4. Welfare and Work

This article is about the bearing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA) of 1996 on labor markets, and especially on the low-wage labor market. The nationwide debate that climaxed with the rollback of federal responsibilities ignored this aspect of policy. Instead, arguments fastened on questions of personal morality. A lax and too-generous system was said to lead women to shun work in favor of habitual idleness and dependency. Welfare was also said to undermine sexual and family morality. Together these charges spurred something like a grand national revival movement to restore moral compulsion to the lives of the poor. Yet, throughout the long history of relief or welfare, charges that relief encouraged immorality always accompanied measures that worsened the terms of work for broad swaths of the population, as I have been at pains to argue elsewhere in work with Richard Cloward.(1) Here I will show that this episode of is no different. To make my points about labor markets, I first discuss the grounds for the charge that the availability of distorts the individual's choice to work or not to work. Then I turn to the larger question of the systemic effects of policy on labor markets, particularly in the context of the specific conditions that characterize the American labor market in the 1990s. Finally, albeit necessarily briefly, I try to unravel some of the tangled connections between labor markets and family stability, the other electrified pole in the campaign against welfare. I will argue that, ironically, when labor market effects are taken into account, welfare reform is far more likely to weaken the actual families that exist in America than to restore them. The public argument about and work focuses on the impact of the dole on the choices of poor women, as well as on the debilitating psychological and subcultural consequences of those choices. Welfare use or dependency is thus cast as a problem of personal morality. Liberals, for their part, defend a more generous policy by arguing in the same vein, claiming that use is justified because most recipients rely on only for relatively short periods and do not in fact become dependent (a claim that rests, however, on just how the count is made).(2) The defenders also argue that there are not enough jobs for the relatively unskilled women on welfare, especially in the inner cities where these women, many of whom are minorities, are concentrated. Some defenders also point to circumstances beyond the control of poor women that prevent them from working, such as the violence of abusive men who are alarmed at the prospect that their female partners will become independent.(3) This, in sum, is an effort to legitimate the decisions of the poor women who turn to welfare. The arguments made by the defenders have a good deal of truth. Yet they also skirt the central charge, that there is a tradeoff between and work, and a more liberal policy tilts individual choices toward welfare, while a restrictive policy tilts the other way. The skittishness is understandable, because acknowledging the tradeoff raises the question of whether it is morally right for a mother to choose over work, a question on which the American public seems to have made up its mind by large majorities, at least for the time being. The underlying idea of the tradeoff is clear, and it does make sense (Edin and Lein, 1997). It is the logic of incentives and disincentives. The economic rewards of work must be greater than the benefits available from unemployment insurance or social assistance or old age pensions. This is the ancient principle of less eligibility, a principle that asserts that even the lowest paid worker must fare better than the pauper. It is not the whole story, of course, since surviving on the dole can be demeaning, and people may want to work for other reasons than their wages. …