The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
at the end of the twentieth century.
Many and various factors contributed to workfare’s ascendance. Institutional arrangements strengthened the hand of workfare advocates and weakened the position of welfarists.17 Public backlash against welfare curtailed the scope of debate.18 Organized economic interests weighed in at important points, including business leaders who saw advantages in expanding workfare over welfare.19 Southern leaders, in short, did not engineer this change by themselves. But they were positioned to powerfully influence the direction of social policy at key junctures. And they repeatedly used the opportunities presented to them—including shifting institutional advantages, changes in the national political balance of power, and heightened public opposition to welfare—to advance a workfare agenda.
My third claim addresses the paradox of imposing workfare on poor families in the context of a declining low-wage labor market. I argue that workfare reversed the logic of income security for poor families inscribed in the New Deal welfare state. Rather than shielding families from the market’s vagaries, its effort to promote, require, and reward work tied assistance to jobs in an unstable labor market. What made this shift so consequential was not primarily the move to encourage employment. It was the fact that workfare policies were imposed in the context of sweeping economic changes that made low-wage work an increasingly unreliable path from poverty to economic security.
Conceptions of work within U.S. social policy were also changing in these years. Work has always held a vaunted role in American political culture, and this has shaped policies toward poor families since the nation’s founding. Expectations about what work should provide, however, have varied over time. Debates over workfare have embodied deeper political and ideological contests over work as a moral imperative, a social obligation, and a source of economic security.20 Since the New Deal, federal policies (from the Fair Labor Standards Act to the Social Security Act) affirmed the notion not only that work was a social obligation but also that a job should deliver a basic livelihood. Wage and workplace regulations and job-based social protections sought to ensure workers a measure of security in a volatile market. Yet the principle that government should define and enforce minimum job standards was always contested and unevenly applied.21 And from the New Deal through the 1990s, the battle lines over work and welfare were drawn and redrawn in a political struggle over the appropriate roles of markets and government in providing income security for poor families. The conflicts were not simply over work requirements for poor mothers in the AFDC program. More fundamentally, they engaged questions of who should be expected to work, when, and under what terms; what counts as work and whose work counts; what low-wage jobs can be expected to deliver; and what government owes the most vulnerable Americans when markets fail. The triumph of workfare required a retreat from the New Deal’s more ambitious responses to these questions.
This argument challenges much of the standard account of modern public assistance.22 According to the conventional story, New Deal and Great Society Democrats promoted and expanded federal assistance from the 1930s through the 1960s. After the 1980 election, the tide turned. Conservative Republicans—led first by Ronald Reagan and later by Newt Gingrich—pursued an agenda of retrenchment and rollback, through budget cuts, eligibility restrictions, and escalating work requirements. Their efforts culminated in the dismantlement of the core New Deal welfare program for poor families, AFDC, in 1996. Although they did not achieve all they wanted, they ushered in a conservative era in welfare politics. Embedded in this familiar story is an unambiguous account of “who did what when”: liberal Democrats led expansions of the welfare state until 1980, with their most ambitious visions thwarted by the conservative coalition in Congress; Republicans then brought contraction and retrenchment, backed by conservative Democrats and ultimately the Clinton White House.
Yet neither the cast of leading characters nor the timing of events in the conventional account is quite accurate. The decisive struggles took place not between the parties, but within the Democratic Party: the conflict ran between those seeking to expand or defend the New Deal welfarist vision of public assistance and those advocating a contending workfare approach, most prominent among Southerners. The turning point toward modern workfare was not the 1980s, but the late 1960s and 1970s, as Chapters 1 and 2 explain. And although there were many forces pressing for work-based reform, the central architects of the initial shift were not Republican advocates of retrenchment, but conservative Southern Democrats in Congress who sought to redefine the purposes of public assistance in ways that preserved the political, economic, and racial order of the South.23
The 1970s thus brought a decisive but largely unrecognized phase of conservative welfare state building, described in Chapter 3. Although expansionary, it marked a turn away from New Deal–style income supports toward programs to formally promote and enforce work. Southern leaders quietly passed federal initiatives to require work from the welfare poor (who received AFDC), to provide welfare to the working poor (through creating the EITC, the Earned Income Tax Credit), and to exempt from work only those unable to earn wages due to old age or disability (through creating SSI, Supplemental Security Income). The outcome of these new work-based approaches to public assistance would be determined not only in the policy realm but also in the context of a changing labor market, as Chapter 4 argues.
When conservative Republicans brought an agenda of welfare retrenchment and labor market deregulation to the White House in the 1980s, the work of these Southern Democrats paved the way, enabling Republican leaders to build new coalitions and compromises. Conservative Republicans were able to leverage earlier Democratic agreements on work and welfare to restrict and weaken AFDC and to fend off more fundamental labor market reform, as Chapter 5 demonstrates. Pressure for conservative reform in the 1980s and 1990s came, once again, from many sources, yet Southern Democrats played a pivotal role.
The final act in the turn to workfare, examined in Chapters 6 and 7, was orchestrated by a new centrist cohort of Southern Democrats in the White House and Congress in the 1990s. Led by Bill Clinton, these Southern centrists forged compromises with Southern conservative Republicans in Congress to rewrite the terms of public assistance for both the welfare poor and the working poor. The core political conflicts and alignments on work and welfare were thus defined well before the Republican ascendance in the 1980s. The new political settlement that emerged in the mid-1990s—embodied in a major expansion in the EITC and the demise of AFDC—was constructed on the groundwork, and largely on the terms, established by leading Southern Democrats beginning in the 1970s.
Quietly replacing the New Deal political settlement on federal income support for the poor, workfare has governed policy and politics ever since. Shifts in party control of Congress and the White House have tested the durability of the workfare settlement under a wide range of political configurations. The years from Clinton’s reelection to Barack Obama’s second term also tested the effectiveness of the work-conditioned safety net under some of the best of economic times (the late 1990s) and the worst of times (the late 2000s) in the postwar era. Workfare, the evidence suggests, often functioned best in the years of robust economic growth and worst in years of downturn and economic hardship. This turbulent period nonetheless saw the consolidation of workfare as the dominant approach to public assistance for poor families, as Chapter 8 demonstrates.
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There are many ways to study the politics of work and welfare. This book draws on scholarship addressing the political and institutional origins of social policy, and on studies of post-1970s economic and labor market transformations.24 Too often, these scholarly conversations are conducted separately, even as the effects of social policy and labor market conditions become increasingly reciprocal.25 In addition to grounding an account of public policy development in its labor market context, this book