US conference exposes Washington's 'war against the poor'
By Bill Nevins
EUGENE, Oregon USA — "People ask me what I'm reading these days. I'm reading history — about the Nazis, about slavery. That seems closest to what is happening to poor people in America today", declared Cheri Honkala, a leader of Philadelphia's Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU). Honkala was speaking at the national Work, Welfare and Politics Conference held here on February 28 and 29.
The conference, organised by the Center for the Study of Women in Society and the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon, drew several hundred participants from across the US. These included politically aware welfare recipients, scholars, government agency staff, politicians, and labour and human rights activists.
The focus of the conference was the impact of the 1996 US federal "welfare reform" law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).
Honkala and other speakers strove to place this vast government policy change in its historical context, and to propose grassroots political education and organising as the response to it.
For 61 years before PRWORA's passing, cash "welfare" assistance (and linked medical insurance) was an entitlement provided on application to the poorest parents and children through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children law. AFDC provided a very meagre dole, well below poverty-level income.
Pledging to "end welfare as we know it", the Democrat administration of Bill Clinton sponsored the PRWORA, which abolished the AFDC entitlement and replaced it with a federal "block grant" scheme known as Temporary Aid to Needy Families. TANF permits the US states to set up their own "welfare-to-work" programs within broad federal parameters.
TANF requires specific life-time household limits on receiving benefits (a maximum of five years and as low as two years in some states). Each state is required to impose strict behaviour-monitoring systems on recipients, aimed at pressuring them to take paid jobs or unpaid "workfare" jobs in exchange for their benefits.
Poor parents (mostly single mothers) must find and keep jobs at the same time as they care for their children. While low-wage jobs are plentiful in most US urban areas, competition for these jobs grows daily. Job prospects are bleak in rural areas, where many TANF recipients live.
Welfare-to-work participants are hampered by educational deficiencies, severe transportation and child-care difficulties, chronic inadequate health care, domestic abuse and cultural barriers (particularly acute among immigrants and indigenous people). As a result, job stability is often a dream, and "career paths" out of poverty are scarce.
Some state-funded programs (like New Mexico's CAREER Works or Greater Philadelphia Works) attempt to alleviate these barriers with case management, mentors, job development and skills training. Their records of achievement are spotty at best.
Robin Hood in reverse
Despite the difficulty of escaping poverty through TANF programs, the number of people enrolled in TANF has fallen dramatically. TANF critics charge that the reduction is largely due to welfare recipients being struck from the rolls for non-compliance, exceeding benefit eligibility time-limits, or because they have been "diverted" from the programs by policies designed to deliver lower welfare statistics rather than alleviate poverty.
Scandalously, many large states, (New York, Texas, Wisconsin, Kansas and others) have used loopholes to channel the TANF block grant funds into tax cuts or to pay for unrelated programs. Anti-poverty advocates have denounced this legalised pilfering as "perverse Robin Hood in reverse".
Conference presenters asserted that, while "welfare reform" has drastically reduced TANF rolls, it has resulted in increased, often dire, poverty for US parents and children. Ironically, poverty and hunger are worsening in Oregon and Wisconsin and other "model" welfare reform states, according to recent studies.
The phrase, "war against the poor" was heard often at the conference. Honkala and others charged that moralistic and racist judgements are being levelled against the poor, a logical outcome of the demonisation of "welfare mothers" which poisoned the US "welfare debate" over the past three decades.
The Work, Welfare and Politics Conference also spotlighted historical and emerging resistance to attacks on the poor. A keynote speaker was City University of New York professor Frances Fox Piven, author with Richard Cloward of the classic 1971 book, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare.
Struggle
Denying the smug claims of liberal and conservative sociologists that US society has made steady progress in meeting the material needs of its poor citizens, this book charts a ragged, dialectical history of struggle. Piven and Cloward show that the US capitalist establishment extends "poor relief" only in response to serious social agitation by the poor themselves, then retracts that "welfare assistance" when the immediate danger of riot and revolution seems to have passed.
Government welfare "generosity" (such as Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" following the 1930s depression or Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" in the 1960s) is fleeting and inevitably followed by reaction and retrenchment (such as Ronald Reagan's cutbacks and Clinton's PRWORA). Thus, the poor are kept poor and dis-empowered, wages are kept low, and the needs of big capital are served.
Bravely moving well beyond the safe role of ivory tower academic theorists, Piven and Cloward joined and encouraged the US welfare rights movement which emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. While helping to organise ghetto voter registration campaigns, they implemented the "crisis strategy", which aimed at "flooding" AFDC welfare offices with all eligible applicants so that besieged local and state officials would be forced to demand that the federal government replace the exhausted and inadequate welfare system with one based on a guaranteed income and national health care. "A placid poor get nothing, but a turbulent poor sometimes get something", wrote Piven and Cloward in 1966.
Piven and Cloward have caught hell for their audaciousness and "unprofessional" street activism, from both right-wing politicians and pseudo-leftist hacks. Yet, as Bryn Mawr professor Sandy Schram, (<http://www.br ynmawr.edu/Acads/GSSW/schram>) showed in his eye-opening paper, the crisis strategy shook up the establishment and very nearly succeeded. Even the reactionary Richard Nixon administration publicly discussed implementing a guaranteed national income scheme.
The process of organising the crisis strategy was itself a big step forward for the poor people involved. The poor stepped out onto the political playing field in the 1970s, establishing powerful alliances with the civil rights, anti-war and the emerging feminist and gay rights movements.
Conference participants offered lessons from recent struggles as nourishment for present-day activists and victims of social and political reaction. Speakers cited the entry of arms-maker Lockheed Martin and other corporations into the lucrative, privatised welfare-management business as reason enough for poor citizens to be wary, alert and informed.
Piven acknowledged that the crisis strategy did not triumph. There is no guaranteed national income, PRWORA has rolled back welfare benefits, and heartless politicians like New York's Mayor Rudy Guiliani have imposed draconian, even terroristic, "workfare" intrusions upon the lives of already hard-pressed poor parents.
Piven pointed out that, despite pilfering by state governments, there is nationally $7 billion in unspent TANF funds, the result of the unexpectedly rapid reduction in TANF participants. Pointing to the increasing efforts of grassroots groups to pressure their state legislatures to put this to use in fighting poverty, Piven said: "There are a number of things that states can do with the $7 billion: create public job programs; increase benefit levels; provide child-care and transportation; and make available real education and training opportunities for low-income families".
Calls for local and national organisation building and for international solidarity with poor people everywhere were warmly received. While optimism prevailed among conference participants, it was guarded. Asked what the alternative is if efforts to "reform the welfare reform" fail, Diane Dujon, a seasoned Massachusetts activist-author-educator and "former welfare mum", answered without smiling, "A revolution, of course".
The conference delivered encouragement mixed with a strong dose of the harsh reality lived by those held in poverty amidst the "booming" US economy. Piven ended the conference by saying, "We need more of these gatherings. We have a lot to learn from the people out there struggling. There is much to be done."
[The full text of Frances Fox Piven's keynote speech, as well as other presentations at the Work, Welfare and Politics Conference, can be obtained from the Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA, or by e-mail at <csws@oregon.uoregon.edu>.
KWRU activist Cheri Honkala faced criminal charges as a result of her participation in the 1999 World Trade Organisation demonstrations in Seattle, Washington. These intimidatory charges have now been dismissed. Information on the KWRU's organising may be found at <http://www.libertynet.org/kwru>.
Bill Nevins is a writer, educator and activist in New Mexico, USA.]