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Introduction

Gripped by a severe recession in late 2007, the United States suffered the most sustained and extensive wave of job destruction the country had seen since the Great Depression. Over the next year and a half, unemployment topped 10 percent, and the number of Americans facing long-term joblessness set new records. Poverty rates climbed above 15 percent, and the Census Bureau reported that more Americans were poor than at any other time in the nation’s history.

The recession ended in 2009, but the hardships did not. By the end of the decade, the median American family had lost twenty years’ worth of accumulated wealth and drew an income more than $5,000 below the median a decade earlier. Five years into the recovery, six in ten Americans said that the recession continued to affect them personally; four in ten said that someone in their household had lost a job.¹

Americans confronted these hard times with a reconfigured social safety net. Decades in the making, it was the product of intense political battles in Washington that saw policymakers replace core elements of the New Deal welfare state for poor families with a workfare system designed to more actively promote and reward employment among the poor.² The modern workfare state was built piecemeal, beginning in the 1960s and culminating in the welfare reform legislation signed by Bill Clinton in 1996. At the time, policymakers and poverty experts were divided over workfare’s likely outcomes—and the early evidence was mixed. But the system went largely untested until the Great Recession of 2007–9 and the slow recovery that followed. The experience of American economic hardship in these years is therefore not only the story of a particularly severe and sustained downturn. It is the story of the failings and flaws in the nation’s new work-conditioned safety net.

Media accounts of the Great Recession focused on the rising economic insecurity of middle-income families faced with the loss of jobs, homes, and savings. Less attention was paid to the population of poor and near-poor Americans who confronted far harsher circumstances. Their numbers were disturbingly high even before the recession. By 2010, the Census Bureau reported, approximately one in three Americans (100.5 million) were poor or near-poor—and four years into the recovery, the numbers were no better: 32.5 percent of Americans (101.8 million) were poor or near-poor in 2013. Roughly half of these (52 million) were in families with incomes above the poverty level, but by less than 50 percent. It is these near-poor families (more than one in six Americans) who are often a single medical emergency or jobless spell away from poverty.³ Many were already struggling in low- or medianwage jobs, and the recession hit them the hardest: blue-collar unemployment increased at nearly three times the rate of white-collar unemployment.⁴

The collapse of the labor market in the recession left many families with nowhere to turn. In the Great Depression, images of unemployed Americans standing in line for bread captured the depth of need. Where were the “bread lines” of the Great Recession? They were formed by the millions who could not find work but had exhausted or failed to qualify for unemployment benefits, who waited in line (or online) to plead their cases.⁵ They included the hundreds of people lined up at the county fairgrounds in west Tennessee for boxes of free food, and those in upstate New York and elsewhere who attended “grocery auctions,” where food past its sell-by date was sold off at steep discounts.⁶ They included the one in three Americans in 2009 who could not afford to comply with their medical prescriptions.⁷ They included young people attending church youth groups in the Rio Grande Valley, who asked why they should finish school if the best they could hope for was low-wage work—and their parents, who told local priests during weekly confessions about the economic pressures straining their marriages, as partners blamed themselves and each other for the failure to make ends meet.⁸ And they included parents dropped from the welfare rolls in Arizona, who described the measures they took to put food on the table and keep the lights on: “They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners—all with children in tow.”⁹

During the Depression, bread lines formed not only because jobs had disappeared but also because there was no federal safety net for those left stranded. The New Deal response to this collective experience included the creation of unemployment insurance and limited federal public assistance programs for certain categories of poor Americans, under the 1935 Social Security Act. Seventy-five years later, poor families in the Great Recession could turn to a combination of old and new programs stitched together into a safety net that was increasingly conditioned on work.

The story of a Delaware family profiled in a New York Times piece illustrates how this new safety net fails to protect families when work fails.¹⁰ Well before the recession, Joe Parente found himself unemployed after a serious back injury forced him out of his job as a pipefitter. He successfully completed a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repair, only to find there was little demand for his new skills. He sought disability benefits, but could not qualify without undergoing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test he could not afford; nor did he qualify for Medicaid. The family of five got by thanks to his wife Kristen’s job as a waitress—until she was laid off in January 2009, when the recession hit Wilmington. She had always been able to find a new job quickly, but not this time. Nor was she eligible for unemployment insurance under Delaware’s rules.¹¹ The Parentes had long viewed government assistance as something for people who “didn’t want to work.” Now they found themselves seeking food stamps and cash assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which had replaced the New Deal entitlement program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). TANF provides temporary cash support to parents who meet the program’s work requirements, but there is no guarantee that an eligible family will receive that aid. After a long wait, they received an allotment of food stamps and $475 a month in cash assistance. TANF’s work requirements meant that each parent had to apply for forty jobs a week and Kristen had to attend “job readiness” classes—even though the family’s poverty had nothing to do with the will or readiness to work. Because no work was available, Kristen was also mandated to volunteer at a community agency. She was fortunate enough to receive a job offer at the agency, but they still needed a “small stipend from the government” to make ends meet. Even then, the family’s resources were not enough to solve their housing problems.

The Parentes’ experience captures many of the dilemmas of the workfare state. The family diligently pursued various forms of assistance, from unemployment benefits and cash assistance to job retraining and readiness classes. Time and again, despite their best efforts, they fell through the gaps in the work-based safety net. Although the Great Recession heightened the challenges faced by millions of families like the Parentes, the underlying problem pre-dates the downturn. It is rooted in the conjuncture of a deteriorating low-wage labor market in the United States and a work-based system of social protections. For many poor and near-poor families, the experience of poverty and economic insecurity is a three-sided trap, defined by a lack of assistance for the nonworking poor, inadequate support for those in low-wage jobs, and few exits from the low-wage sector to middle-class jobs with more robust social protections. How did we end up with a safety net that provides so few buffers against a crisis like the Great Recession?

The shift to workfare is arguably the most significant transformation in the U.S. welfare state of the past fifty years. Yet its dimensions, causes, and consequences have not been fully explored. Workfare is often narrowly used as shorthand for programs that require work of welfare recipients, but these policies are part of a much deeper shift in the approach to federal aid for the poor. Public assistance programs created in the New Deal had always been restrictive and inadequate, and many families combined wage-earning and welfare—but federal aid for the poor was not conditioned on work. Welfare provision rested on the logic of need-based entitlement for certain vulnerable groups unable to fully support themselves through employment. And over its first three decades, the policy trajectory was toward gradually expanding coverage and increasing benefits for eligible poor families.¹² With the turn to workfare in the 1960s, a formal link was forged between work and public assistance in federal policy, and higher levels of aid began to flow to the working poor while aid for those outside the labor market diminished. By the end of the 1990s, the logic of federal cash assistance for the poor had shifted. The majority of the nation’s income assistance was now conditioned on employment, and the aim was to promote, require, and reward work among poor families in the low-wage labor market.¹³

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This book is about the politics of the transformation to workfare. Its central argument is that the policy change was driven by a political split and struggle within the Democratic Party over the ends and means of antipoverty assistance. The outcome was a system of social protections that tied most public income assistance to private employment—precisely at the moment that deindustrialization and global economic competition made low-wage jobs less effective at providing income security and stability. Three core claims in this argument link developments in the Democratic Party, in Southern politics, and in the U.S. labor market. Together, they explain how and why political leaders rewrote the social contract for poor families between the 1960s and the 1990s. And they place these decisions about public assistance squarely in the context of the rising job instability and wage stagnation that began in the mid-1970s and continue today.

The first claim is that workfare was fundamentally a Democratic project. It grew out of divisions within the party over the trajectory of public assistance. New Deal welfarism was always contested, even among Democrats; it was a product of political compromises, and was circumscribed by the patchwork character of the 1935 Social Security Act. New Deal public assistance programs for discrete categories of poor Americans (the elderly, blind, single mothers with children, and later, the disabled) emerged as the weakest link in the chain of social protections provided under the act, both institutionally and politically. Unlike social insurance programs (such as Social Security and unemployment insurance), public assistance programs were designed for certain needy groups deemed “unemployable.” Institutional authority and funding obligations for these programs were divided between state and federal governments. Public assistance thus embodied a thin concept of entitlement—always qualified, often distorted by state-level program administrators, and politically vulnerable. Yet within these constraints, New Deal welfarism nonetheless defined a role for the federal government in public assistance and established a basic framework for providing aid as an entitlement. Many liberal advocates during and after the New Deal hoped to expand this need-based welfarist ideal into a broader social safety net over time.¹⁴

In the early 1960s, however, a conservative faction of the Democratic Party began to construct a workfare regime alongside New Deal welfare programs. By the 1990s, workfare would eclipse New Deal assistance for poor families. Although Republicans were important allies at key junctures in the decades-long process of change, both the policy models for workfare at the federal level and the political decisions to adopt new workfare policies were crafted primarily by Democrats.

The book’s second claim is that Southern Democratic leaders in particular played a pivotal role in constructing modern workfare in these years. This is a story of how the South—the region with the nation’s highest levels of poverty and inequality and least generous social welfare policies—won the fight to rewrite America’s family assistance policy in the decades between the Great Society and the 1996 welfare reform.¹⁵ The role of Southern legislators in constraining New Deal welfarism at its creation in the 1930s is familiar to historians.¹⁶ What is striking in this study is the role of subsequent cohorts of Southern conservatives and centrists in constructing a workfare regime on the remnants of the old welfarist system at the end of the twentieth century.

Many and various factors contributed to workfare’s ascendance. Institutional arrangements strengthened the hand of workfare advocates and weakened the position of welfarists.¹⁷ Public backlash against welfare curtailed the scope of debate.¹⁸ Organized economic interests weighed in at important points, including business leaders who saw advantages in expanding workfare over welfare.¹⁹ Southern leaders, in short, did not engineer this change by themselves. But they were positioned to powerfully influence the direction of social policy at key junctures. And they repeatedly used the opportunities presented to them—including shifting institutional advantages, changes in the national political balance of power, and heightened public opposition to welfare—to advance a workfare agenda.

My third claim addresses the paradox of imposing workfare on poor families in the context of a declining low-wage labor market. I argue that workfare reversed the logic of income security for poor families inscribed in the New Deal welfare state. Rather than shielding families from the market’s vagaries, its effort to promote, require, and reward work tied assistance to jobs in an unstable labor market. What made this shift so consequential was not primarily the move to encourage employment. It was the fact that workfare policies were imposed in the context of sweeping economic changes that made low-wage work an increasingly unreliable path from poverty to economic security.

Conceptions of work within U.S. social policy were also changing in these years. Work has always held a vaunted role in American political culture, and this has shaped policies toward poor families since the nation’s founding. Expectations about what work should provide, however, have varied over time. Debates over workfare have embodied deeper political and ideological contests over work as a moral imperative, a social obligation, and a source of economic security.²⁰ Since the New Deal, federal policies (from the Fair Labor Standards Act to the Social Security Act) affirmed the notion not only that work was a social obligation but also that a job should deliver a basic livelihood. Wage and workplace regulations and job-based social protections sought to ensure workers a measure of security in a volatile market. Yet the principle that government should define and enforce minimum job standards was always contested and unevenly applied.²¹ And from the New Deal through the 1990s, the battle lines over work and welfare were drawn and redrawn in a political struggle over the appropriate roles of markets and government in providing income security for poor families. The conflicts were not simply over work requirements for poor mothers in the AFDC program. More fundamentally, they engaged questions of who should be expected to work, when, and under what terms; what counts as work and whose work counts; what low-wage jobs can be expected to deliver; and what government owes the most vulnerable Americans when markets fail. The triumph of workfare required a retreat from the New Deal’s more ambitious responses to these questions.

This argument challenges much of the standard account of modern public assistance.²² According to the conventional story, New Deal and Great Society Democrats promoted and expanded federal assistance from the 1930s through the 1960s. After the 1980 election, the tide turned. Conservative Republicans—led first by Ronald Reagan and later by Newt Gingrich—pursued an agenda of retrenchment and rollback, through budget cuts, eligibility restrictions, and escalating work requirements. Their efforts culminated in the dismantlement of the core New Deal welfare program for poor families, AFDC, in 1996. Although they did not achieve all they wanted, they ushered in a conservative era in welfare politics. Embedded in this familiar story is an unambiguous account of “who did what when”: liberal Democrats led expansions of the welfare state until 1980, with their most ambitious visions thwarted by the conservative coalition in Congress; Republicans then brought contraction and retrenchment, backed by conservative Democrats and ultimately the Clinton White House.

Yet neither the cast of leading characters nor the timing of events in the conventional account is quite accurate. The decisive struggles took place not between the parties, but within the Democratic Party: the conflict ran between those seeking to expand or defend the New Deal welfarist vision of public assistance and those advocating a contending workfare approach, most prominent among Southerners. The turning point toward modern workfare was not the 1980s, but the late 1960s and 1970s, as Chapters 1 and 2 explain. And although there were many forces pressing for work-based reform, the central architects of the initial shift were not Republican advocates of retrenchment, but conservative Southern Democrats in Congress who sought to redefine the purposes of public assistance in ways that preserved the political, economic, and racial order of the South.²³

The 1970s thus brought a decisive but largely unrecognized phase of conservative welfare state building, described in Chapter 3. Although expansionary, it marked a turn away from New Deal–style income supports toward programs to formally promote and enforce work. Southern leaders quietly passed federal initiatives to require work from the welfare poor (who received AFDC), to provide welfare to the working poor (through creating the EITC, the Earned Income Tax Credit), and to exempt from work only those unable to earn wages due to old age or disability (through creating SSI, Supplemental Security Income). The outcome of these new work-based approaches to public assistance would be determined not only in the policy realm but also in the context of a changing labor market, as Chapter 4 argues.

When conservative Republicans brought an agenda of welfare retrenchment and labor market deregulation to the White House in the 1980s, the work of these Southern Democrats paved the way, enabling Republican leaders to build new coalitions and compromises. Conservative Republicans were able to leverage earlier Democratic agreements on work and welfare to restrict and weaken AFDC and to fend off more fundamental labor market reform, as Chapter 5 demonstrates. Pressure for conservative reform in the 1980s and 1990s came, once again, from many sources, yet Southern Democrats played a pivotal role.

The final act in the turn to workfare, examined in Chapters 6 and 7, was orchestrated by a new centrist cohort of Southern Democrats in the White House and Congress in the 1990s. Led by Bill Clinton, these Southern centrists forged compromises with Southern conservative Republicans in Congress to rewrite the terms of public assistance for both the welfare poor and the working poor. The core political conflicts and alignments on work and welfare were thus defined well before the Republican ascendance in the 1980s. The new political settlement that emerged in the mid-1990s—embodied in a major expansion in the EITC and the demise of AFDC—was constructed on the groundwork, and largely on the terms, established by leading Southern Democrats beginning in the 1970s.

Quietly replacing the New Deal political settlement on federal income support for the poor, workfare has governed policy and politics ever since. Shifts in party control of Congress and the White House have tested the durability of the workfare settlement under a wide range of political configurations. The years from Clinton’s reelection to Barack Obama’s second term also tested the effectiveness of the work-conditioned safety net under some of the best of economic times (the late 1990s) and the worst of times (the late 2000s) in the postwar era. Workfare, the evidence suggests, often functioned best in the years of robust economic growth and worst in years of downturn and economic hardship. This turbulent period nonetheless saw the consolidation of workfare as the dominant approach to public assistance for poor families, as Chapter 8 demonstrates.

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There are many ways to study the politics of work and welfare. This book draws on scholarship addressing the political and institutional origins of social policy, and on studies of post-1970s economic and labor market transformations.²⁴ Too often, these scholarly conversations are conducted separately, even as the effects of social policy and labor market conditions become increasingly reciprocal.²⁵ In addition to grounding an account of public policy development in its labor market context, this book seeks out the political and institutional roots of workfare, to understand both the sources of policy change, and the persistence of a work-based approach despite evidence of its shortcomings as a safety net.

To existing literatures on welfare state retrenchment and economic inequality, the story of workfare offers analytical leverage in understanding late twentieth-century changes in the U.S. welfare state and their implications. Recent comparative scholarship on models of social provision has posited an affinity between workfare and the new political economy of contemporary capitalism, with its increasing demand for “flexible” labor.²⁶ Few of these works, however, focus attention on the political development of workfare in U.S. public assistance—on how, when, and why this turn took place. This book suggests that the origins of workfare in the United States may have as much to do with the local and highly stratified Southern labor markets of the past as with the “flattened and flexible” global labor market of the twenty-first century.

Other scholars have leveled compelling new challenges at old assumptions about U.S. welfare-state retrenchment, with a focus on the 1980s and beyond.²⁷ Recent works have pointed to patterns of expansion in some policy areas even in periods of fiscal constraint, and to trends toward a new market-oriented “enabling” paradigm for social provision.²⁸ This account seeks out earlier architects of the conservative turn in U.S. welfare policy, and it examines the interaction effects between social programs to better understand the transformation. It demonstrates that conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s relied on programs developed by Southern Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s to build the political compromises and coalitions needed to achieve their aims. This approach redefines the relationships between antipoverty programs. The EITC, for example, is conventionally seen as an exception to the retrenchment in public assistance exemplified by AFDC’s dismantlement: it expanded even as other programs faced serious cutbacks.²⁹ In fact, the enactment and expansion of the EITC enabled conservatives to win moderate support for cuts in AFDC, and the EITC was thus used politically to facilitate AFDC’s decline. Implicit here is the notion that retrenchment and reconfiguration may be two sides of the same coin: one model of income assistance was dismantled as another was constructed, offering one explanation for why some programs grew and others declined in a period of conservative ascendancy. Although opponents of the New Deal welfare state have at times undermined social welfare programs by cutting budgets, they have also achieved their aims by creating new programs, or turning the purposes of existing programs toward conservative ends.

The story of workfare’s origins also speaks to recent debates on the political sources of economic inequality. Prominent accounts have focused on the role of voters and political parties, arguing, for example, that low-income Americans have fared better when elections yield Democratic rather than Republican administrations, based on income distribution data under varying conditions of party control.³⁰ But this metric may miss a deeper story. Workfare illustrates how particular Democratic-led social policies have reinforced or even exacerbated inequality over time. Other scholars in the inequality debate focus on the role of organized interests and institutions in policymaking. They argue that policy choices affecting income distribution are shaped more decisively by mobilized economic interests and structural advantages in the political environment than by the actions of individual voters or parties.³¹ The complex role of different factions within the Democratic party, and their alliances with organized interests and like-minded Republicans in the development of workfare, lends evidence to this claim.

The case of workfare also engages larger theoretical debates about the sources and mechanisms of institutional change and stability. By showing how incremental shifts in the operation of public assistance over time came to redefine and undermine the original purposes and trajectory of social programs such as AFDC, for example, this analysis broadens conceptions of “path dependence.”³² The workfare case also sheds light on recent debates over “submerged,” “delegated,” “hidden,” and “shadow” policymaking in American politics. The development of workfare relied on the use of tax incentives and other pro-market policy tools to win passage of favored social programs by centrist or conservative Democrats—from Louisiana Senator Russell Long to President Clinton. These “submerged” or “hidden” policy tools arguably undermined support for broader redistributive efforts at key moments, in part by obscuring the role of government in providing benefits.³³

In focusing on federal policy and the role of work and labor markets, I do not mean to deny other frameworks for understanding the politics of public assistance. This book focuses on a significant, untold story about policymaking over time; as a result, the spotlight is on the role of political elites, mainly at the national level. Other actors have played vital roles in welfare politics, including welfare recipients, the civil rights and women’s movements, business interests, and state and local officials; though not the focus of this study, their contributions to the politics of public assistance have been established in numerous accounts.³⁴

Particularly on the subject of AFDC, there are rich literatures on the gender and racial politics of reform, and this book is indebted to many of these works. Gender analyses have exposed the ways welfare policies have been fueled by attempts to regulate and control the behavior of single mothers eligible for AFDC. Welfare has not only failed to provide adequate income for their families, but it has also been used systematically to undermine their rights and liberties regarding marriage, reproduction, and child-rearing. Race-centered scholarship demonstrates how welfare restrictions, rules, and cutbacks not only targeted nonmarried mothers, but were often racially motivated. My account argues that historically, welfare reform has been driven by political-economic factors in addition to and often in conjunction with race and gender.³⁵ Preoccupied with preserving regional labor markets with social hierarchies intact, Southern lawmakers led the charge to rewrite federal policy in the 1960s to impose work requirements on poor single mothers in AFDC, for example; this was a critical turning point in the gendered struggles over welfare rights and work obligations. They also provided the decisive template (the EITC) in the 1970s for addressing problems in the low-wage workforce, one that circumvented rather than challenged the deep racial and gender disparities in rates of unemployment, job tenure, wage mobility, and access to job-related social protections that continue today.³⁶

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This book has been animated by more than the scholarly conversations it engages, however. From the outset, my central interest has been to understand the staleness of the contemporary political debate on poverty and public assistance. For more than thirty years, the poverty debate has been framed largely by the question of how to move single mothers from welfare to work. Declining numbers on the welfare rolls are still used, by conservatives and liberals alike, as evidence of the success of federal antipoverty policies.³⁷ This book recasts the debate to focus on the economic security of families under the workfare system. Doing so demands attention not only to welfare families, but to the far larger population of poor and near-poor families who are the targets of workfare.

For politics and policy, the questions raised by the workfare state are pointed. Federal policy now seeks to address family poverty by tying income assistance to employment. How successfully is it achieving this aim? Is a strategy of conditioning the social contract for poor Americans on employment the best way to ensure basic economic security for these families?

The evidence to date is not encouraging. Viewed in the context of other wealthy nations, the record of the United States in addressing poverty is abysmal. Poor families with children put in more hours at work than their counterparts in any other rich country. The United States also leads these countries in the number of workers who hold low-wage jobs. At the same time, the United States does far less than other wealthy nations to reduce poverty through social expenditures and tax policies. In countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Finland, government transfer programs and taxes reduce the poverty rate by more than 20 percentage points. In the United States, it is a mere 9.7 points. So poor Americans work more, but more remain in poverty than in other wealthy nations (17.3 percent of Americans were poor a decade into the 2000s, measured by the shared international standard, compared with an average of 9.9 percent in twenty-three of the wealthiest nations). Comparisons of rates of poverty among children are particularly disturbing. As a percentage of national income, the United States spends about half as much as other wealthy countries on programs for nonelderly families with children. And our child poverty rate (23.1 percent using the international standard) is more than double the average rate in those countries.³⁸

Political leaders point proudly to the number of Americans who have left welfare and to the growing reach of workfare programs. The EITC, for example, lifts some five to six million people out of poverty each year. But another three million are in poor families entirely outside the new system, receiving neither wages nor assistance, and some forty million Americansreceive poverty-level wages.³⁹ National poverty levels have remained stubbornly high over the past fifteen years, and tens of millions of Americans balance precariously just above the poverty line.⁴⁰ These trends have continued even in the wake of major declines in the welfare rolls, historic increases in the number of poor adults working year-round and full-time, and investments of more than $500 billion in the new workfare strategies.⁴¹ Like “body counts” tallied in military conflicts, both the diminishing number of welfare recipients and the rising number of workfare participants are less indicators of progress than they are indictments of the deep structural weaknesses in the U.S. low-wage labor market, and the failure of social policy to address the problem.

Table I.1 Rates of Relative Poverty, Child Poverty, and Poverty Reduction Through Government Policy in Select Wealthy Nations, Late 2000s

Source: Elise Gould and Hilary Wething, “U.S. Poverty Rates Higher, Safety Net Weaker Than in Peer Countries,” Economic Policy Institute, July 24, 2012, Figures C, D, and F.

Note: The United States is a standout among wealthy nations for its high rates of poverty in the population as a whole and among children. These figures represent rates of relative poverty using the common international standard—the percentage of people in households with less than half the median household income. The United States also does less than other wealthy countries to reduce poverty through government policy. The last column indicates the degree to which relative poverty is reduced by taxes and transfer programs; in these twenty-three countries, government policies reduce poverty by an average of 17.1 percentage points.^a Ranked highest to lowest.