Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine
will truly change the lives of low-income mothers and their children.
These women’s distrust appeared to arise from several sources. They learned it through direct experience with those who prove untrustworthy. Experiences with one caseworker, boss, or romantic partner taught them that others were not reliable, and they then carried over that distrust to new caseworkers, bosses, and boyfriends. They absorbed wariness from others in their community whose experiences taught them to be suspicious of the motives and reliability of various actors and institutions. They used distrust as armor to preemptively protect themselves from those who might disappoint or mistreat them.
In all of these situations, the women’s subordinate position in contexts such as the welfare office and the low-wage workplace—and even sometimes romantic relationships marked by violence or intimidation—was likely to be at the root of their distrust. This structural position brought with it a degree of powerlessness. Relative powerlessness vis-à-vis those around them made the women vulnerable to mistreatment by those who did not share their interests.
The women’s limited power also left them with few tools in their arsenals, other than distrust, with which to confront the indignities of their position. Others might be in control, but the women retained the power to withhold trust. Without deep changes—much deeper ones than those offered by welfare reform—that would actually alter their relative position of power in interactions or at least provide some guarantee that others would share their interests or would reliably make good on promises, distrust and the barriers to action it creates would prevail.
The women I interviewed were not only in a disadvantaged position in welfare offices, workplaces, and similar local contexts, they were also at the bottom of the hierarchy in U.S. society more broadly. Most notably, they were at the very bottom of the income distribution. In 2005, during my second round of interviews, a single mother of two children in Illinois with no other income than welfare received $4,752 in income for the entire year, unless of course she did not manage to retain benefits for the whole year, in which case she received less. If instead of receiving welfare she worked for minimum wage, which was $5.15 in 2005, she would still make only $10,712. And that would be if she worked forty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, without missing a single day. The poverty line for a family with one adult and two children in 2005 was $15,735. Thus the welfare recipient’s income was less than a third of those living at the poverty line figure, and even a full-time minimum-wage worker’s income was only about two-thirds of the poverty line amount.19
Many of the women I interviewed faced other disadvantages in addition to low income that relegated them to the bottom of the U.S. stratification system. They lived in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty with high crime rates. Their children attended low-performing schools, much like the ones they themselves had attended. Often the men in their lives were incarcerated. They did not have the political voice to sway politicians to address their concerns. The women’s disadvantage and relative powerlessness were thus twofold: they were in subordinate positions both in several of the contexts I studied and in U.S. society at large. These positions of subordination fed their suspicion that others did not share their interests and that it was up to them to protect themselves.
AIN’T NO TRUST’s MAIN FINDINGS AND ARGUMENT
The study documents that most of the low-income mothers interviewed experienced feelings of distrust. This distrust surfaced, not in just one setting, but in all of the arenas studied: welfare offices, workplaces, child care markets, romantic unions, and social networks. The presence and nature of distrust did not change across the two time periods studied. Distrust inhibited the actions of the women during both the pre- and post-welfare reform time periods. Most notably, it often kept women from taking the very actions that welfare reform was designed to promote. These four findings—most mothers experienced distrust, mothers experienced distrust across multiple arenas, distrust did not change across the time periods, and distrust inhibited action at both time periods, even those actions welfare reformers intended to promote—are the main findings of this book.
On the basis of these findings, Ain’t No Trust argues that welfare reform’s effects would have been larger if distrust had not limited women’s response to the incentives that reform created. Other researchers, discussed further in chapter 1, have indeed found that despite the impact of welfare reform, it fell short of achieving all its intended effects and did not universally improve the lives of low-income families.20 Indeed, the stories told by the women interviewed for this study support these findings in that they talked about having nearly identical problems whether they were interviewed before or after welfare. The daily struggles of low-income mothers’ lives sounded no different across time periods.
Welfare reform did not attempt to reduce distrust. It did not address any of the elements that produce distrust in the five settings this book investigates. As scholarship described in chapter 1 shows, it did not change the incentives for caseworkers, working conditions in low-wage jobs, the supply of high-quality child care, the opportunities for low-income men, or the resources to communities in which the members of women’s social networks live.21 These are “structural” elements of the five settings. It also did not change the fact that low-income mothers, especially single mothers, still occupy a disadvantaged position in the U.S. social structure at large. For instance, single-mother families have the highest poverty rate of all family types in America.22 William Julius Wilson defines social structure as “the way social positions, social roles, and networks of social relationships are arranged in our institutions, such as the economy, polity, education, and organization of the family.”23 These patterned arrangements affect both the relationships people have with each other and the opportunities (or barriers to opportunity) people have.
The research is based on a study of low-income women and hence does not directly study these structural factors themselves.24 But we know from the studies discussed in chapter 1 that welfare reform did not make changes in these structural factors. We can see the women reacting to these factors in their reports of why they distrust. As they detail events, we see that the women learn to distrust through direct experience. They learn to distrust because they interact with people they deem untrustworthy. The women report that these people can be unreliable, abusive, unsafe, disrespectful, or destructive in other ways. This perceived untrustworthiness in turn relates to the structural factors that welfare reform left in place. For instance, some mothers share Bethany’s claim that caseworkers cut them off from benefits to which they are entitled. This complaint relates to a structural element of the welfare office: in both time periods, caseworkers have been strongly encouraged to reduce the size of their caseloads and have not been penalized for making bureaucratic errors that cut benefits to eligible recipients.25 It is true that at times some mothers appear to enter into interactions already distrusting. But this preemptive distrust is still structurally undergirded by either the women’s past experiences or their knowledge of others’ experiences.
This book is about the prevalence of distrust in low-income communities. Women of different races, ethnicities, ages, educational levels, and employment histories and from different time periods all report high levels of distrust. The book is about how distrust guides behavior. It is about the costs of learning to distrust the hard way: by placing trust in those who prove untrustworthy. In short, Ain’t No Trust argues that we cannot understand life in poverty without attention to the production and consequences of distrust.
The book uses the case of welfare reform to illustrate the role of distrust in low-income life and to highlight the persistence of distrust when the structural factors that produce it do not change. And by using the case of a policy reform, the book also shows that policies that do not attend to the structures that produce distrust may be able to achieve certain effects but that these effects will be limited in scope.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO TRUST, POVERTY, AND SOCIAL POLICY RESEARCH
The findings in this book contribute to several different literatures. Overall, they suggest that these literatures should incorporate the lessons learned by each other. In this section, I discuss each of these literatures in turn.
Ain’t No Trust argues that the literatures on poverty and social policy would benefit from paying more attention to the literature on trust. The trust literature