By Randy Albelda

"Ending welfare as we know it" has rapidly become ending welfare. Time limits virtually assure that the majority of families who receive welfare will be cut off at least from federal funding. The current trend is to replace welfare with earnings and is best summed up by the ever-present term "welfare-to-work."

The welfare-to-work "solution" can be thought of as a match made in hell. It puts poor mothers who need the most support and flexibility into jobs in the low-wage labor market which often are the most inflexible, have the least family-necessary benefits (vacation time, health care, sick days), and provide levels of pay that often are insufficient to support a single person, let alone a family. This mismatch is not going to be resolved by providing short-term job training, work vans, poor-quality child care, or even refundable earned income tax credits. It is a political, social, and economic problem that must be addressed in our policies but also in our national psyche. It starts with valuing the work that families do. Raising children - in any and all family configurations - is absolutely vital work to our individual and collective well-being. And it is deserving. Recognizing this will not only transform how we think about welfare, it can and must change how we think about the structure of paid work. We must have access to paid work that allows us to take care of our families and have a family life without relegating all women to the home.

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT
Ending welfare poses some historically familiar alternatives for women. Getting married and staying married - thus being dependent on a man - was of course the fond hope and major inspiration for conservatives who sponsored the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The Act leads with these two "findings": 1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society; and 2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children.

The path most proponents of welfare reform promote publicly, however, is "welfare-to-work." There is a wide range of methods for promoting paid work instead of welfare, from the punitive "work-first" strategies pursued by over half the states to the more liberal strategies (which include a generous package of training and education options, day care, transportation, and health care) put forth by Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood when they were welfare reform policymakers in the Clinton Administration. Despite its current popularity, the notion of putting welfare mothers to "work" is hardly new. Work requirements have long been part of AFDC, and were seen as an important way to get women, particularly black women, off the welfare rolls. It was only in the early 1990s, however, that paid work became the main alternative in light of benefit time limits.

Most states, as well as the ancillary not-for-profit agencies and for-profit companies that get lucrative welfare-related contracts, are putting significant energies into getting adult welfare recipients to "work." Work in this case means paid employment or unpaid community or public-service placements (workfare). But there are problems with welfare-to-work, some of which states readily recognize and are working to cope with (however inadequately), and others which states do not even recognize.

INADEQUATE SUPPORTS FOR WELFARE-TO-WORK MOMS
One aspect of states' welfare-to-work policy has always been their concern with the "job readiness" of welfare mothers. From vast amounts of published research we know many welfare mothers have low educational attainment and many lack recent job experience (although the vast majority have been employed at some point). Both of these characteristics impede entry into the labor market and, once there, all but assure low wages. This is too bad since welfare-to-work ideology rests on short-term training, which is reinforced by precluding most education from qualifying as "work-related activities" in the work quotas established in PRWORA. This of course means that many state programs will be ineffectual in improving women's skills.

More and more research is uncovering another set of barriers to work, including learning disabilities, severe bouts of depression, and experiences with domestic violence. The prediction is that the easy-to-place recipients will soon be thrown out of the welfare system and those who remain will require much more training and support to get paid employment. Ironically, or perhaps cynically, welfare will become exactly how it was portrayed for years - a system that serves very low-functioning women with children who need long-term assistance. Recent studies show that over 41% of current recipients have less than a high school diploma, and between 10% and 31% of welfare recipients are currently victims of domestic violence. Helping women overcome barriers to employment will take time, quality counseling, and long-term training, something welfare reform is discouraging or prohibiting.

What distinguishes welfare recipients from other poor people is that two thirds of them are children being raised, most often, by a mother on her own. Welfare has always been a program for families with young children. Therefore, welfare-to-work requires a substantial set of ancillary supports that mothers with small children need to get to work, such as health insurance, transportation, and childcare. Since many jobs available to welfare-to-work mothers do not provide health insurance, states allow women to stay on Medicaid, but typically only for one year after leaving welfare. Then they're on their own. Some states have recognized the transportation challenge mothers face - efficiently getting children to and from day care and school, and getting themselves to and from work in a timely fashion - and some are trying to solve this problem with loaner cars, work vans, and public transportation vouchers. In rural and suburban areas, however, the problems are much more difficult since adequate transportation is just not there. Regarding childcare, policy makers recognize the need for it, but their solutions should make us shiver. Very few states pay any attention to the quality of care. Any care seems to do for poor mothers. In Massachusetts, for example, the state encourages mothers to find low-cost caretakers with reimbursements of $15 a day. Assuming you get what you pay for, such childcare is a disaster for mothers and children. Moreover, it impoverishes and exploits the caregivers.

AND WHAT ABOUT THE PROBLEMS WITH NO NAME?
Will welfare-to-work actually ensure economic "independence"? Many are avoiding this question because the economic expansion, which has both accompanied and accommodated welfare-to-work, has at least fulfilled one premise of welfare reform - moving women from the rolls to a job. However, come the downturn, many who did get jobs will lose them and caseloads will creep back up. Further, the expansion has allowed states to be slack, if not entirely unimaginative, in their training and education efforts, relying on the economic expansion to reduce rolls and thereby claim victory in the welfare reform battle.

Will finding a job mean earning a living wage? Not likely. What is almost always ignored or conveniently forgotten in the blind faith that all too often accompanies the welfare-to-work mentality is that the U.S. labor market has always failed women who have little formal education and sporadic job experiences. Women have a very hard time supporting themselves, let alone families, on wages from waitressing, sales clerking, cleaning hotel rooms, or even assisting administrators. Yet these are exactly the kinds of jobs welfare-to-work mothers are likely to get.

In addition to the problems of a fickle labor market and chronically low wages, women in the welfare-to-work pipeline must cope with the fact that most jobs are not "mother ready." That is, they do not accommodate mothers' needs, even when training, work, and childcare arrangements are in place. These are not unknown or new needs. They include the remarkably mundane events such as children getting sick, school and medical appointments, school vacations, and early-release school days. Employers, especially those who employ low-wage workers, do not want workers who come in late because a school bus didn't show up, miss days because there was no child care, or worry about their children at 3:00 PM - instead of doing their tedious low-wage-earning tasks. Unfortunately, low-wage employers of current and former welfare recipients are least likely to grant sick leave and vacation time. According to a report in last year's American Journal of Public Health, 46% of women who had never been on welfare got sick leave and vacation pay at their jobs, as compared to 24% of women who had been on welfare less than two years, and 19% of women who had been on welfare more than two years.

Most state administrators, politicians, journalists, and researchers see the work of taking care of children as a cost of welfare-to-work, but not as an important and valuable family activity. Devaluing women's unpaid work in the home is clearly evident in studies of welfare reform. Typically, researchers compare welfare families' and employed families' material well-being without imputing any value to women's time. In short, the value of women's unpaid labor in the home when she is receiving welfare is zero. As a policy, welfare-to-work fails to grapple with the fact that adults responsible for children cannot (and probably should not) put their jobs - especially low-wage ones - before the needs of their children.

FAMILY VALUES/VALUING FAMILIES
The ideologues who concern themselves with poor mothers exhibit split personalities when it comes to getting women to work. The conservative architects of welfare reform who want to force poor mothers to do lousy jobs are now busy enacting tax cuts to encourage middle-class moms to stay at home and trying hard to eliminate the "marriage penalty" in the tax code. Liberals, on the other hand, seem preoccupied with providing inadequate supports for full-time employment for poor mothers. What's going on?

One way to make sense of the obsession with employment for poor mothers is to see the emphasis on paid work in welfare reform as a major change in thinking about women and public assistance. Indeed, it is a major value shift. The Social Security Act of 1935 made all poor single mothers entitled to receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), although the levels received were far lower than the other two major programs (Social Security and Unemployment Insurance) in that historic legislation. At that time, the notion of having to "work" for one's benefits was not an expectation of most single mothers. Women who were not attached to male breadwinners received income, but not much.

Another old value set guiding single mothers' receipt of cash assistance pivoted on how women became single mothers. Widows were seen as deserving, while divorced, separated, and never-married mothers were not. Benefit levels reinforced these "values."

What makes a single mother "deserving" today has changed. The salient factor is no longer how she happened to become a single parent, but rather if she is engaged in paid labor. This sentiment is only possible in an age when most women are in the paid labor market and when the moral repugnance of women without men has dissipated. Ironically, both of these accomplishments can be attributed in part to the successes of the women's movement, coupled with modern industrialization. As more and more women are drawn into the labor force, they tend to have fewer children and are not as likely to get or stay married. Interestingly, both conservatives and liberals have lent weight to the idea that working single mothers are more deserving.

The positive value of employment was accompanied by the negative value placed on receiving welfare. Led by Ronald Reagan and conservative thinker Charles Murray in the 1980s, welfare opponents referred to AFDC recipients as "welfare queens." They were presumed to have loads of children, leech resources from the state, and then pass their dysfunctional behavior on to their children. In the mid-1980s through the 1990s, many "liberal" poverty researchers carried this banner as well. "Underclass" authors, notably William Julius Wilson and Christopher Jencks, as well as their left detractors, such as William Darity and Samuel Myers, discussed welfare receipt as a pathology - one of the many "bad" behaviors that helps reproduce poverty. Jencks even referred to women receiving welfare as the "reproductive underclass." Further, when adult recipients have earnings, even if they receive hefty supplements, they are not perceived as receiving "hand-outs" and hence are deserving. It would seem, then, putting welfare mothers to work solves the problem of growing welfare rolls and plays into American values that will help restore safety nets for the poor. On both the Right and the Left, putting poor mothers to work is the prescribed cure to their "dysfunctional" tendencies.

A PROGRESSIVE AGENDA
I do not want to argue here that paid work is bad. Indeed, earnings can and do buy economic security and some independence from men, especially from abusive relationships. In a society that values paid work, doing it can build your self-esteem as well. However, welfare-to-work is a set up. The types of jobs poor mothers get and can keep provide neither much dignity nor sufficient wages. Working enough hours at low wages to support a family is often untenable. Women fail too often. This is not only demoralizing, but economically debilitating. If we don't think both about valuing women's work at home as well as when they do paid work, welfare-to-work is a cruel hoax that makes legislators feel better about themselves, but leaves poor families in the lurch.

Instead of trying to reform poor mothers to become working poor mothers, we need to take a closer look at job structures and what it will take to make work possible for mothers who support families. This might include a shorter work week or at least income supplements to those who take a part-time job so that families can still pay for basic needs like housing, health insurance, childcare, food, and clothing. Paid family and medical leave and expanded unemployment insurance to cover less continuous and low-paying part time work must also be in place. A mother shouldn't lose her job or her weekly pay because her child gets chicken pox. Herein lies the true opportunity of welfare-to-work welfare reform.

A national discussion about the value of women's work in the home is much needed for all women, not just those who turn to public assistance. It would raise several important sets of policy issues, including:

• seriously considering the provision of publicly funded family care such as child care centers, extended day programs, and child allowances;

• working to make sure that welfare is not punitive, and is at least comparable to social security and unemployment insurance; and

• focusing not just on making mothers "job ready," but promoting policies that make paid work "mother-ready" - in other words, conducive to mothers needs, paying a living wage, and offering opportunities for advancement.

If we as a nation recognized the value of women's work, we wouldn't have welfare reform that merely replaces public assistance with forcing mothers into working jobs at low wages and a shallow set of supports that vanishes quickly. Seeing the work of raising children as a benefit to society, not merely a cost of going to work, would mean developing a welfare-to-work regime that truly supports part-time waged work. Further, it might make us more cognizant that for some families at some points in their lives, having the sole adult in the labor force is not possible or desirable. Public income supports for poor single mothers will always need to exist precisely because we value the work of mothers taking care of their children.

Resources: Gwendolyn Mink, Welfare's End, Cornell University Press, 1998. P. Loprest and S. R. Zedlewski, November 1999, "Current and Former Welfare Recipients: How Do They Differ?" Discussion Paper 17 (Washington: The Urban Institute). Sandra Danziger, et al., Barriers to the Employment of Welfare Recipients, revised ed. 9/99, University of Michigan Press. S. Jody Heymann and Alison Earle, "The Impact of Welfare Reform on Parents' Ability to Care for their Children's Health," American Journal of Public Health, April 1999.