Lost Ground:
Welfare Reform, Poverty and Beyond
Edited by Randy Albelda and Ann Withorn

Welfare-to-work has not worked.

So finds Lost Ground: Welfare Reform, Poverty and Beyond, a timely and harrowing anthology about the repercussions of the 1996 welfare reform act.

The net result? Millions of Americans who no longer have welfare to serve as their meager safety net are now paying a heavy, life-threatening price for popular political rhetoric.

Edited by University of Massachusetts at Boston professors Randy Albelda and Ann Withorn, Lost Ground includes twelve, collected articles by academics and activists on subjects related to welfare reform.

To be sure, none of the contributors to Lost Ground romanticizes—or calls for a return to—the welfare of yore. Aid to Dependent Families with Children, as it was known before the present-day Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), was both inadequate and demeaning to its recipients. Instead, the authors argue that the core messages embodied in welfare reform and the new TANF program have gone far beyond the wording of legislation to reflect, in sum, what we think of the very citizens who constitute our most vulnerable classes of people: women, people of color, and poor families.

In proper political and historical context, explains contributor Frances Fox Piven, the campaign for welfare reform can be seen as a tragic American story about the nation's economic insecurity and rising inequality, in which the main actors are poor women.

"Even as Clinton was campaigning in 1992 on 'It's the economy, stupid,' he also raised the slogans of 'End welfare as we know it' and 'Two years and off to work,'" Piven writes. "His pollsters told him the slogans struck a chord. Clinton had stumbled on the uses of the angry politics of resentment. The result was a contest between Republicans and Democrats, between national and state politicians, to own the welfare issue. And welfare reform is the consequence."

Co-editor Albelda reports that the vast majority of adults leaving welfare are precariously employed at jobs averaging $7.50/hour, while many others are dependent on family, friends, and ex-partners for financial assistance to make ends meet. To compound the suffering, he writes, some welfare recipients have resorted to giving their children up to foster care rather than watch their children suffer for lack of housing, daycare and food.

On the surface, PRWORA's establishment of stiff paternity establishment and child support enforcement rules seemed like the right step to the bipartisan legislators who leapt all over the opportunity to pass welfare reform. But these rules, according to Lost Ground, have forced women into contact with abusive ex-partners, and subjected recipients to intrusive questions about sexual behavior in front of courtroom judges.

"TANF encourages more aggressive and systematic intrusion into recipients sex lives because states are required to punish non-cooperating mothers with benefit cuts, because mothers must sign child support income over to the state as a condition of receiving welfare, and because the federal government offers state incentives and services to boost paternity establishment rates," writes Gwendolyn Mink in her essay, "Violating Women: Rights Abuses in the Welfare Police State."

Any welfare recipient convicted of a drug-related felony is now barred from TANF for life, writes contributor Kenneth Neubeck. These kinds of regulations, he argues, have formed the racist underpinnings of welfare
reform because the exaggerated share of drug-related arrests have fallen on low-income people of color.

Ultimately, Albelda reminds readers that a just society would provide, at a minimum, income supplements to low-income workers; paid family/medical leave; an expansion of unemployment insurance; pay equity; universal health care; and day care and early education programs for children. "If we as a nation recognized the value of women's work, we would not have welfare reform that substitutes public assistance with the earnings of mothers in low-wage jobs and a shallow set of supports that vanish quickly," he concludes.

But, as each of the contributors to Lost Ground seems to understand, American society is far from this kind of approach toward—and respect for—women's work. For now, the fallout from a regressive, punitive approach to welfare only seems guaranteed to intensify existing societal inequalities, hunger, disease and crime rates. Welfare-to-work, it seems, might have just as easily been named welfare-to-worse-off.

Reviewed by Silja J.A. Talvi
08.24.02

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