alternatives and to stand up against "welfare bashing."

The dilemmas faced by everyone involved in the morass of welfare reform cannot be solved on individual levels or through more create service strategies. With a federal commitment to a flawed system gone, we are all called upon to initiate and participate in serious discussions regarding what might lead to a better system, before time limits and family caps harden all our hearts and make the increasing misery seem normal.

There are proposals for wage subsidy policies being seriously promoted by Wider Opportunities for Women, a national group of feminist economists and policy analysts. These proposals are detailed and attempt to show how a national system could be devised to supplement the wages of all low income workers. The National Welfare Rights Union is promoting a national children's grant proposal, similar to what exists in Europe, that would allow all families with a "family grant," to be repaid through taxation by higher level families. Activist labor groups, like Jobs for Justice, are actively sponsoring "living wage" campaigns and other efforts to make employment viable for more single parent families. Other women's advocates are still insisting that for single mothers, there has to be a "mother's wage" that explicitly values women's caregiving work.7

Such debates are not "academic" but are essential steps in the creation of a new, truly reformed system to address the needs of all the women mentioned above. It is important that agencies, community, and labor and professional groups sponsor forums to examine differing strategies and that we begin the hard task of rebuilding another national consensus regarding what the "safety net" can be. We might even be able to create positive "real reforms" within some states as models for what a truly secure society would be.

A word of caution, however. Advocates, professionals, and others who want to "re-invent the safety net," cannot avoid conflict with some popular, albeit well-financed, opposition. Another, deeper ethical dilemma we must face is that in our democratic society, large numbers of people support welfare reform, not just because they are uninformed, but because they honestly think that it is wrong to provide income support as a floor underneath the labor market (Withorn, 1996). We have serious work to do to be able to challenge such deeply held assumptions, and it cannot all be just that of Drovidinz more information and better alternatives. We will have to argue openly and publicly with conservative opponents, and be willing to surface some deep disagreements.

Such controversy is not easy for anyone. Welfare recipients have to do it every time they stand in the grocery store line with foodstamps or the new financial assistance issued bank cards. Workers and advocates have to step into the ring also - to call the right wing talk shows, to write editorials and letters to the editors protesting disrespectful language toward recipients as well as to explain why policies are eaa. we cannot let welfare bashing pass and just focus on positive, universal, solutions. To do so is to leave the most vulnerable women like Clarissa, Mary, Susan, and their children to fend for themselves on yet another battlefield. Being of assistance means more than finding all the possible ways to offer the best service and arguing for better policies, it means standing up for welfare recipients whenever and wherever we hear them being attacked.

But How Do We Get Through the Day?

It's like living with an abuser who controls his victim with continual uncertainty. You never know what he's going to do, or how it II affect you. I can only think Governor Johnson (New Mexico) has ambitions of riding into a national post by having the first poor-free state.

- Roberta Lucera,

welfare recipient (Boston Globe, November 6, 1997, p. A41)

In many ways, the ethical challenges posed by welfare reform are not new. They have been here as long as those who work with low income families have coped with the social ethics associated with poverty, and with the implications of a "work ethic" that legitimates individual suffering in low-wage jobs by calling it "independence." But, for me - now that time limits, family caps, and forced work have been ratified as official state policy, and enforced through a myriad of regulations whose cruelty derives equally from complexity and confusion - the ethical tensions have heightened dramatically.

Today, society is saying that some babies, because of their mothers' "choice" to have them while on welfare, are ineligible for any income benefits until they are eighteen years old. Or that other children, because their mothers have not found jobs after a set time limit, have no claim for economic assistance from the state. The few hopes such children have are that their mother will transform herself suddenly into someone different from who she is, that an individual waiver given at the sufferance of a sympathetic commissioner will allow them benefits, or that their mothers will put them up for adoption or foster care.

The dilemmas posed by such absolute state-generated policies are untenable. They are as unacceptable as those posed by policies in a 1930s Germany that would not permit children of Jews to go to public schools, or that cut state benefits to disabled people as "useless eaters." And is Ms. Lucera's anti-vision of a "poor free state" really so far from the "ethnic cleansing" we decry today?

While such comparisons may seem strong, I cannot back away from them. All who work with low-income families and children today must do more than the equivalent of sending Red Cross packages into the concentration camps. We cannot remain silent about the meaning as well as the effects of welfare reform. We must speak up at family gatherings, at social events, at professional meetings, in front of the legislatures, to the media. We must join organizations and attend rallies and protests. We must do all that we can to help day to day, but the only way we will be able to justify the small impacts of what we can do there is if we are simultaneously speaking out, acting out and doing everything we can to change the law and rules that corrupt us all.

1. This quote and the other quotes from recipients in this article were spoken by welfare recipients enrolled in a "Reclaiming Rights" community class of welfare recipients, and former recipients, meeting weekly in the public library the heart of Boston's low income black and Latino community (1997, Fall).

2. For the best summaries of the specific content of national and state welfare reforms, see the various publications of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) in Washington DC.

3. All the statistics listed here are taken from Randy Albelda and Nancy Folbre's extremely useful book, The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual, (New York: The New York Press).

4. A new and exceptionally powerful aspect of federal welfare reform were the cuts it made in benefits for legal immigrants. Although these cuts were a significant part of the savings associated with the bill, I am not going to discuss them here. They too raise deep, historicallly rooted, ethical dilemmas regarding the legitimacy of newcomers to this society, but here, for the sake of focus, I focus on the problems for single mothers posed by the act.

5. The Welfare Reform and Human Rights Monitering Project began out of efforts to create evidence of how much of the implementation of welfare reform was a violation of recipients' human rights, as stated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is being coordinated out of the Boston, Massachusetts. Unitarian/Universalist office in Cambridge, MA.

6. In Philadelphia, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union has worked with professionals in several local universities and agencies to establish just such an "underground railroad" of people who will be willing to provide sanctuary, safe houses, and free support and advice, as called upon.

7. See Albelda and Folbre (1996) for a good short summary of all these efforts, with suggestions as to how to find resources for new visions.

References

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Albelda, R. & Folbre, N. (1996). The war on the poor: A defense manual. New York: The New Press.

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Ann Withorn is professor, College of Public and Community Service, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts.

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