Welfare Payments and the Reproduction of Low-Wage Workers and Secondary Jobs

Abstract

Information gathered from five annual interviews with the adults in some 2,700 households in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s is used in this paper to demonstrate that welfare — Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC for unemployed parents, and the various state Gen eral Assistance programs — is an institution which helps to reproduce the sec ondary labor market by systematically reinforcing low-wage, high-turnover modes of work. More concretely, we are able to strongly refute the widely- repeated ruling-class argument that there exists a distinct "welfare class" of people unable or unwilling to work who must be supported by social programs paid for by the taxes of those who do work for a living. This divisive assertion is simply untrue; even within a single year, half of all the households that ever receive welfare over a five-year period also have at least one working adult. And the degree of mixing of work and welfare increases to the extent that, over the whole five years, 92%_of these "ever-welfare" households also contain adults who work at some time. At the macro level, labor market conditions and the need for more income exert a strong impact on whether or not welfare is ever used, whether it is used more than once, and how much welfare is received relative to total family income.