Rediscovering Republicanism by John Nantz

Author:John Nantz [Nantz, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780761872337
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Rules-Oriented Cogs”

The traditional expectation of welfare caseworkers was that they would encourage recipients to find work. This view changed in the 1970s as the federal government came to play a dominant role in the nation’s welfare programs and as structuralist assumptions took hold. In this model, caseworkers became little more than dispensers of benefits, required to follow specific, prescriptive rules laid out by federal law. The role now came with detailed sets of rules and forms for every possible issue. The Chicago Tribune reported on what this looked like after shadowing Susan Dilliogold, a Chicago welfare worker in 1976:

More time is spent in the rambling Austin district office on West Madison Street filling out 2077s, 120s, and 93Cs. Mountains of paper forms that put people on welfare, take them off, give them more money, give them less money, replace stolen checks, give food stamps, keep track of their constantly changing addresses, and follow them in and out of hospitals, drug programs, schools, and jobs. . . . The caseworker is the main link between faceless filing cabinets and the welfare recipient. . . . A manual nearly three inches thick tells her how to do it. It tells her how to fill out forms and ask questions. . . . “I signed my name 175 times one day,” Susan reported.15

DeParle summed up the situation: “By the late 1960s, the average caseworker was the equivalent of a postal clerk, a low-paid, rules-oriented cog.” 16

Academics at the time picked up on the attitude change. In 1970, Joel F. Handler, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, and Ellen Hollingsworth, a researcher at the Institute for Research on Poverty, published a study called “Reforming Welfare: The Constraints of the Bureaucracy and the Clients.”17 The academics reported that welfare workers “seemed to lack the commitment demanded by nonuniform administration.” Many workers viewed their positions as “temporary.” Turnover rates were extremely high: clients in the study typically saw the same caseworker only three times before a replacement was assigned. The study reported that “these attitudes foster a lack of individualized administration and minimize the initiative of many caseworkers.”18 However, the attitudes were largely a symptom, not a cause. The role of a “low-paid, rules-oriented cog,” besieged by forms, directly led to the lack of individualized administration and initiative and conveyed an impersonal manner.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the federal government passed additional welfare laws that helped precipitate and exacerbate the impersonal and detached culture of the country’s welfare agencies. Legislation passed throughout those years gave increasing powers to the federal government, with less flexibility and discretion given to the more local state governments. In 1965, the new Medicaid program offered substantial federal funding to the states to offer healthcare benefits for the eligible poor and came with numerous federal rules and stipulations required to take the money.19 Other programs such as welfare had new rules added. Across the board, bureaucracy and complexity increased.

Notably, this increased federal control over the nation’s welfare programs also

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