“Poor mothers distrust men, employers, and welfare caseworkers–and almost everyone else except a few family and friends. Finally we have a book that puts this palpable distrust at the center of analysis. Levine offers rich description of how distrust permeates the lives of the women she interviewed both before and after welfare reform, and insightful theorizing about the causes and consequences of this distrust.”–Paula England, New York University

“Policy makers have many goals for women who are poor: get jobs, put their children in daycare, and rely on family members for assistance rather than the government. As policy makers have sought to understand why these policies have floundered, many critics have focused on the failings of the women. In this engaging book, Judith A. Levine shifts the conversation in a fresh and original fashion. In rich, in-depth interviews, Levine presents women’s accounts of how employers harass them, caseworkers lie, and even family members often remain untrustworthy. Levine shows us that feelings of trust are a crucial social lubricant, but this lubricant is in short supply in the lives of single low-income mothers. Without trust, it is hard to get ahead. Highly recommended!”–Annette Lareau, Stanley I. Sheerr Professor, University of Pennsylvania

Judith Levine is Associate Professor of Sociology at Temple University.

Ain’t No Trust

How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers and Why It Matters

By Judith A. Levine

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Judith A. Levine
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27471-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, xi,
Introduction, 1,
1. Welfare Reform and the Enduring Structural Roots of Distrust, 23,
2. “The Way They Treat You Is Inhumane”: Caseworkers and the Welfare Office, 47,
3. “I Couldn’t Put Up with It No More”: Perceived Mistreatment and Distrust at Work, 84,
4. “I Don’t Trust People to Watch My Kids”: Mothers’ Distrust in Child Care Providers, 123,
5. “You Can’t Put Your Trust in Men”: Gender Distrust and Marriage, 147,
6. “I Trust My Mother and No One Else”: Trust and Distrust in Social Networks, 179,
Conclusion, 204,
Appendix: Research Methods, 219,
Notes, 235,
Bibliography, 267,
Index, 285,

CHAPTER 1

Welfare Reform and the Enduring Structural Roots of Distrust

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CASH ASSISTANCE FOR LOW-INCOME MOTHERS AND THEIR CHILDREN

PRWORA was not the first time the United States attempted to reform the way it delivers cash assistance to low-income families. In fact, just a mere eight years earlier, the Family Support Act of 1988 had made similar, though smaller, changes. Both pieces of legislation echo themes that run throughout the history of the American welfare state. Since the beginning of this history, politicians and the public have been concerned that “handouts” in the form of cash assistance would create a dependent population and undermine the value of work. Additionally, policy makers have resisted rewarding the “wrong” sorts of people—those deemed undeserving or unworthy of help either because they are able-bodied but are not employed or because their moral character is considered lacking in other ways. Those deemed deserving benefit from more generous social programs and those deemed undeserving receive less generous benefits or, sometimes, none at all. Popular resentment of welfare recipients, considered undeserving by many citizens, has played an important role throughout this history. This theme continues in the most recent reforms. In fact, one can interpret the welfare reform of 1996 as an aggressive attempt to promote “deserving” behavior (welfare exit, employment, marriage) and to transform the welfare population from an “irresponsible” and “undeserving” crowd to a responsible and deserving one. After all, the words “Personal Responsibility” appear in the name of the legislation that ushered in welfare reform.

While all forms of government social spending can be considered “welfare,” when people refer to welfare they typically mean cash assistance to low-income families. These families usually, but not always, consist of single mothers and their children. At the time the 1996 changes were being debated, the program that issued such assistance was called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The earliest precursors of AFDC, which were instituted even before the United States had a federal system of social welfare policies, were the Widows’ Pensions, a set of state-level pensions designed to support Civil War widows, enabling them to continue raising their children rather than losing the children to orphanages. Widows, especially those who had lost their husbands in wartime military service, were considered a group particularly deserving of government assistance. Furthermore, staying home to raise their children was accepted as the appropriate role for women. This sympathy for war widows supplied the needed political will to pass the Widows’ Pensions. In doing so, state governments were willing to act as a substitute for an absent breadwinner in the family by replacing his earnings, at least in part.

The concept behind Widows’ Pensions became the basis for a national program of cash assistance to low-income families when Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed his main New Deal legislation, the Social Security Act of 1935, in response to the Great Depression. The Social Security Act created a two-tiered national welfare state in which employed Americans receive social welfare benefits, such as disability and retirement payments, through a set of universal, employment-based, contributory social insurance programs, while those out of the labor market whose income falls under a defined eligibility level receive benefits through noncontributory public assistance programs. Roosevelt initially conceived of cash assistance to low-income families and similar public assistance programs as equal in importance to employment-based social insurance programs, but they quickly became less favored and less generous. Even Roosevelt feared that cash relief without work requirements would become a “habit with the country.”

The two-tiered welfare state not only resulted in an uneven welfare state in terms of generosity but also divided the population into those eligible for the more generous programs and those shuttled into the less generous ones. Since women, racial minorities, and members of the lower classes have had less stable attachments to the labor force, the division has largely been based on gender, race, and class lines.

These lines became even clearer in the 1960s when civil rights legislation and President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and “Great Society” programs (inspired by President Kennedy’s antipoverty efforts cut short by his assassination) gave political voice and equal access to welfare benefits to many African Americans for the first time. Suddenly the welfare rolls swelled and those receiving cash assistance benefits were increasingly African American. In addition, the single-mother recipients of benefits were increasingly never-married women rather than widows. Coupled with the 1960s’ racial unrest in many cities, these changes made middleclass Americans less likely to view single mothers as a group deserving of government aid. While African Americans still constituted a minority of those on the welfare rolls, a public perception of welfare recipients as primarily African American probably decreased support for social welfare spending. Welfare served as a convenient focal point for white America’s anger at and judgment of African Americans. As Jill Quadagno writes in her book The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty, “No program better exemplifies the racially divisive character of the American welfare state than Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Conservatives attack AFDC for discouraging work and family formation and for rewarding laziness. Such comments are really subtly veiled messages about family structures and employment patterns among African Americans. However, often the attacks are neither veiled nor subtle.” These racially tinged reactions to welfare largely spelled the end of the Great Society efforts to eradicate poverty.

As time wore on through the feminist movement of the 1970s and the increasing labor market participation of mothers in the 1980s, the idea that women should be home with children, and that those without a husband’s paycheck to enable them to do so should be paid by the government instead, lost support. Cash assistance to low-income mothers and their children was no longer seen as a benefit that appropriately replaced an absent male breadwinner’s earnings so that women could fulfill their duties as mothers and children’s basic needs could be met; instead, it was viewed as one that rewarded recipients who were undeserving on account of their lack of a work ethic and their sexual immorality. Attitudes gradually shifted from a “maternalist” welfare state, or one designed to support women’s roles as mothers, to a “universal worker” welfare state, or one that encouraged men and women alike to provide for children not through stay-at-home care but through paid employment. Some argued that the cash assistance program created perverted incentives that discouraged both work and marriage, creating a pathological “dependency.”

The 1980s ushered in the transition from the “War on Poverty” to the “War on Welfare.” President Reagan used the image of the “Welfare Queen,” always depicted as an African American woman and often as one who picked up her welfare check in her Cadillac and fur coat, to drum up (or tap into) animosity toward welfare spending. In Reagan’s view, the biggest problem with welfare was the fraud it bred, and he used racial tensions to add fuel to the public’s anger over paying taxes for a program that, in many people’s eyes, benefited only the undeserving. In 1981, he passed the Omnibus Reconciliation Act, which began to chip away at welfare benefits. The Family Support Act of 1988 mandated that each state institute a welfare-to-work training program for welfare recipients and allowed states to require recipient participation, created work supports for recipients transitioning to work, and stepped up efforts to establish the paternity of children receiving benefits in order to increase enforcement of child support payments to reimburse the state for welfare expenditures.

But it was the Democratic president Bill Clinton who took welfare reform across the finish line. Polling during his 1992 presidential campaign bid indicated that his line promising to “end welfare as we know it,” which was written by a young aide the night before he first used it, was one of the most popular phrases he uttered on the campaign trail. Once elected, he set out to make good on that campaign promise. He brought top social policy experts from Harvard University and Washington, D.C., think tanks to help develop the right mix of programming. Then the Republican-led Congress drafted its own versions of a bill. Twice President Clinton vetoed these versions, arguing that they placed too much burden on recipients without enough support. When the third version came to his desk in August 1996, he signed. Mary Jo Bane and Peter Edelman, two of the experts he had brought to his administration to work on welfare reform, resigned in protest, claiming the new law would drive many additional families into poverty.

Fears of rewarding the undeserving have been with us since the beginning of our welfare state. Over time, single mothers and their children have lost their status as a deserving group and have been seen increasingly as unworthy of our support. Coupled with frustrations with the cash assistance program on all fronts, including among recipients of benefits themselves, this shift led to increasing demands for welfare reform and, ultimately, to the passage of reform in 1996.

WHAT POLICY CHANGES DID WELFARE REFORM MAKE?

While the 1996 legislation made many changes to AFDC and other programs (such as Food Stamps), I outline here the key changes it made to the AFDC program, since, as the main cash assistance program to low-income families, AFDC is often what people mean when they refer to “welfare.” Before reform, women like Bethany Grant, whom we met in the Introduction, received monthly cash assistance through AFDC, but reform replaced AFDC with a new program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The word temporary underscores the idea that women like Susan Schiller, whom I interviewed after reform and whom we also met in the Introduction, should see the program as an emergency, short-term source of support between periods of employment or marriage to an employed spouse. Unlike Bethany, who had no limit on the amount of time she could receive cash assistance, Susan faced a lifetime limit of five years of receipt.

Susan had received cash assistance, or “welfare,” four times in her life. Three of these were before reform and began when she gave birth to each of her first three children. These three times totaled about five years. Susan then remained off welfare for almost a decade until after reform, in 2001, when she was between jobs, was suffering from depression, and went back on welfare for about four or five months to get herself together before finding another job. Had reform’s time limits been in place during each of the times Susan received welfare, she would have reached her time limit before this last time. Though she had not used welfare in close to ten years, was out of work, was severely depressed, was the single mother of three minor children at the time, and received no child support from the fathers of any of her children, she would not have been eligible. For this reason Susan considered returning to welfare a last resort. However, since only her 2001 short stint was after reform, Susan actually had over four years before she would hit her time limit. If Susan’s trouble finding a job or the pressures of her son’s legal issues led her one day to return to welfare, she might end up reaching that limit. If so, then Susan would never be eligible for cash assistance again in her lifetime, no matter what financial disaster might befall her. Neither the loss of a job, a new baby in the house, a medical emergency, nor any other circumstance would allow her to be eligible.

Unlike Bethany, who was encouraged but not required to find a job, when Susan was receiving cash assistance in 2001 she did face work requirements. The exact nature of these requirements differs across the states, but in Illinois, for a woman like Susan who was not caring for an infant at the time, was not in a domestic violence crisis, did not have a health condition deemed severe enough to warrant an exemption, was not caring for someone else with a severe health condition, and was not over the age of sixty, these requirements began immediately.

Like most Illinois welfare recipients since reform, Susan spent the first thirty days after she filed her application “working for her check,” meaning she had to do volunteer work cleaning, carrying boxes, and filing papers in a welfare office from 9 a.m. until noon five days a week to “earn” the $342 she received in cash assistance for the month. She was then sent to a job-training program that sent her out on job interviews. These interviews gave her little control over the kind of job she might get, her hours, or the job’s location. Luckily for Susan, she found a job that suited her needs through her own efforts and left the welfare rolls. It was this job that she left when she was trying to gain control over her son, leaving her in her current situation of getting neither welfare benefits nor earnings from work.

Before reform, Bethany was guaranteed access to welfare benefits. The Social Security Act of 1935 made cash assistance a federal entitlement for low-income families. This meant that as long as a family met the eligibility criteria, it could not be denied benefits even in times of budgetary stress on the government. Susan enjoyed no such guarantee. Now the federal government gives each state a block grant to cover its cash assistance program for low-income families. If there is high demand for welfare benefits—for example, during a period of economic recession—the block grant could run out of money. If so, the state is allowed to say that it will no longer pay welfare benefits because welfare reform has taken away the federal entitlement to those benefits. Many critics of welfare reform point to this ending of entitlement as the most audacious change reform made because it undoes what Roosevelt did when he established a right to benefits under the Social Security Act of 1935.

To discourage nonmarital childbearing, reform also allowed states to decide not to give welfare benefits to new babies if their mothers were already receiving cash assistance. Illinois initially decided to take this option to impose what is called a “family cap,” but it then reversed its decision and began to phase out the family cap provision in August of 2003. If Susan had been a welfare recipient when the family cap was in place and had gotten pregnant, she would not have received any cash assistance benefits for her new baby.

Undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for cash assistance benefits. The 1996 law extended limitations on immigrants’ eligibility by allowing states to bar documented immigrants from cash assistance benefits. Both Bethany and Susan were U.S. citizens; several of the other women interviewed after reform were not, but since their children were U.S. born, the children could receive benefits. Reform also allowed states to deny eligibility for benefits to those with a drug felony record.

Mothers are now required to establish officially the paternity of their children before they can receive cash assistance so that states can attempt to reimburse their welfare programs with child support payments from absent fathers. When Susan applied for cash assistance in 2001, she was given an appointment with a separate child support office in order to establish paternity. She named the father of her children who were still minors at the time, and the court awarded child support, even though he never paid. Some fear that this provision puts women and children in harm’s way by reinitiating their contact with potentially abusive or hostile men. Provisions have been made for exemptions for women fearing violence, though critics remain concerned that exemptions are too difficult to get. While child support enforcement serves the financial goal of paying back the state for welfare outlays, proponents also argue that it encourages the reintroduction and involvement of fathers with their children. Welfare reform legislation also encourages states to promote marriage in a variety of ways, including “relationship-training” programs whose goal is to teach parents constructive ways to interact with each other. President George W. Bush was particularly supportive of the marriage promotion aspects of welfare reform.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Ain’t No Trust by Judith A. Levine. Copyright © 2013 Judith A. Levine. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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