Ann Withorn teaches and writes about welfare and poverty, from a base at UMass. Boston. She is finishing a small study of how community-based agencies around the country are engaging with welfare reform, and was one of the people arrested in Boston to protest the imposition of time limits.

"Tell me this: What happened to the 3000 families who dropped from the Welfare Department's list of people due to hit the time limits between August and November? Where did they go? What happened to the kids? Is anybody worrying about those families? Does anybody care?"

-Debby Hoyt Fraser, at the Framingham Women's Alliance State House protest against Massachusetts time limits, Nov. 30, 1998

The "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act" of 1996 was public policy at its most controversial. And now, with two years of implementation under our belt, both opponents and proponents find welfare reform living up to their expectations.

As opponents of "welfare reform" vehemently argued, poor families with children who used to rely on AFDC to keep body and soul together are now being made destitute by direct government action. A one-two punch is leaving families with no income: first, because "full family sanctions" are increasingly being imposed as punishment for non-compliance with an array of punitive bureaucratic mandates; and, second, because states are beginning to hit self-imposed time limits on how long a family can receive cash benefits. Maybe, if they know how to apply, and their workers help, parents and children continue to receive medical assistance and food stamps. Or maybe not, if they get so angry and discouraged that they just want to run away from anything having to do with "the Welfare." Studies of the fate of such families show that, minimally, 34% remain unemployed-and often 50% or more do not find jobs when they lose cash benefits. Not surprisingly, poverty rates are rising in many states, even as unemployment is falling.

And, as proponents of PRWORA predicted, welfare reform has (obviously abetted by the "strong" economy) dramatically brought down the absolute numbers of families who use public assistance across the nation. Sanctions and time limits count for some of the reductions, but it also seems that more people are reluctant to apply for aid-out of fear, rumors, and explicit policy decisions by departments (like NYC) to discourage applications. These reductions in the welfare rolls gave Clinton the first of two real bi-partisan applause lines in his State of the Union Address (the second was when he recognized Hillary). Such trends, showing anywhere from 20% to 60% reductions in the welfare rolls are bandied about by the press and politicians who look askance at any "liberal diehards" who continue to tarnish the obvious truth that "welfare reform is working" with concerns about increasing poverty and missing families.

Finally, the PRA has indeed fulfilled Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it." State and county welfare departments are renaming and restructuring themselves, sometimes privatizing themselves, and imposing a "work first" strategy with glee-restricting education and training opportunities, imposing extensive "community service" workfare assignments on anyone unable to follow mottos like the "any job is a good job" mantra of Massachusetts. Community-based agencies are torn between internal pressures to maintain missions of "empowering" poor communities and external rewards for offering training programs to help women "transition to work," regardless of the long term economic promise such programs afford. Agencies, like the Texas program quoted below, report that they are losing touch with families who have lost benefits and are trying to make do with unstable employment: We are seeing a severe crisis. People are so beaten down and so busy trying to cope that they don't demand or ask for help and things get worse and worse. Agencies used to be able to give people $50 to help with an electric bill occasionally. Now people don't come in until the bill is $400 and it's a crisis that can't be handled.

What's next?

Those of us who know that almost everything about welfare reform was wrong-from its false premises devaluing parental work, through its incorrect arguments about the availability of family-sustaining jobs for single moms, to its denial of public responsibility for maintaining an economic safety net-find ourselves incredibly challenged.

The barriers are immense. Many human services providers seem to be accepting welfare reform as something to "adjust to" or just another new mandate they must "try to make succeed" (perhaps because of the money being dangled before them if they will just pretend everyone can find a job). Many recipients seem resigned to giving up: to returning to batterers, or to taking jobs with wages and time demands that destabilize their families. Some may be, finally, accepting worse options that don't generate sympathetic press-like not asking where your sons get "extra" money, or selling your body or drugs, or just using whatever works to alleviate the fear. It has always been hard to argue that welfare existed to protect people from exactly such worse options, now it is well nigh impossible. And within the movement, activists and advocates around the country often find ourselves in different places over basic questions: what's winnable? what's worth fighting for?

In the short run, many of us are still fighting to turn back the worst aspects of the new laws on a state by state level. In Massachusetts, for example, we are doing everything we can-including civil disobedience-just to get the state to push back its two-year time limit to the federal five-year limit. In many states, depending on the progress of their reforms, efforts are under way to have education and training count as "community service," or to substitute state dollars for federal dollars when part-time work is being subsidized-so as to stop the federal time limit clock.

Around the country people are trying to build a movement with new allies. Catholics and many mainline as well as liberal Protestant churches are beginning to speak out, as the moral implications of refusing to provide basic economic maintenance sinks in. Labor union activists are beginning to see the effects on workers as hundreds of thousands of desperate "new workers" (as the welfare-to-work jargon now labels recipients) are thrown into the job market. Many workers understand that, just at a time when a tight labor market may finally begin to drive up wages, welfare reform is forcing more people into competition for low wage jobs, and making them especially fearful of rocking the boat if they get hired.

There is also hope that mainstream women's groups will see what it means that single mothers are being denied their perception of the best choice for their families-especially since so many moms (and children) on welfare are still reeling from the trauma of violence, and face major obstacles in the job market. Even the media seems to be backing off the unchecked welfare bashing which was such a significant factor in getting welfare reform passed three years ago.

On my good days, I think that we are making real progress. After 31 people got arrested in Boston in November, building on a Fall of activism, the response was amazing. People were calling asking what they could do, offering to give money. For a while it seemed possible to believe that people were coming to see, as Tim Costello, the director of the Campaign for Contingent Work/Workers Center in Boston, says: "welfare reform, especially the time limits, is a moral meltdown‚ that sickens us all." And it still seems like we have turned a corner, that many people are coming to realize that welfare reform isn't really "welfare to work." For many it is "welfare to worse"-worse poverty, worse jobs and economic futures, worse family instability, worse violence and homelessness.

But, honestly, my bad days almost outnumber my good ones. Often I am consumed with fury and frustration that so many people, even good progressives, are simply beginning to put welfare reform on their list of "bad things" that they oppose, but are not able to see how absolutely unacceptable it is that we will allow children and families to have no income in a society with a 69 billion dollar national surplus, and millions more dollars in state surpluses around the nation. I fear that we are being hardened into tolerating the kind of invisible "working poverty" that was declared unacceptable for most Americans 60 years ago.

I grew up in a white, Southern, lower middle class, racist world where people were not supposed to complain, where blacks and poor whites were required to take any job they could get and not ask for help, where women who had made their bed were expected to lie in it. The "success" of welfare reform moves us all back to this world, where there is no place to run, no place to hide from the capitalist, racist, sexist order of things. The immigration rules that say you can come here but never ask for help, and the criminal justice "reforms" that say there is no such thing as rehabilitation, not to mention the public housing rules that kick whole families out if a child breaks the law, are all part of the same pattern. It is an ugly vision but one that those who want to celebrate our organizing progress must remember, because it provides a sense of emergency and focus to any deepening hope that a movement for economic and social justice can grow again.

So now is time to act-not just monitor, not just educate. The "disappeared" who are cut from welfare rolls today join the growing ranks of invisible people already left with few legitimate social claims: immigrants, people with "unpopular" disabilities, those who broke the law and are to be punished forever, and workers in unstable, "contingent" jobs. If we are not careful, their numbers will soon be swelled by working class seniors abandoned by Social Security changes brought by the same forces who gave us the welfare reform. Before we are all caught up in the next crisis, let's find energy in the words of those who were arrested trying to end the time limits in Massachusetts:

"....We are not the criminals here. Rather, what we did in the Governor's office was to exercise our rights as citizens seeking redress for a criminal situation that hurts all of us. A state of emergency has been created for the families who have already been cut off welfare, for those appealing their situation and hoping for an extension, and for all the workers who fear losing their jobs, or having their wages lowered, because of the addition of thousands of new job seekers into the labor market. This emergency was made by our policymakers and it must be fixed, immediately

"...We come from many different backgrounds, but the largest group of us are labor activists who know that time limits hurt all workers. As such, we know that wages will go down 12% and that it will be even harder for those in the bottom third of the wage scale to fight for better working conditions. Several of us are teachers who know that more of our students will be unable to concentrate on their studies because their families face even greater vulnerability. And many of us are activists who know that we must continue to stand up for the rights of all women to keep themselves and their children safe from violence. Finally, we are all concerned citizens who believe that our actions can make a difference and we insist that our elected officials stop creating more desperate poverty for the families of this state.

"Don't do this in our name."