Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market - Softcover

Collins, Jane L.; Mayer, Victoria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226114066 ISBN 13: 9780226114064

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Both Hands Tied studies the working poor in the United States, focusing in particular on the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers. Grounded in the experience of thirty-three women living in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, it tells the story of their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying and often state-funded jobs with inflexible schedules—and the moments when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid.

Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer here examine the situations of these women in light of the 1996 national Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other like-minded reforms—laws that ended the entitlement to welfare for those in need and provided an incentive for them to return to work. Arguing that this reform came at a time of gendered change in the labor force and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state, Both Hands Tied provides a stark but poignant portrait of how welfare reform afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants’ economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jane L. Collins is the Evjue Bascom Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology and Gender and Women&;s Studies at the University of Wisconsin&;Madison and the author of Threads: Gender, Labor and Power in the Global Apparel Industry, among other titles. Victoria Mayer is assistant professor of sociology at Colby College.

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Both Hands Tied

WELFARE REFORM AND THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM IN THE LOW-WAGE LABOR MARKETBy JANE L. COLLINS VICTORIA MAYER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2010 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-11406-4

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................viAcknowledgments...............................................................................viiPreface.......................................................................................ix1 Introduction: The Connection between Welfare and Work.......................................12 Welfare Reform's Context: The Growth of the Low-Wage Service Sector.........................263 Welfare Reform's Content: Building Connections between Work and Welfare.....................554 Tying the First Hand: The Solitary Wage Bargain.............................................835 Tying the Second Hand: Challenges to Economic Citizenship...................................1146 Both Hands Tied: The Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market........................1477 Conclusion: Untying the Hands...............................................................159APPENDIX A. Description of Interview Process..................................................165APPENDIX B. Interview Protocol................................................................167APPENDIX C. Economic Composition of Sample....................................................174APPENDIX D. Industrial Composition of Milwaukee and Racine....................................175APPENDIX E. Wisconsin Works (W-2) Documents...................................................177Notes.........................................................................................179References....................................................................................201Index.........................................................................................215

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WELFARE AND WORK

Low-wage work apparently must be mandated, just as a draft has sometimes been necessary to staff the military. LAWRENCE MEAD, BEYOND ENTITLEMENT

If I were President ... I'd start paying women a living wage for doing the work we are already doing-child raising and housekeeping. And the welfare crisis would be over. Just like that. JOHNNIE TILLMON, NATIONAL WELFARE RIGHTS ORGANIZATION

PUTTING WELFARE REFORM IN ITS CONTEXT

Walking from Walnut Street to Capitol Avenue on Milwaukee's near north side on a weekday afternoon, one is struck by the absence of adults in the neighborhood. Teenage boys work on cars and talk on cell phones, and teenage girls walk their little brothers and sisters home from school. An occasional grandmother supervises kids at yard work. But there are no working-age adults in sight. Brightly painted day care centers tucked between grocery shops and storefront churches provide a clue to their whereabouts. "First and second shift," the signs announce. "Six a.m. to midnight. Four weeks to 2 years. Free transportation available." With names like Pristine Child Care, the Early Childhood Academy, and Imagination Station, the centers offer upbeat slogans: "Where young minds possess a bright future" or "Where faith and learning come together to build strong families." They also speak to the end of welfare and the widespread movement of the neighborhood's mothers into work.

The year 996 marked a sea change in our nation's system of welfare provision. In that year, the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—a law that ended the statutory entitlement to welfare for people in need and tied benefits, for those who continued to rely on them, to work. A year later, state officials in Wisconsin implemented their own vehicle for the new policies, known as Wisconsin Works, or W-2. Many who promoted these reforms held them to be a step toward fiscal responsibility; others considered them morally necessary to restore self-reliance and personal accountability, values that they perceived to have eroded among the poor. But welfare reform was intimately connected to gendered changes in labor force participation and to profound underlying shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state. The reforms were tied to the movement of women out of the home and into the workforce in unprecedented numbers, the growth of a racially and gender-segregated service sector that depended heavily on women's labor, and the withdrawal of corporations and government from the business of providing a safety net for workers. These trends have generated new forms of economic insecurity that are felt by most wage-dependent American households. This book documents how welfare reform has intersected with such changes for poor, single-parent families, eroding their social rights in ways that affect their ability to care for their members and undermining their civil rights and labor protections.

The chapters that follow recount the experiences of a number of women living and working in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, in 2004. These women had all relied on welfare at some point in 2003, but most had also worked a great deal over the past few years. All were mothers of young children. Our book tells the story of their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paid jobs with inflexible schedules, and the moments when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for aid. We write about these experiences not just to provide a window into the harsh reality of conditions at the low end of the labor market. There are numerous books by journalists and social scientists that document these conditions eloquently and effectively. Rather, we place these women's accounts in the context of two profound institutional shifts: first, the growth of the low-wage service sector and its particular productivity and profitability challenges, and second, the erosion of the bargains between workers and employers, on one hand, and citizens and government, on the other, that led to the end of the "family wage system" that stabilized working-class life in the twentieth century. We show how new political rationalities based on free market principles enabled these shifts. Perhaps most importantly, we document how changes in the institutions of welfare and work came together to produce patterned challenges for the women we interviewed.

Even a casual conversation with women working in low-wage jobs reveals how tightly work and welfare are interwoven. As forty-three-year-old Ebony Walker told us:

My very first job—I was sixteen. And I worked for Burger King. I can sing the Burger King song—that's what got me hired. After that it was school bus, modeling, factory ... not counting factory, I'd say I've had about twenty-five different jobs over the years.

Between many of Ebony's jobs were episodes on welfare, occasioned by illness, injury, and childbirth. As we shall see, the kinds of jobs in which she worked did not provide workers' compensation, maternity leave, or even sick leave, and welfare was the lifeline that allowed her to feed herself and her family as she recovered and regrouped. For women like Ebony, it was a source of support that, while punitive and insufficient, allowed them to deal with the inadequacies of jobs in the low-wage labor market and the absence of other, less stigmatized forms of assistance.

Consider the case of Natasha Castinelli, a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226114066
• ISBN 13: 9780226114064
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 239
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar