The Changing Face of Welfare:

A Year-Long Series on the Current State of Public Assistance

Aired March 1, 1999

This is InfoOhio After Nine. I'm David C. Barnett welcoming you to Monday, the first day of March 1999 and the first day of an in-depth examination of Welfare. More specifically, the reform of welfare, the changing face of welfare -- that public assistance program that was instituted in this country in the 1930s and is dramatically changing as we head towards the year 2000 -- as we hurdle towards the year 2000, really. The clock is ticking on a state timetable which says thousands of Ohioans on public assistance have to be working in about a year and a half from now. Between now and then, we here at 90.3 are going to feature a series of stories that will explore the likelihood of that happening. What does it take to find a job for someone who has never been gainfully employed and what is gainful employment? How much money does it really take to say, support a single mother to support herself and a couple of kids? What about training for that job? What about transportation to that job? A car? Public transit? Do the kids need daycare? Is it available and how do they get there? And after our particular person gets that job, what happens do them? Do they keep it and what happens if they don't because of many of the issues we just talked about? Over the next year, we're going to ask those questions and try and get some answers. We begin, though, with a review of the massive changes in entitlement reform. It's changes that have gone through and have happened in just the past two years. 90.3's April Baer reports.

April Baer– Federal welfare reform statutes were passed in 1996 as part of the mammoth federal budget bill. But if you really want to trace the roots of welfare reform, it's best to begin in 1994 - the year Republicans took control of Congress and the Ohio House. Welfare reform was the jewel in the GOP crown. The issue, Republicans hoped, would unite fiscal responsibility with social responsibility. Former State Representative, Ed Casputas says there was feeling in Columbus that Ohio wanted more from its welfare system.

Ed Casputas–The perception I know of my colleagues in the Ohio House was that the safety net had become a safety hammock and that we needed to fine-tune how we help those that come upon tough times, but not create a lifestyle where there would be disincentives for people not trying to have a career.

AB–With one fell swoop, Congress dismantled the two major programs upon which welfare was built: Aid To Families With Dependent Children, which offered cash and food stamps to families, and the training initiative, better known as the Jobs Program. In 1996, Jane Campbell was a Democrat representing Northeast Ohio in the legislature.

Jane Campbell–I think what happened is that there was a real concern on the federal government's part that they have the political victory, to say we passed welfare reform. Because basically what the federal government did is said we're passing welfare reform, we're giving it back to the states - five-year time limit.

AB–Campbell, now a Cuyahoga County Commissioner, says at the time the federal mandates came down there was a lot of pressure on the state to live up to the new standards. Congress had rebuilt welfare in the form of temporary assistance for needy families or the TANFT program. Under the new law, recipients now have a five-year limit to benefits and must participate in some work activity after two years on welfare. But overall the states are given considerable freedom to use block grants to set up other goals within the welfare system. Sue Pearlmutter is an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University who specializes in welfare issues. She notes that Ohio made some interesting decisions in crafting a plan that actually stipulates tougher work requirements than are called for by the federal government.

Sue Pearlmutter– Many governors, like Governor Voinovich, where worried about the rate of participation based upon the rate of participation from the previous welfare program - the JOBS program. I think the decision was made here to go above and beyond the federal mandates to assure that Ohio would not lose any money down the road.

AB–But Perlmutter points out that although the state set the work requirements, its up to Ohio's 88 counties to implement the plan. Commissioner Jane Campbell puts it another way.

JC–What the state of Ohio did is said, we're passing welfare reform, and five years is too long. In the state of Ohio, you only need three years to get off of welfare. The counties can figure out how to make this happen. So we're the end of the food chain.

AB–Commissioner Campbell remains optimistic that Cuyahoga and other counties can find success by taking care of the factors the county has control over and by keeping close watch over those it can't predict.

JC–Right now the economy is very strong. We pray daily that the economy stays strong because to try to do welfare reform in a recession economy is a prescription for disaster. The second thing is that we have to make sure that we provide support for families that are working because even when they go to work, there still is need for childcare assistance, ongoing healthcare assistance. The stronger people are connected to those supportive services, the more likely they are to be successful in the labor force.

AB–Sue Pearlmutter concurs that basic services from transportation to babysitting will be crucial in helping people support themselves. But she worries that many families on the rolls have become fragile because of substance abuse and mental health problems. Also, she predicts it's going to be tough finding the kind of jobs welfare recipients need.

SP–New entry-level jobs that are available to people with few skills are going to have to be the priority and that means doing job development or getting somebody else to do job development and I haven't seen that really happening. In the first place, there are just not enough jobs and in the second place, even those jobs that there are, are not readily accessible to people.

AB–During 1998, Cuyahoga County was able to move 11,000 people off the rolls. As of October, over 21,000 are still looking for work. For InfoOhio, I'm April Baer in Cleveland.

David C. Barnett–Writer Linda Gordon says that the word "welfare", once associated with "prosperity", "good health" and "well-being", today connotes "poverty", "bad health" and a philosophy of "fatalism". Linda Gordon is the author of the book "Pitied, But Not Entitled" and she will be in Cleveland tomorrow to address a Case Western Reserve University forum with her topic, "How Welfare Became A Dirty Word". Good morning, Professor Gordon.

Linda Gordon–Good morning.

DCB–Was the notion of public assistance, which we now call welfare, received well when it was first introduced back in the 30s?

LG–Extremely well. Something that is a very odd irony is that welfare, which as not many people know is part of the Social Security Act. The program that we call welfare was actually the only uncontroversial part of the Social Security Act. People fought like the very dickens over the principals of unemployment compensation and old age pensions. The particularly hated the idea of old age pensions because they thought that what that was doing was removing from children, the obligation to support their parents.

DCB–And was the system initially well-run?

LG–Well, it had an entirely different conception and I think that is why we are in the mess we're in today. When what we call welfare, which was the program, called Aid to Families With Dependent Children, when it was created, it's whole entire purpose was to keep mothers out of the labor force. There was a very broad consensus in the United States at this time that mothers of school-age children did not belong in the labor force but should be home full time. And if they didn't have husbands who could support them to do that, then the public needed to accept responsibility for providing those children with what people believed children needed. But what happened is that a law that was designed for that purpose naturally became completely illogical, irrational and contradictory as the world changed and as mothers went increasingly, rapidly into the labor market over the decades.

DCB–So was this a slow change or did it happen within any particular decade?

LG–It was a slow change until really the 1960s, 1970s because this was the period when you really began to get very well organized, well-funded conservative campaigns against welfare which culminated in the early 1990s. The other part of the change is that welfare was designed in a period in which this was still a completely segregated and completely racist country and another of the ironies is that when welfare was first established in 1935 it was designed so as to exclude almost all people of color in the United States in the first, say, five years of welfare at the end of the 1930s, it was pretty much a lily-white program.

DCB–Really?

LG–And what happened is that in the 1950s and 60s as part of the civil rights movement when particularly African-Americans started challenging these exclusions and saying we have a right to these welfare benefits too, that the program begin to change very rapidly and to become stigmatized in part because of that change in the color of the faces of the people on welfare.

DCB–Now in your book you argue that a whole lot of people benefit from public assistance in our country these days. Give us some examples.

LG–Well, of all of the monies that the federal government spends to support its citizens, 23% of those monies go to poor people. Meaning that, what is it - 77% - go to people who are not poor. This is one of the central parts of what I mean by saying how welfare became a dirty word. What has happened is through a gradual process, which has a lot to do with language that people stigmatize programs that give poor people some of other people's tax money. But they don't stigmatize the kind of either huge corporate benefits. Just one example, in one of the most recent minimum wage bills, attached to that bill is riders for $21.4 billion of corporate subsidiaries. These are the things we don't notice. Or take one other example to show you what I mean. Today the average elderly recipient of a social security old age pension - that person receives five to six times more of other people's tax money than does the average mother who was collecting AFDC. And yet we don't have that kind of discussion in which people worry about social security recipients as being parasites who are taking other people's money.

DCB–Now for the million-dollar question in a minute, if you can. How do we change the perceptions that you describe? How do we make it so that it isn't pitied, but not entitled? How do we make sure that welfare is not a dirty word?

LG–I think we need to understand, I think a good starting place is to understand the consequences of the welfare repeal in 1996. The problem is not that mothers should not be working. I think there is a consensus that many mothers of younger children who have to work. The problem is that by and large, as even Business Week has reported, that people who are going off welfare into jobs are ending up worse off. Their children are poorer. They have poorer medical care, poorer nutrition. What we need to do is to think about how to make work pay. How to arrange things so that a parent who is willing to put in a substantial number of hours of work can in fact earn enough and have the supports necessary to raise their children properly. And this is something that cannot be done by the states. The states do not have the tax base to take on this kind of responsibility. It's going to have to be federal responsibility.

DCB–Linda Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and has written extensively about women's issues and women's history. Her book is "Pitied, But Not Entitled". She will be talking about that book with an address called "How Welfare Became A Dirty Word" at a forum tomorrow at Case Western Reserve University. Thanks for joining us Professor Gordon.

LG–Thank you.