The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
Representative Joel Broyhill of Virginia drew the line in the sand, telling reporters: “I will insist that no one receive any assistance through the welfare program who is physically able to do work but refuses to do so. I don’t want any provision limiting the requirement to ‘suitable’ employment. Any type of work should be considered suitable or reasonable to a person seeking public assistance.”31
The Southern contingent lost a battle, however, when the Nixon administration reworked the original FAP bill (after it died in the Senate in 1970) and reintroduced it as H.R. 1 in 1971. The original bill had stipulated that FAP recipients could be assigned to any job paying the “prevailing wage” and permitted states to administer the program. This provided latitude to Southern administrators seeking to preserve the existing hierarchies in the region’s labor market, where the “prevailing wage” for domestic work in Mississippi was $4 a day.32 But in an appeal to labor and Northern liberals, the revised bill mandated federal rather than state administration and asserted that family breadwinners had the right to reject any job paying less than $1.20 an hour (the federal minimum was $1.60 at the time).33 These income levels would significantly force wages up throughout the rural South, which had the lowest average hourly earnings ($1.08) in the nation.34 FAP would provide a federal income to a poor family, even if a parent rejected many of the jobs then available—unless local employers boosted wages for farmhands, dishwashers, domestics, and other positions not covered by the federal minimum wage, to reach the FAP minimum of $1.20.35
Table 3.1 House Votes on Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, 1970 and 1971
Source: Author’s calculations based on vote totals reported in Congressional Quarterly Almanac 26 (1970): 16H; and Congressional Quarterly Almanac 27 (1971): 35H.
Note: On the two key FAP-related votes in the House, Northern Democrats were overwhelmingly in favor, Southern Democrats were overwhelmingly opposed, and Republicans were split. The first vote was on final passage of H.R. 16311, which passed 243–155 on April 16, 1970. The second vote was on a motion by Representative Al Ullman (D-Ore.) to delete the FAP provisions from the 1971 Social Security Amendments (H.R. 1). The Ullman motion was rejected 187–234 on June 22, 1971.
Despite numerous attempts by the Nixon administration to address Southerners’ concerns, opposition remained strong. On the two direct votes on FAP in the House, Southern Democrats voted against the plan by large margins, with 81 and 70 percent opposed. Northern Democrats were 86 and 72 percent in favor; Republicans were nearly evenly split. In the Senate, the pattern was similar, though there were no direct up-or-down votes on the measure: on FAP-related votes, over 90 percent of Southern Senate Democrats cast votes that opposed the measure.36
Table 3.2 Senate Votes on Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, 1972
Source: Calculations based on vote totals reported in Congressional Quarterly Almanac 28 (1972): 72S–73S.
Note: Key Senate votes on FAP in 1972 reflected divisions between Northern and Southern Democrats, and the fact that Southern Democrats often held the balance of votes in the Senate. The first vote was on a motion by Senator Long (D-La.) to table (kill) Senator Ribicoff’s (D-Conn.) liberal version of FAP; the vote to table passed 52–34 on October 3, 1972. The second was on a Long motion to table a Ribicoff amendment to remove workfare provisions from a Social Security bill passed by the Finance Committee. Long’s motion passed 44–41 on October 4, 1972. The third vote was on a motion by Senator Roth (R-Del.) to pilot-test competing welfare reform proposals rather than enact FAP or other alternatives; the motion passed 46–41 on October 4, 1972.
Only a small percentage of Southern members of the president’s own party, meanwhile, was willing to support him. Cast largely out of party loyalty, these Republican votes were costly to party stalwarts such as Representative George H. W. Bush of Texas, who made a bid for a Senate seat in the November 1970 election—and lost. True to the Southern Democratic position, his opponent Lloyd Bentsen produced ads that criticized Bush’s pro-FAP vote and the prospect of “14 million more on welfare,” and described a vote for Bentsen as a “vote against big welfare” and higher taxes.37 President Nixon wrote to Bush in late October: “I understand that you have been attacked by your opponent for your support of the Family Assistance Plan on the grounds that it is a ‘guaranteed annual income.’ This is a very serious misinterpretation of the goals of our plan.”38
But, of course, it was not a serious misinterpretation, and Southern leaders knew it. Many feared, in short, “that FAP’s guaranteed income would shrink the supply of cheap labor, bankrupt marginal industry, boost the cost of locally produced goods and services, increase taxes, and put more blacks into political office,” concluded journalists Vince and Vee Burke in their 1974 study of FAP.39 Little wonder, with these perceived stakes for his region, that Senator Long waged a pitched battle against FAP from his pivotal position as chair of the Finance Committee. FAP, he said with no trace of irony, made him “tremble in fear for the fate of this Republic.”40
As it became clear that FAP was not simply going to go away after its initial setbacks, however, opponents realized that they needed to counter with their own alternative proposals. The twin commitments to defeating FAP and defending Southern political and economic arrangements created a powerful incentive to craft conservative—if expansionary—reforms.
Building Workfare Through Piecemeal Policymaking
Beginning in 1971, with the nation riveted on the legislative battle over the Nixon proposal, conservative Southern leaders in Congress began quietly passing legislation that would usher in a new era in public assistance. The three legislative initiatives shared several features. Each reflected elements of the conservative vision and regional interests of key Southern leaders. And each helped redefine the terms of public assistance for a distinct category of poor Americans. The Talmadge amendments targeted current welfare recipients, many of whom, in the view of conservative workfarists, were poor because they would not work. SSI restructured assistance for elderly and disabled adults, whom conservatives believed were poor because they could not work. And the EITC extended aid to families who, conservatives recognized, were poor even though they were working. In altering the terms of assistance, each of the initiatives advanced the core premises of workfarist public assistance—namely, require work from single mothers on AFDC, exempt from work only those too old or infirm to earn wages, and reward work among low-wage workers. Ultimately, each of the initiatives would facilitate compromises and coalitions in the 1980s and 1990s that helped erode and then dismantle the core wel-farist entitlement for poor families.
The first move was made by Democratic Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia. It took aim at the welfare poor, and in particular, at AFDC recipients. Under the New Deal model of public assistance, federal policy considered these recipients poor because caregiving obligations made them unable to work at sufficient levels to support their families.41 Beginning with the push by Wilbur Mills to add a new federal work mandate to AFDC through the initial 1967 WIN amendments, conservative reformers began to assert, instead, that these recipients were too often simply unwilling to work, and therefore should be evaluated for referral to state work programs.
Talmadge was one of the harshest congressional critics of FAP. He shared the concerns of other Southerners about the sheer numbers that would be brought into the system of federal cash assistance under the plan.42 And he believed that FAP did far too little to require work of all who were able. In hearings before the Senate Finance Committee in the spring of 1970, Talmadge grilled HEW Secretary Robert Finch and Undersecretary John Veneman.43 He concluded that in many parts of Georgia, “we might have over half the people in individual counties on welfare.”44 Under Talmadge’s questioning, Veneman acknowledged the low cash penalty a FAP family would pay if a family head refused work, confirming conservatives’ worst fears about FAP.45
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