2. When Work Is Slavery

Abstract

Unable to find another job after being laid off in 1992, Hattie Hargrove, a Long Island custodial worker, labored in July 1997 for her old supervisor at her old tasks for the Mineola County Department of Social Services - but in place of wages she ended up each month with a $53.50 check, $263 in food stamps, and no employee protections. Hargrove was participating in New York's Work Experience Program (WEP), one of the state-level workfare initiatives developed presumably to teach those on public assistance how to labor. If an employee, she explained, be making more money, and I'd have benefits instead of Medicaid. know I would feel better because I'd be getting a paycheck and people wouldn't look down at me like I was crazy anymore. Hargrove was a double causality of a budget-cutting mania that had led to the downsizing of government employment, while forcing recipients to for their benefits by undertaking jobs previously performed by public employees. don't mind doing the work, similarly reported street cleaner Geneva Moore, a 45-year-old Bronx mother of three. But we just like a piece of waste material the way the state program treats us. They feel like we're slaves or something, having to off our check. Complaining of dangerous conditions, sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and arbitrary treatment, those enrolled in WEP spoke of their labor as slavery or indentured servitude.(1) The requiring of participants to for their benefits is not new, nor is the identification of workfare with slavery. Beginning with 1967 amendments to the Social Security Act, which established the Work Incentive Program (WIN) that allowed mothers of even small children to participate in employment or training if childcare was available, reform has fought dependence and poor single mothers have opposed forced work at less than the minimum wage (Rose, 1972: 109). Linking - income maintenance or assistance to those in need - with dependency, and mandating - public labor usually performed for a wage - as its antidote, reform in the last decades of the 20th century has transformed the meanings of and welfare and the relationship between the two. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the politics surrounding the now defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). We need to understand reform in the 1990s as the triumph of a 30-year reaction against the gains of the 1960s, after African American women finally shared in AFDC and finally became a right or entitlement. Here I explore contested understandings of and its relation to welfare. The voices of poor single mothers, organized in the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) from 1966 until 1975, offer an alternative vantage point from which to evaluate current reform. They recognized the necessity of not merely expanding the definition of to embrace the unpaid labor of caregiving or motherwork, but of refocusing the debate from to income. Such a standpoint shifts the policy question from are you working? to are you earning enough to raise your children in dignity?(2) The Historical Shape of Welfare Before the New Deal, the recipient of mothers' pensions was to be the white, worthy widow, the object of congressional paeans when such programs found a federal niche in Title IV of the 1935 Social Security Act. (In theory, the 1935 law served all single mothers; though there was no mention of race, labor-market segmentation and local administration led to discriminatory implementation.) The first major amendments in 1939 separated the widowed mother, deserving because her deceased husband qualified for social insurance, from the never-married or divorced mother, judged undeserving because she was a woman without a man (either husband or father) mediating her relation to the state even from the grave. Where widows and their children received survivors' insurance after 1939, poor single mothers received Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) [changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, in 1962]. …