Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine
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