Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine
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