Barriers to the Employment of Welfare Recipients

Using a new survey of a representative sample of single mothers who were welfare recipients in an urban Michigan county, the authors explore how certain employment barriers, often ignored by previous welfare researchers and policy makers, constrain these single mothers' employability. The results the authors present show that welfare recipients in the sample have unusually high levels of some barriers to work, such as physical and mental health problems, domestic violence, and lack of transportation, but relatively low levels of other barriers, such as drug or alcohol dependence and lack of understanding work norms. The authors also show that most recipients have multiple barriers and that the number of barriers is strongly and negatively associated with employment status. In addition, the authors find that an expanded regression model that includes these barriers is a significantly better predictor of employment than is a model that only includes variables traditionally measured, such as education, work experience and welfare history. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of these results for understanding the employment and post-welfare experiences of single mothers and for reforming welfare-to-work policies.