Читать книгу Ain't No Trust - Judith Levine - Страница 12
Оглавление| TWO | “The Way They Treat You Is Inhumane” | |
| CASEWORKERS AND THE WELFARE OFFICE |
It was forty-five minutes of hell. It was terrible. She doesn’t like the people that need the help.
—Julie Callahan
’Cause, like Public Aid kind of makes you feel like you just panhandling almost, might as well say. The way they treat you. They just don’t treat you right. You go up to them office and they all cold . . .
—Danielle Adams
For several cold winter months in 2005 after reform, I spent a lot of time talking with Julie Callahan, a white mother of two whose freckles and strawberry blonde ponytail made her look even younger than her twenty-three years. Two days after I first met Julie, she applied for cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. We then spoke after each of her appointments in the process of her qualifying for benefits. Julie had been on TANF briefly when her five-year-old daughter was born but had quickly gotten back to work as a waitress in a restaurant managed by her family members and had left the rolls. She was reapplying because she had had a second child, a son who was now just under a month old. Julie was not married, but she was very close with her son’s father even though the two did not live together. Her five-year-old had a different father who was no longer involved with Julie or Julie’s daughter.
Julie was apprehensive about having to go to the welfare office, and she was unprepared for what happened during her first meeting with her caseworker. As she explained on the phone that same evening in an agitated voice when I asked her how it went, “Oh, it was a big problem. The caseworker, Ms. Driscoll, was very mean and she was very disrespectful. She said she doesn’t care what happens because . . . she’s tired of young women coming to her asking for welfare. She said she’s going to retire soon and she’s settled, but my life’s just beginning and I’m already asking for welfare.”
Julie was clearly very upset and spoke quickly and forcefully, repeating over and over, “She was so degrading” and “She acted like the money is coming out of her pocket.” Julie reported that Ms. Driscoll had just started attacking her at the beginning of the meeting, saying, “Why can’t you get a boyfriend who has a job?” When she first started the meeting and was looking over Julie’s case file, Julie reported, Ms. Driscoll said, “What’s changed since the last five years [the last time Julie was on assistance]? Oh, I know, you have another kid—and you can’t even support the one you have.” Julie was speechless. “I don’t know why she has to get into my personal life—who my boyfriend is and what I do with my spare time. It’s almost like they want to know when I go to the bathroom.” Julie’s final summary of the meeting was simply, “It was forty-five minutes of hell. It was terrible. She doesn’t like the people that need the help.”
Throughout the long application process, Julie dealt with others in the Public Aid office.1 She found some to be just like Ms. Driscoll and others refreshingly pleasant. But as Ms. Driscoll remained Julie’s caseworker, Julie’s overall impression of social interaction at the office was that it was belittling and uncooperative.
Like Julie, most women interviewed for this study perceived the majority of social interactions between themselves and caseworkers in the welfare office to be adversarial. Women at both time periods reported that caseworkers did not take the time to explain rules clearly and that they treated recipients disrespectfully. Many women said they had trouble getting or keeping benefits to which they believed they had a legal right. Such experiences engender distrust.
This distrust interferes with the intended incentives of specific welfare policies. Not only the specifics of welfare benefits and rules but also the philosophy of welfare policy is communicated through caseworkers.2 Since the women receiving welfare in my study tended to see these messengers as the enemy, they tended also to report to me that they were suspicious of welfare policy’s promises and intentions. Thus they did not trust that promised benefits would accrue in practice. They believed that their interests were directly at odds with those of the welfare office—that is, that their own interest was in retaining benefits, while the main motivation of the welfare office and its personnel was to move them off the welfare rolls.3
I begin this chapter with an overview of how welfare offices and welfare policies differed before and after welfare reform. What did not change was the fact that the women I interviewed reported hostile relationships with their caseworkers at both time periods. I then discuss two reasons why these hostile relationships are a breeding ground for distrust. First, communication in the client-caseworker relationship is poor, resulting in women not knowing or understanding official welfare rules and benefits. This is a problem because even when caseworkers follow rules appropriately and cut a woman’s benefits legitimately, a woman who does not understand the rules will feel she has been treated unfairly and, as a result, will distrust her caseworker. Poor communication about rules and benefits also generates distrust because it leads women to feel that their caseworkers are holding out on information they should be giving them, for instance about available work supports like transportation subsidies. Second, even when women do know about rules and benefits, they do not believe that the caseworkers with whom they have hostile relationships will actually follow the official rules and deliver benefits appropriately. Hostility leads to distrust that caseworkers will make good on the welfare office’s promises. As a result, women are less responsive to voluntary incentives to enter the labor force than they would be if they believed promised benefits would be delivered. I conclude with a discussion of how the structure of the welfare office, particularly the lack of shared interests between caseworkers and clients, promotes distrust and how such distrust might be addressed.
WELFARE REFORM AND THE WELFARE OFFICE
Today’s low-income women who receive cash assistance interact with a welfare office and with caseworkers who must operate under the goals and incentives set forth by the 1996 reforms. For a long time, welfare policies have been trying to move recipients into the workforce, leading caseworkers to stress that benefits should be seen as temporary supports. The welfare reform act of 1996 dramatically stepped up such efforts.
A Preference for Sticks over Carrots
The 1996 welfare reform legislation was not the first policy with the goal of moving low-income women into the labor market, but it shifted the emphasis from encouragement to force. As discussed in chapter 1, less than a decade before welfare reform was passed, the Family Support Act (FSA) of 1988 attempted to reform welfare as well. As implemented in some states, the FSA did create work requirements for certain groups of recipients, but they were not applied as broadly and were not as onerous as those created by the 1996 policy. Most importantly, the FSA did not impose time limits on benefits. Hence, the 1996 reforms focused more on mandatory “sticks” to force recipients to find jobs, whereas implementation of the 1988 legislation, especially in certain states, relied more heavily on voluntary incentives, or “carrots,” to draw recipients into the workforce. Two of the voluntary work incentives instituted by the FSA were to provide low-income mothers who left welfare for work with a child care subsidy for one year and to grant continued Medicaid coverage, also for one year, after the transition to work. Before the passage of the 1988 legislation, Medicaid had been available to low-income families only if they fell into certain categories, one of which was being a cash assistance recipient. As a result, most parents who left welfare for low-wage work, which rarely provides insurance benefits, were faced with immediate loss of medical coverage for themselves and their children. FSA’s transitional Medicaid benefits thus removed one disincentive for welfare recipients to find employment.
Another major voluntary incentive, called the Work Pays program, was instituted in the state of Illinois in 1993. Prior to the implementation of Work Pays, a welfare recipient’s monthly assistance grant was docked one dollar for every dollar that she earned through employment. This effectively meant that earnings were taxed at a rate of 100 percent, which created a disincentive to enter the labor force.4 The Work Pays program changed this rule, instead allowing recipients to keep two out of every three dollars of earned income. Illinois was able to supersede the federal dollar-for-dollar reduction rule because in the early 1990s, before the 1996 welfare reform bill was penned, President Clinton liberally granted states waivers to experiment with welfare rules. This state-level experimentation provided ideas for policy innovation and evidence of policy effects that were eventually used as support for federal reform. Illinois received a waiver in 1993 to run Work Pays, and the program has been in place ever since.
Several carrots still exist (and existed at the time of my post-reform interviews) in Illinois alongside reform’s new sticks. In addition to the Work Pays program remaining in effect, eligibility for Medicaid was decoupled from the receipt of cash assistance by federal decree at the time reform was passed. This means that as long as a family’s income is low enough to be eligible, the family can receive Medicaid benefits. Eligibility for Illinois’s child care subsidy is also decoupled from cash assistance receipt. This decoupling of child care subsidies and Medicaid replaces FSA’s transitional child care and Medicaid benefits. Now income-eligible families can receive these benefits no matter how long they have been off cash assistance.5 Illinois also provides additional work supports for women transitioning from welfare to a job, such as money for both transportation to work and clothing required for work. These remaining and additional voluntary incentives, however, are overshadowed by the dramatic coercive measures that reform instituted.6 For example, women cannot receive cash assistance without participating in an approved work activity, there is a lifetime limit of sixty months of assistance, and those who do not meet requirements are “sanctioned” by having their benefits reduced or even eliminated.7 The guiding belief of reform is that carrots alone cannot be effective and sticks must be increased to get welfare mothers to work.
The welfare department has been successful in communicating the “sticks” of welfare reform, partly because this message is drummed into the heads of recipients during almost every interaction with the welfare office in a way that the more nuanced messages about “carrots” are not. As we will see below, recipients are often unaware of the carrots but clearly know the sticks. The sticks have also been emphasized in communications by other outlets, such as the news media, during reform’s passage and implementation.
Reform’s requirements that state governments reduce their cash assistance caseloads and produce near-universal employment among welfare recipients trickle down to the structural arrangements of local welfare offices. Caseworkers must reduce caseload size and increase employment among their clients in order to perform well in their jobs. These structural forces encourage caseworkers to focus on coercive measures, which are more easily communicated and delivered than the more complex voluntary incentives. And this focus promotes welfare recipients’ distrust.
Changes in the Role of the Caseworker
As welfare policies changed after 1996, so did the job of the caseworker. Before reform, the main job of caseworkers was to “cut checks.” In other words, it was their job to assess applicants’ eligibility for benefits, to give applicants the appropriate amount, and to make sure that clients were not doing anything (such as receiving unreported income) that changed their eligibility status.8 Yes, caseworkers were supposed to encourage clients to move off the rolls through employment or other routes, and they had some role in helping clients do so, especially after the passage of reform’s precursor, the FSA, in 1988. But it was not their job to systematically assess and address recipients’ barriers to employment and to make sure that all cases got off the rolls within a set period of time.
Since reform, the job has been different. Caseworkers are now case managers whose job is not just to encourage but to actually shepherd clients’ movement into the labor force. They now are supposed to address clients’ issues with job skills, domestic violence, substance use, child care, transportation, and a host of other factors that interfere with employment. It is their job to connect clients with a separate government office that manages paternity establishment, with another office that manages Medicaid, and with job-training programs (usually separate not-for-profit agencies or for-profit businesses that contract with the state to provide job training to welfare recipients). When it is appropriate, they also are supposed to help transfer clients with disabilities from TANF onto Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a federal assistance program for the physically and mentally disabled.9
Moreover, reform did not just create new requirements for welfare recipients. It also created new requirements for state governments. States that do not meet work participation targets for their caseloads are penalized by the federal government by being given less funding to run their cash assistance programs. States are also rewarded through increased funding if they do various things such as lower their nonmarital fertility rate (without raising their abortion rate). These federal penalties on and rewards to state governments translate into increased pressure on caseworkers to meet goals for clients. Needless to say, being a caseworker in the post-reform world is not an easy job.
In an informational interview with a manager in a Chicago welfare office, I learned of the difficulties welfare offices face in making the transition needed to meet these new demands. One challenge is shifting caseworkers to doing tasks that require both a new set of job skills and a new mind-set toward the goals of the job. The manager described this shift as a work in progress, even though I interviewed her eight years after the passage of welfare reform.
Little Change in the Quality of Interactions in the Welfare Office
Most women interviewed both before and after welfare reform described their experiences interacting with caseworkers in negative terms. Women reported that caseworkers were impatient, rude, and disrespectful while simultaneously being incompetent. Common images emerged across women’s narratives in both time periods. In fact, it is striking how often women used similar words to describe these interactions. Common phrasings included that the caseworkers “treat us like children,” were “snotty,” had a “bad [or nasty] attitude,” and “act like the money is coming out of their own pocket.” This common language was used by a striking number of women.10
There was, however, some variation in the reported quality of caseworker interactions within each time period. Some women reported that, while they knew others who had had bad experiences, they had been lucky to have had neutral or even highly positive relationships with their caseworkers (though only women after reform identified specific positive experiences). There was also variation in the experiences of individual women across reported interactions with different caseworkers, some seen as supportive and others as hostile. Despite this variation, the overwhelming assessment by women in both time periods was that their interactions with caseworkers were fraught with tension and disrespect. Studies of caseworkers indicated that they too experienced frustrations in communicating with clients and pointed to the structural arrangements of the workplace as a major source of their difficulties.11
Most women before reform consistently reported negative interactions with caseworkers. A handful spoke neutrally or in nonspecific positive terms about their interactions with welfare office personnel, but none of the pre-reform women spoke enthusiastically about a caseworker or gave a detailed story of how a caseworker had helped them. Instead, they simply commented that they had had a helpful caseworker here and there.
Juanita Soto, interviewed before welfare reform, was a thirty-eight-year-old Puerto Rican woman with a quiet, thoughtful, and warm demeanor. Her long dark hair framed a strong, attractive face and deep brown eyes. She lived with her twelve-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter. She also had a twenty-one-year-old son by the same father, but he had been raised mostly by her parents since she had had him when she was fifteen. He was now living with Juanita’s sister, attending community college, and about to enter the National Guard. Like many women I interviewed, Juanita was short a bedroom or two in her apartment, so the living room served as her bedroom and the one small bedroom was shared by her children, who slept in bunk beds that took up almost the entire room. Juanita said it was not an ideal situation, especially for a twelve-year-old boy to have to share a room with his younger sister, but that she had “no choice.”
One evening, we sat folding laundry together on the small Formica table in her kitchen while she explained what it was like to have to engage with caseworkers. It was difficult to imagine Juanita being anything but polite, since she displayed a gentle and mature personality with me. She had none of the toughness or hostility in her tone that some of the other women exhibited, especially when they spoke about their caseworkers. One would expect she would elicit courteous treatment, but she reported a different story.
Juanita had received cash assistance for eight years, starting when her oldest child was two, during a period when his father went to jail and stopped contributing money to the household. When she finally got a job working as a receptionist, she was immediately cut from the welfare rolls. While she was surprised to lose her benefits so quickly, she did not miss the treatment she reported receiving at the hands of her caseworkers. “I mean . . . they disrespect you. They make you feel stupid. They treat you like you’re . . . you know, nobody. Terrible. I had so many caseworkers that did . . . that. . . . Just because you’re on the other side and you’re making your check does not give you the right to down-talk us or to embarrass us or make us feel dumb. . . . Oh, I hated it.”
During a brief, more recent stint on welfare when Juanita was between jobs, she found her caseworkers to be no better, and she was relieved when she found a job and was again free of them. Many other women echoed Juanita’s words. Nakida Brown bluntly stated, “They got a nasty attitude, a shitty attitude, like that money that they giving us is coming out of they pocket.” Tahiera Jackson complained, “They so snotty up there. Just the way they talk to people. They just have a bad attitude.”
Danielle Adams, a thirty-five-year-old African American mother of a thirteen-year-old and a five-year-old, was one of the most successful of the women in the labor market. While wages earned by most of the rest of women interviewed before reform ranged from $4.25 to $8.00 an hour (or roughly $6.50 to $12.00 in constant 2012 dollars), Danielle was making $16.77 an hour ($25.92 in 2012 dollars) as a seasonal sanitation worker for the city of Chicago. She had to work for five years from April to November before she could be hired as a full-year worker. The winter before our first interview, she returned to welfare for the second time in her life until the job began again in April. She explained that she greatly preferred being independent from the welfare system. “ ’Cause, like Public Aid kind of makes you feel like you just panhandling almost, might as well say. The way they treat you. They just don’t treat you right. You go up to them office and they all cold.”
Since Danielle was an extraordinary success compared to most of the women—she was in line for a relatively highly paid permanent job—one might expect caseworkers would appreciate that she was on the brink of a stable employment history. But she did not describe any difference from other women in how she was treated. For example, Grace James, who differed greatly from Danielle in that she had been out of the labor market for many years and had no plans for reentry, reported similar treatment: “They act as if they’re giving you so much. But actually, they’re not giving you barely enough to live on.”
It is hard to argue with Grace. At the time of the pre-reform interviews, a single mother in Illinois with two minor children received $377 a month in cash assistance. Benefit levels have always been set by the states, and this Illinois rate was just above the national average of $367—above the lowest rate in Mississippi of $120 but below the highest rate in Alaska of $923. The Illinois cash assistance rate, which translated into $4,524 per year, did not bring a mother’s income anywhere near to being over the poverty line. By the time of the post-reform interviews, Illinois had raised its rate but only to $396. This increase was also not nearly enough to keep up with inflation. Once these figures are adjusted for inflation, we see the Illinois benefit actually went down between the two interview periods. Converted to constant 2012 dollars, the pre-reform benefit was $568 per month, whereas the post-reform benefit was $465.12 Thus women after reform had to do more to get less.
Women also stated that instead of helping them gain confidence to enter the workforce, caseworkers often demeaned them. Luisa Estevez, who eventually achieved success in a salaried job with benefits at a job-training center after leaving welfare, felt that her caseworker regularly belittled her. During one appointment, he had her take a written test. “I gave him the test back and . . . he goes, ‘Oh, you’re a doofus.’ And I don’t know what the word meant, but I knew I didn’t take it well. It just so happened that there was a dictionary there and I looked up the word, and the word mean ‘stupid.’ ” Luisa learned from this incident that her caseworker was not supportive. In fact, she came to see him as someone who pulled her down.
Many women had similar stories, but Dolores Rios summed up the general reaction to caseworkers quite simply: “They’re all full of shit. . . . Oh man, they’re real bitches, real bitches.” While not every woman spoke as forcefully, and some pointed to a humane interaction here and there, most women agreed with Dolores’s general sentiment. In the eyes of most women, caseworkers were not allies. They were not supporters. They were hostile and disrespectful gatekeepers that one had to endure in order to get public assistance benefits.
Given the new tasks that welfare reform required of caseworkers, the women interviewed after reform had much more contact with caseworkers than women did before reform. They were also more likely to interact with several caseworkers. This increased contact exposed women to the possibility of both more negative interactions and more positive ones than women had had before reform, when they simply picked up checks from caseworkers. Perhaps not surprisingly then, women after reform reported both extremely negative interactions and (though rarely) extremely positive interactions with caseworkers. The increased pressure on caseworkers to move clients into the workforce also probably contributed to the increased incidence of both negative and positive interactions. Clients who felt that caseworkers’ only interest was in pushing them into the labor market were likely to feel mistreated. But a few reported encountering caseworkers who really took an interest in them in order to help them find jobs, with the result that the women had positive feelings about interactions. The general tone of the post-reform women’s descriptions of their interactions, however, was similar to that of women before reform. Overall, they too saw caseworkers not as helpful agents but as hostile gatekeepers.
Most women after reform reported that caseworkers were rude and treated clients unprofessionally. Many women complained that caseworkers did not take the time to treat them as individuals, an approach that was considered demeaning and meant that women’s particular needs were not addressed. The increased demands on caseworkers after reform may make it difficult for caseworkers to take the time to give each recipient what she needs.
As Wanda Bailey explained,
You can find out a lot about a person if you just talk with them instead of treating them like a piece of paper. And we just a name on a paper with a number to them. . . . And it’s like, “I just want to deal with her and get her outta here” and “I just want to see the next person.” . . . I speak for most young ladies that’s on aid. All of us are not unruly and just angry all the time. There’s a lotta people who are very intelligent, have been in college and have held jobs for . . . years. And the way they treat you is inhumane. . . . They try to belittle you with their words and . . . there’s never a please or thank you.
Another common complaint was that caseworkers asked very personal questions, often about sexual relationships, and did not respect women’s privacy or appear to have any code of confidentiality. This particular concern was much more common among the post-reform women, probably because welfare reform’s new paternity establishment requirements had led to this line of questioning. It was these types of questions that made Julie Callahan complain that she felt as if caseworkers almost wanted to know when she went to the bathroom. Julie did not seem to realize that the questions might have been about trying to figure out the identity of her baby’s father so that child support could be collected. Furthermore, she did not recognize that many citizens probably felt that the father’s identity was legitimately the state’s business once a mother was asking for financial assistance. Instead, the questions simply seemed invasive to her. The fact that she felt that way indicates that her caseworker did not explain why the questions were necessary and did not ask them in a suitably delicate way given their sensitive nature.
Adriana Marquez, the mother of an infant son, was appalled at how insensitively she was treated when she applied for TANF after her son was born. She reported that personal information such as her welfare history and the fact that she was not together with her baby’s father was publicly shared. “I went to try to apply when my son was first born and they tried to embarrass me in there, the caseworkers. . . . When I went the second time, I [asked to talk] to a supervisor and [my caseworker] started hollering all my business out in the room [when] it’s supposed to be private.”
Like women before reform, what women after reform considered most difficult about interacting with caseworkers was simply how rude they found them to be. Dionne Anderson, a tall and stately thirty-eight-year-old African American woman, was unusual among those interviewed in that she did not have her first (and only) child until age thirty-six. In a sense, Dionne was not unlike upper-middle-class professional women who delay childbearing as they pursue careers. Dionne, however, had been sidetracked from motherhood because she was busy “in the life,” otherwise known as the drug trade. Her ability to “gain authority” (rise above the level of street dealers) had protected her from the police, who were never able to pin anything on her. But Dionne eventually left dealing when she sensed the police were beginning to close in on her. She was tired of it anyway. After leaving the life, she became involved with her church and regretted that she had spent so much time “in the streets” rather than pursuing the education she quit after eleventh grade. “I could have had a degree and gotten somewhere by now,” she sighed with resignation.
Dionne described everything about parenting as new to her since she had spent so many years childless and had not spent much time around children. Having earned a sufficient living selling drugs, she was also not familiar with the welfare system. She thus found the interaction style of caseworkers a shock when she started receiving benefits after her son’s birth. “I’m not comfortable at all because . . . they don’t know how to talk to you. They don’t know how to present theirself to you. So I am sitting here nicely—just like I’m sitting here with you, you know. It’s like they holler at you like you some kind of little kid, you know. I’m looking at this lady like ‘Is you crazy?’ . . . The caseworkers, they are very snotty. Some of them, you can’t talk to them.”
Dionne really had no preconceived notions of what it would be like to interact with caseworkers. She had applied for welfare expecting help and not the treatment she described. Dionne had been no saint, for sure. But, as she indicated in her quote above, she did indeed speak with me in a calm and professional manner—or “nicely,” to use her words. She also did not have children young or have a lot of children, conditions that might raise the hackles of caseworkers tired of doling out aid. But she described the same treatment that Julie Callahan, mother of two at twenty-three years old, described.
Though most women after reform reported negative interactions with caseworkers, some had positive interactions in welfare offices. In contrast, no women before reform described specific incidents of positive interactions with caseworkers, though a few made general statements about some caseworkers being helpful. Caseworkers after reform earned praise when they treated the women respectfully, when they followed through on what they had promised to do, when they were flexible, when they went out of their way to help, or when they cheered on women who were trying to transition to work.
Georgia Burke, an African American mother of seven children, liked her caseworker’s reliability. “Say like the food stamps don’t be on your card when they supposed to be there. He, instead of letting his paperwork pile up, he puts it in that same day as he tells you. He don’t wait. When he say he’s gonna do it, he does it.”
When caseworkers let their “paperwork pile up,” the cost for recipients is high. They may have to wait to receive benefits that they desperately need. By doing his paperwork right away, Georgia’s caseworker showed that he recognized how important the food stamps were to her family’s well-being. He was thus not only serving her needs but showing her respect.
Melissa Jacobs, a married twenty-eight-year-old white mother of three, was happy with one of her caseworkers for the same reason. As we sat at the dining room table in her apartment with her children loudly playing around us and her husband in and out, she described her experiences. “The caseworker was very respectful. She did everything like it was supposed to be. I didn’t have no interruptions on my case. I didn’t have no problems until she retired and then they switched me [to another caseworker].” Note that Melissa appreciated that she had “no interruptions” in her case, and remember that a main frustration that Bethany Grant, whom we met in the Introduction, had with her caseworker was that she “messed up” Bethany’s case and that Bethany was without benefits for several months during the cold Chicago winter as a result. Melissa’s new caseworker was less reliable than the one she appreciated, and she had complaints both about the way she was treated and about the difficulty of getting her benefits consistently. The difference between her actual experiences with each caseworker was what taught her who could be trusted to deliver and who could not.
Monisha Hall, an African American mother who at twenty-six was busy managing three children under the age of five, was grateful that her caseworker was willing to be flexible in the bureaucratic process of assessing her eligibility for cash assistance. Otherwise, she would have had to wait longer for her check to come through. Monisha lived in her sister’s apartment, and her sister charged her rent. Monisha’s caseworker had told her that she needed a notarized letter from her sister stating the amount of the rent so it could be included in a calculation of Monisha’s expenses and hence her needed income. Many women described caseworkers who were sticklers about every rule, but when Monisha forgot to bring the letter, her caseworker did not demand that she get it. “I was supposed to bring in . . . a notarized letter from my sister about the rent ’cause she was charging me like a hundred dollars. And I had forgot to get it. And [my caseworker] was like, ‘All right.’ She just let it go. She was like, ‘I know you say it’s your sister, I know what’s going on, I know how much you give her, so you don’t have to bring it back.’” From this experience, Monisha learned she could trust her caseworker to be on her side.
Still, many of the positive descriptions were coupled with statements about how rare such caseworkers were. Kala Amos, a twenty-five-year-old African American mother of three who hoped to be a police officer and had held two jobs as a security guard, appreciated her caseworker because she did “what [she] say [she]’ll do.” Also, her caseworker would call her to remind her of appointments or paperwork she needed to bring in, which Kala said the caseworker was not required to do. Kala did not think her caseworker is typical, however. “She real nice. You gotta have a good relationship with your caseworker in order to get your paperwork done. You can’t have no attitude. But some of the caseworkers down at the Aid office, they’ll make you have a attitude ’cause some of ’em so snide. They don’t know how to talk to you. And you grown. And you down there trying to get yourself together and they be having attitude. Not all of ’em, but some of ’em do. But the caseworkers that I’ve had, I never had a problem with mine.”
Kala’s comments are interesting for several reasons. First, she was saying that getting “your paperwork done,” by which she meant completing all the bureaucratic requirements to apply for benefits and to keep them coming, could not be done without a good relationship with one’s caseworker. Second, she was acknowledging that not all clients exhibited a good attitude, but she attributed that to the belittling attitudes of caseworkers who treated clients like children even though the clients were “grown” and were trying to “get themselves together.” Third, she felt she had had good caseworkers but said she had observed bad ones.
Even women who reported positive interactions with a caseworker explained that in addition to their positive experiences, they had had negative interactions with other caseworkers or had observed negative interactions between other caseworkers and other clients. Unlike most women who had much shorter periods on welfare, Alpha Walker, a mother of seven, had been on AFDC and then TANF for a total of seventeen years. She had certainly seen her share of caseworkers. With a resigned sigh, she said, “Some of them are all right. I mean, they know how to talk to you and they try to help you. But some of them, they talk to you snotty and they act like it’s they money coming out they pocket.” Here Alpha’s reference to “money coming out they pocket” echoes Julie’s use of the same phrase when describing Ms. Driscoll’s attitude. Similarly, Kala’s comment above about caseworkers treating “grown” clients inappropriately harkens back to Dionne’s surprise at caseworkers who treated clients like children. As I mentioned earlier, often women who did not even know each other observed the same behaviors in their caseworkers.
Edwina Bright was an African American mother of four children—two grown daughters who were married and lived with their husbands and two teenage sons. Edwina was particularly thoughtful, often took time to really think before answering a question, and exhibited no active hostility about her time on welfare. Edwina had held many jobs and had stably transitioned from welfare shortly after reform policies began. At the time of our interview, she had held her current position for four years. Her job, as a janitor who also did a lot of the landscaping at her building, was unionized, which was very rare among the women in either time period. Back when she had received welfare, Edwina had had both good and bad interactions with caseworkers. “Throughout the times that I was on aid, I could say it was kind of like a mixed thing. Some of the caseworkers that I had were really good. Really interested in your well-being. Trying to help you as much as they can. Then, I found some that was just little dooky-heads . . . really didn’t care what happened, you know, and would tell you. I had one tell me, ‘Oh, I don’t care . . . I don’t care what happens.’”
One caseworker, however, stood out in her memory for having really taken an interest in encouraging her to stick to her goals. Edwina had left welfare for work but had lost her job. When she went to reapply for welfare benefits, she met a caseworker who dissuaded her. Edwina listened to her, returned to searching for a job, and eventually found a job she liked. She had not been on welfare since. Normally, Edwina said, she might complain that the caseworker was not being cooperative, but there was something about her warmth and respectful tone that Edwina found sincere. “But what she told me was, ‘You have made a [transition] from being on public aid [to] having a job. Don’t fall back into the hole again. Try to find something else. You know, we have programs. Try to get into a program. Don’t go back. You took two steps forward. Don’t take twelve steps back, you know. You owe it to yourself and your children.’ . . . I appreciate her giving me that talk. There are a lot of people who don’t take the time out to do that.”
One might interpret Edwina’s story the same way she did, that the caseworker was going out of her way to help her. Of course, one might also see the caseworker as guided by her new post-reform job requirements of deterring applicants from joining the rolls and encouraging them into the labor market instead. What made the difference for Edwina was the respectful tone the caseworker used. Many women felt like cogs in the large machine of the welfare office. Making a human connection with a caseworker was rare, but when it happened it was valued.
Caseworkers, of course, have their own perceptions of their actions and their interactions with clients. In several informational interviews that I held with caseworkers, they expressed a great deal of frustration with clients who did not follow procedures or were nonresponsive in other ways. It is impossible to know from interviews with recipients whether their perceptions accurately reflect what happened during their visits to the welfare office. Other researchers who have studied caseworkers themselves, however, do find evidence in support of my respondents’ reports.13
My own observations also lend some support to the women’s claims. In multiple visits to welfare offices, I observed caseworkers and other office personnel speaking to recipients in impatient and demeaning ways. At one office, I sat on a bench in front of a reception counter waiting to meet with a member of the staff with whom I had an appointment. Several clients were sitting on the bench with me. The woman working at the long counter began barking at them as if they were naughty schoolchildren.14 With a stern expression and in an angry voice, she began yelling orders that were difficult to interpret. I was not sure whether she was trying to tell them they should not be waiting there, they should be coming up to her, or some other directive. She treated them as if they were doing something wrong before ascertaining why they were waiting. The clients looked shocked and confused. It seemed to take them a minute to realize the woman was speaking to them, presumably because they could not figure out what they had done wrong or what she wanted them to do to fix it. The woman’s approach to the clients—scolding them like children, assuming they were doing something wrong before finding out the facts, and not explaining calmly what she needed them to do—illustrated many of my interviewees’ comments about welfare office personnel.15
Caseworkers and counselors in job-training programs may themselves be of two minds about reform’s requirements. In informal interviews with one caseworker and three different job-training counselors, I asked about the challenges of dealing with clients under the post-reform regime. All four stressed the importance of clients’ following rules and expressed frustration with clients who did not meet reform’s requirements. They said they had no patience for certain clients, especially those who did not bring required paperwork, who missed meetings, or who were evasive when asked questions. As they spoke, they exhibited the harsh tone of which clients accused them.
But then I asked them a different kind of question. I asked what they thought of reform itself. Each of the four surprised me. Each said that they thought the policies reform had put in place were too harsh. They agreed with reform’s goals, but they did not think it was flexible or forgiving enough for women who needed more time to find stable employment that allowed them also to care for their children. Most of the women I interviewed said the same thing. They too thought they should not rely on welfare long term and should find employment, but they thought they needed more support, more time, and more understanding when it could not happen immediately or when crises intervened. Thus caseworkers, job-training counselors, and clients may think similarly, but their different roles force them into adversarial positions. Caseworkers’ and job-training counselors’ job is to enforce reform’s mandates, and that required task overrides their personal views of reform. Clients get to see only the person fulfilling that job task and rarely the person who has a more humane understanding of a client’s challenges.
We see here how the structure of the welfare office, and of job-training programs to which welfare offices send welfare recipients, shapes the nature of interactions between low-income mothers and caseworkers or job-training counselors. Because caseworkers and counselors are rewarded for moving clients from welfare to work and not for treating them sensitively, making sure they understand policies, or making sure they get all of the benefits to which they are entitled, their jobs are structured so that they have interests at odds with those of welfare recipients who are trying to retain benefits and who wish for sensitive treatment.
ISSUES OF DISTRUST IN THE WELFARE OFFICE
The dynamics described in this chapter, in which welfare recipients often view their caseworkers as disrespectful and uncaring, have profound consequences for their experiences on welfare. After all, it is the caseworkers who must help the women navigate the complex rules and procedures of the welfare system.
These dynamics also have implications for how welfare policies play out. If welfare recipients are not aware of or do not understand welfare rules and the work incentives they contain, they cannot take advantage of such incentives. And even when the women do know the rules, if they do not trust their caseworkers they may not believe that these incentive policies truly will be applied. As a result, they may not take the steps necessary to receive them. This was equally true for the women I interviewed in both time periods.
Knowledge of the Written Rules
It may at first seem that it should be easy for welfare recipients to grasp what welfare policy rules are. However, the rules that are written in legislation, the rules as they are actually implemented by caseworkers, and recipients’ interpretation of the written and implemented rules all differ from each other. The gaps between these three things lead to difficulty in caseworker and client communication about policies. Often the women I interviewed described welfare rules differently than they were written up officially. As we will see below, they might say that they would be cut off Medicaid benefits if they got a job, when the written rules said this would not happen. When women did not describe rules in the same way as they were written, I say they had “a different understanding of the rules” rather than an “incorrect understanding.” This is because it is possible that rules were not implemented according to how they were written. The women’s understandings of the rules would be “wrong” if indeed rules were implemented as written. However, if they were not, then the women might have a correct understanding of the rules as implemented, even though that understanding was different from the rules as written. As we shall see, many of the women at both time periods reported that the rules as written were not the same as the rules as practiced.16 As described in more depth below, I myself found a brochure in a welfare office informing clients of a policy that the state had voted to discontinue a year and a half earlier. Clearly, the written legislation (that this particular policy should be stopped) and the policy implemented, or at least communicated, in the welfare office were in conflict with each other.
The rules themselves, of course, differed before and after reform, which somewhat affected the interviews’ content. Even so, many of the women in both time periods either stated that they did not know particular rules or gave descriptions of the rules that were different from the official descriptions.
Pre-reform interviews focused on how women perceived two different kinds of “carrots” to entice them into the labor market. The Work Pays program, described above, allowed (and continues to allow) employed welfare recipients to keep two out of every three dollars of their earnings instead of having their welfare grants reduced a dollar for every dollar earned through employment. The transitional medical and child care benefits set up by the earlier reform measures of 1988 allowed women to keep both Medicaid coverage and child care subsidies for a year after they exited welfare for work.
If properly applied, Work Pays would allow women who work for minimal pay and limited hours to retain eligibility for cash assistance and to raise their income levels. The transitional benefits, if granted as indicated in written policy, would ensure that families would not lose medical coverage for at least a year after a mother became employed.
I asked each respondent detailed questions about each of these welfare rules. Fewer than half of the women described the Work Pays program or the transitional benefits as they were laid out in written materials at the welfare office. Most women assumed that they would be cut off from all benefits as soon as they took a job. They did not realize that the written regulations stated that, on the basis of the Work Pays program, they should have been able to keep a portion of their cash assistance grant (unless their earnings were so high that they were no longer income eligible) and that, on the basis of the FSA of 1988, they should receive transitional child care and Medicaid benefits for one year.
When she was a teenager, Pauline Garett worked in a fast-food restaurant. Fast-food jobs are low-paying and often part time. They are thus exactly the type of employment Work Pays and transitional Medicaid and child care benefits were designed to encourage by subsidizing the low wages and adding work supports. However, Pauline did not see this potential, as her response demonstrated when she was asked if she would take a fast-food job at age thirty-three after years of not being employed:
No, I would take something that would give me a little bit more money to pay my bus fare to get there. Really, I would have to be careful what kind of job I take. I know right now, if I took a job and it didn’t work out and [had] no kind of [medical] coverage for my kids—’cause Public Aid, they gonna snatch that right away as soon as I report it to them—they take that from me, and say a job paying like five or six dollars, it’s not gonna make it. ’Cause I got to pay my own expenses on my own, pay for me to get to the job. Still, I need something to cover me, some kind of [medical] coverage for my kids, so I don’t know.
