The Human Crisis of Welfare Reform

This statement was approved by the AFSC Board of Directors, Feb. 21, 1998

Today, at a time when the US economy is booming for some people, and the well-to-do are gaining ever more wealth and income, this country has adopted policies that abandon the war on poverty, efforts toward equality of economic access, and greater diversity in all sectors of the workforce. These policies amount to abdication of the fundamental role of government "to promote the general welfare" as mandated by the US Constitution. As a people, we have yet to learn that the general welfare is our common welfare. In fact, the term "welfare" is stigmatized and scorned.

This trend in US policy is sharply expressed in the 1996 "welfare reform," the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replaced it with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The previous system had serious problems, but the new law creates a system that does not address these problems, and does not support the goals its title suggests.

This legislation is covertly but profoundly racist and sexist, based on stereotyped images of people who receive means-tested government benefits and hostility toward immigrants and refugees, who are singled out for exclusion from access to public benefits. The congressional debate showed supporters blaming poor women for their poverty and willing to punish them and their children.

The legislation worsens the destructive effects of a global economy that drives wages of low wage workers ever lower. By forcing more than a million mostly unskilled people into an overcrowded low-wage labor market, it will drive wage levels down and increase the gap between women’s and men’s wages.

It does not provide adequately for the care of children whose mothers must work outside the home. At the same time it denies the value of the work of parenting. It makes little provision for addressing individual barriers to employment, such as domestic violence or illiteracy.

In an increasingly technical job market, it makes no provision for education and training for jobs that offer decent pay. In fact, it forces welfare recipients to abandon college and other education programs that would qualify them for jobs that would provide adequately for their families. It establishes "workfare" programs in which people who cannot find private sector jobs must work off their benefits at minimum or subminimum wages.

Protection of workfare participants by labor laws and civil rights laws that protect all other workers is, at best, unclear. In most states, there is no protection against displacement of other workers. Workfare constitutes an attack on the sector of unionized municipal workers and rolls back gains in setting wage and professional standards for skilled and social service workers, sectors that have been crucial entry points for people for color.

AFSC’s views are profoundly at odds with the policies exemplified by this welfare legislation. AFSC’s faith that there is that of God in every person leads us to support efforts for economic and social justice and to recognize economic rights as human rights.

Nonprofit organizations and faith communities have a role to play in assisting the poor to meet their needs and assert their rights, but government at all levels has an essential responsibility to assure economic security. The federal government has an affirmative responsibility to assure that basic economic rights are met. We reaffirm the AFSC statement of 1984, which said:

We urge the US government to adopt an approach that recognizes the basic economic human rights, including the right to a job, income, shelter, health care, education and a decent environment. Such an approach should include a national income maintenance policy to assure all persons an adequate standard of living; an employment policy which makes available jobs, training, quality child care and other support services and which creates jobs that fill the multiplicity of unmet needs in our society; effective enforcement of affirmative action laws; protection of the right of all workers to organize and bargain collectively.

The 1996 welfare reform legislation threatens a crisis that will be evidenced in increasing hunger, homelessness, and poverty and in fissures in the solidarity of poor communities.

We call upon our allies in the religious, women’s, civil and human rights, labor, and human service organizations to join in a challenge to this looming crisis, with these goals:

• Creation of public and private jobs at a livable wage, with health benefits, occupational health and safety coverage, and anti-discrimination protections. At the same time we must not assume that everyone should be seeking work outside the home.
• Assurance that all workers, including workfare workers, have the right to organize and bargain collectively.
• Documentation of the situation of people who leave the welfare rolls, in order to determine whether they have found jobs, have been able to keep the jobs, and have moved out of poverty.
• Availability of quality affordable (or free) and accessible child care and elder care, as needed. The workforce of child care workers must receive livable wages and employment benefits.
• Assurance of health benefits as needed, including Supplemental Security Income (SSI) coverage for children with disabilities.
• Provision of transportation to work sites and child care sites.
• Availability of education at all levels, from literacy to post-secondary.
• Establishment and enforcement of effective worker anti-displacement rules to assure that current workers are not fired and replaced by welfare recipients.
• Government encouragement and support of community economic development.
• Maintenance of a true safety net for those who work in the home caring for children or elderly or disabled family members, or for whom no jobs are available. The safety net must include food assistance, health care, decent affordable housing, and adequate income.
• Guarantees that no federal programs, means-tested or otherwise, may be permitted to single out immigrants for exclusion.
• Elimination of the arbitrary five-year lifetime limit of public assistance, regardless of need.
• Support for everyone to live above the poverty line.

AFSC is committed to the struggle for these changes. We pledge to work alongside those directly affected by this crisis to assure that their voices are strongly heard in the movement toward a society that honors all its people and values the contributions they can make.

Everyone is Deserving:
Toolkit on TANF Reauthorization and Welfare Reform
Hands-on resource brimming with facts and figures, policy

proposals, reproducible handouts, and gassroots organizing contacts
$7 each; 5 for $30, postage included, checks payable to AFSC. Send to: Kathryn Kurtz, AFSC Community Relations Unit, 1501 Cherry St., Philadelphia, PA 19102; 215/241-7125; www.afsc.org

• Economic Human Rights: A Faith-Based Perspective
  
• The Human Impact of TANF
• Reauthorizing TANF: Opportunities for Action
• Building Common Ground
• Resources

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