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CHAPTER THREE

The Carrot and the Stick

Nydia, a thirty-five-year-old Puerto Rican woman with a bright smile and an infectious laugh, applied for food stamps at the local welfare office in North Brooklyn after the birth of her second child. She worked full-time and had planned on taking a full twelve weeks of unpaid maternity leave. Like many mothers, she cobbled together funds from her vacation, sick days, and savings to cover the expense of not working for three months. Her husband was “doing odds and ends,” as she put it, working in construction. Together, it should have been enough to get them through twelve weeks without Nydia’s paychecks. But a few weeks into her leave, her husband tore his rotator cuff and had to be in sling for a month. With both of them out of work, Nydia suddenly felt desperate. “I never felt the way I felt when I applied for food stamps. It was not a good feeling. I was like, holy moly, how am I going to feed my kids?” She considered cutting her maternity leave short and going back to work, but her mom convinced her to apply for food stamps instead so she could have more time at home with her son.

Nydia and her mother arrived at the local welfare office early in the day to make sure theirs wouldn’t be a wasted trip. The lines at the welfare office often snaked down the block. It wasn’t unusual to wait for several hours in the dingy waiting rooms before being told there were no appointments left for the day and to come back tomorrow. Nydia and her mother weren’t taking any chances. They were there right as the office opened. After waiting for several hours, Nydia finally got in to see a caseworker, whom she described as “mean” and “talking down” to her.

Caught between the conflicting goals of restricting welfare for unemployed applicants and expanding food stamp use among the “working poor,” front-line employees often see their job as policing the boundaries between those who genuinely deserve help and those who are trying to defraud the system. They rely heavily on official documents like tax forms and pay stubs to evaluate whether the applicant is eligible. Applicants face skepticism and suspicion as caseworkers try to make sense out of the extensive documentation that accompanies each application, which includes information documenting residence, income, expenses, assets, and citizenship status.

Lester Towns, a middle-aged African American man who works at the North Brooklyn welfare office processing food stamp applications felt that applicants “don’t want to put income down.” He continued: “They don’t want to put their bank accounts down. They don’t want to fill out anything that they feel that’s gonna make them not receive food stamps.” This was echoed by Tish Taylor, an African American woman who has worked in the welfare office for over twenty years. “We’ve been working here so long,” she said, “we know how to pull it out, the stuff that gets them in trouble. We know certain things, so we question it.”

Eligibility specialists probe clients about two main issues: household composition and income, which both determine whether a household qualifies for food stamp benefits and how much it will receive. Clear documentation of income, especially with pay stubs, is one of the easiest ways for workers to make sense of a client’s case. Clients who have no work or unstable work, work off the books, or receive some other form of irregular income are subject to far more scrutiny and have to document their income with letters written by either an employer or the applicant. Taylor described her interactions with these clients: “We say, ‘Bring the pay stubs,’ and when the client says they don’t get pay stubs, we get a letter, which we know is a fraudulent thing.”

Nydia’s caseworker quickly discovered that her husband and children were already in the computer system because they received health insurance benefits from the state. Nydia had health insurance through her job, but it wasn’t very good and it was expensive to cover her children under this plan. She and her children’s’ father are not officially married, though they have lived together for fifteen years. Since he does not have a regular income, he and their two children qualify for public health benefits through the Medicaid program. This raised a red flag for the worker who began questioning why Nydia and her husband weren’t officially married.

Nydia was put off by this line of questioning and responded, “That’s none of your business. He’s the father of my children.” With tensions rising, the case worker pointed out that, “a lot of these cases are fraud.” This accusation upset Nydia and she started crying right there in the food stamp office. “And then when I started crying, I felt humiliated. That’s how I felt. And I was like, oh no. Heck no.” She pulled herself together and told the caseworker, “I’m not here because I want to be. I’m here because I need help. You know, I need help to feed my children. I’m not asking for no cash assistance. I have a job and I plan on going back to work, but I need help. And you know what? I work. I pay taxes. I think I’m entitled to this. Whether it’s for this little bit of time or for an extended period of time, I need this.”

Nydia had said the magic words. She asserted her deservingness in clear terms, arguing that she was not asking for cash assistance, had a job, paid taxes, and was entitled to food assistance for her children. Instantly the tone changed. The case worker asked for Nydia’s pay stubs and paperwork related to her maternity leave. As Nydia put it, the caseworker “brought it down and the rest of the process was smooth.” Because she had clear documentation, including pay stubs, Nydia was able to make her employment legible, visible, and verifiable to the food stamp office. Her ability to produce paperwork that corroborated her identity as a working mother, someone who “has a job,” eased the tensions in their interaction and convinced the case worker that she deserved assistance. Her application was processed that day and three days later she was able to go grocery shopping for her family. Once she returned to work at the end of her maternity leave, her family continued to receive food stamps because her income was low enough that they still qualified. Nydia had a clear understanding that it was not her status as a mother that entitled her to assistance, but her status as a worker. She understood the new terms of deservingness in part because it was her job to help other women access income supports.

Nydia worked as a family assistant at a day care center in North Brooklyn, where she helped connect the low-income families at her center with benefits and programs, from parenting classes to housing assistance. Nydia was an outspoken advocate for SNAP, in large part because she benefitted from the program herself. She used her own experience when talking to other parents about the food stamp program, particularly when they were embarrassed or hesitant to apply. “I try to encourage our parents to enroll. A lot of them are afraid . . . and I keep telling them that it’s not welfare. It’s not the same thing. It’s food assistance that they are entitled to, especially for their children. With the stigma with food stamps, they’re embarrassed, and I’m like, you have no reason. I’m employed. I don’t make excellent money, but I make pretty decent money and I don’t have an issue [with getting SNAP] at all.”

Since 2001, the fastest-growing demographic on the food stamp rolls has been low-wage workers and their families.¹ Many participants, like Nydia, work full-time in offices, day care centers, and restaurants and earn barely enough to put them over the poverty line. Like Nydia, over a third of food stamp recipients have at least some college. Nydia’s insistence that food stamps “are not welfare,” but food assistance that working families “are entitled to” echoes the language of political elites who have attempted to reduce the stigma of certain welfare state programs, particularly for women in the workforce who are struggling financially.

THE CARROT: SUBSIDIZING WORKING MOTHERS

Food stamps have seen a remarkable turn-around from a stigmatized welfare program in the 1990s to a valued “work support” today. A 2010 article in the New York Times declared that the program “once stigmatized, has found acceptance” (DeParle and Gebeloff 2010). The article argued that “after tough welfare laws chased millions of people from the cash rolls, many into low-wage jobs as fast-food workers, maids, and nursing aides, newly sympathetic officials saw food stamps as a way to help them” (DeParle and Gebeloff 2010). As legal scholar David Super demonstrates, “in the six years from 1996 to 2002, the Food Stamp Program shed its skin, transforming from a political pariah to the beneficiary of a multi-billion dollar benefit expansion proposed by George W. Bush (at the same time he was attacking a host of other means-tested programs)” (Super 2004). The efforts to ease access to food stamp benefits were largely motivated by a new attitude among administrators and policy makers that reframed food stamps as a “work support” for low-wage workers.

Attempts to destigmatize programs like food stamps stand in stark contrast to the rhetoric that surrounded welfare reform legislation passed in 1996. In the mid-1990’s, politicians zeroed in on poor women deemed “dependent” and argued that these women must be pushed into a job—any job—no matter how low paid or insecure. But welfare reform’s promise of self-sufficiency through employment proved somewhat illusory. Most women who left the welfare rolls found low-wage jobs, but very little relief from the grinding poverty they had known when they were receiving assistance. Welfare reforms were enacted in a period of declining job prospects and stagnating wages for many working and middle-class households. In this context, full-time working mothers, like Nydia, who struggled to make ends meet emerged as a new deserving poor and welfare spending and program administration were transformed to boost the value of these workers’ low wages. The policy approach since 1996 has been to modify and expand some means-tested welfare benefits to “make work pay,” especially for working mothers, by subsidizing low wages.

The largest contributing factor to the remarkable rise in the food stamp rolls between 2001 and 2012 has been a deteriorating economy that no longer works for many workers. Nydia is one of them. Food stamps have become increasingly important, not only for the very poor—families struggling to make ends meet at jobs paying the minimum wage or less—but for people attempting to maintain a toehold on the middle class. As college educations (and even advanced degrees) lose their value in an increasingly competitive job market, more and more families and individuals turn to welfare programs to retain some level of security. “Work supports” become the thin line that keeps them from slipping into situations of real hardship.

Nydia’s family was typical in this regard. Nydia was born and raised in North Brooklyn. She and her two siblings grew up on a tree-lined block of cramped tenement buildings. Her dad worked as a mechanic for forty years in a plastic bag factory on the nearby waterfront. He walked to work every morning before he retired. When Nydia and her siblings were young, her mom worked part time as a nurse’s aide and as a cashier. Nydia’s family was by no means wealthy, but when her dad retired, he was making $48 an hour, had a good pension, and received social security. Work had offered her family a strong sense of financial stability and security.

Nydia began working at the day care shortly after her father passed away. Like her father, Nydia’s life is structured by work and family. In some ways her life has not changed much since her childhood. She still lives in the cramped railroad apartment where she was born and which she inherited from her parents. Like her dad, her life is centered on her neighborhood. She walks to work every morning and returns home every night to care for her two children. Just like her dad, she is represented by a union at work and sees herself as part of the American working class.

Despite these similarities, what it meant to be working class in the New York of Nydia’s youth and what it means today are dramatically different. Perhaps most dramatically, Nydia is the main breadwinner for her family. Her husband, with only a high school diploma, struggles to find steady work. Dramatic changes in the neighborhood, the city and the overall economy mean that families like hers struggle for a sense of stability and security. The nearby waterfront, once packed with large, industrial employers, where men like Nydia’s dad came to expect jobs for life, is unrecognizable today. Old factory buildings have been demolished or transformed into luxury housing built for a wealthy elite. Income inequality has skyrocketed, undermining the middle class and transforming the experience of work—as well as the rewards associated with it.