When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

Author:William Julius Wilson [Wilson, William Julius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In order to counter some of the stereotypes about welfare receipt that form part of the dominant American belief system, liberals have frequently emphasized that only a minority of the total number of AFDC recipients are African-American. This is true. But it actually plays into the hands of conservatives to ignore the fact that the percentage of AFDC recipients who were African-American (39.2 percent) in 1995 was roughly equal to the percentage who were non-Hispanic white (39.9 percent), despite the fact that blacks make up only 12.4 percent of the nation’s population. Instead of masking such statistics, the best way to defeat the stereotypes about welfare is to emphasize the hard realities of the inner-city ghetto and the larger society that give rise to welfare receipt. This would more effectively challenge some of the underlying assumptions that have led to calls for welfare reform, especially those that put forth draconian measures either to cut benefits severely or to end them altogether.

In the mid-1990s, two drastically opposed approaches to the issue of welfare reform came to the fore. One recognizes that although welfare is not the major cause of urban social dislocations, efforts should be made to facilitate the transition from welfare to work for several reasons: Welfare recipients prefer work over welfare and would readily accept jobs that will not result in their slipping deeper into poverty; not working has certain debilitating effects on individuals and on family life over time; and children are worse off if they are widely exposed to an environment where few or no people work. Accordingly, welfare reform should not be undertaken in isolation. It should be tied to efforts to create jobs for the disadvantaged. Welfare reform should also be conjoined with programs to establish universal health insurance so that public aid recipients who want to “go out there and get a job” do not face the dilemma posed by a Chicago welfare mother: “I don’t like being on public aid right now. But without a medical card, what do I do when my kids get sick?”

Accordingly, advocates of this approach, which involves the assumption that welfare mothers prefer work over welfare, are likely to support enthusiastically those aspects of social reform that are designed to “make work pay,” principally through the expansion of the earned income tax credit, the creation of universal health insurance, the development of child care programs, and the establishment of child support provisions to ensure contributions from absent parents.

All of these subsidies and benefits designed to make low-wage work pay were originally incorporated into the initial proposals discussed by President Clinton and his advisers in 1993. Welfare reform was thus part of a more comprehensive agenda of social reform. It was argued that to ease the transition from welfare to work it is not only necessary to help local government create public-sector jobs when private-sector jobs are lacking and to turn welfare offices into “transitional” centers for training and job placement, it is also important to have in place universal health insurance to make any kind of welfare reform program viable.

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