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NATIONAL JOBS FOR ALL COALITION
UNCOMMON
SENSE 17 © February 1997
#4 of FAIR WORK AND WELFARE: a welfare reform packet
NEEDED:
A NATIONAL COMMITMENT TO FAMILIES*
By Ruth A. Sidel, Professor of Sociology, Hunter
College and Advisory Board, National Jobs for All Coalition
*Adapted from Keeping Women and Children Last: America’s War
on the Poor, Penguin, chapter 7.
Welfare repeal is forcing poor mothers and their children off
the welfare rolls and into a labor force that is already overcrowded,
particularly for workers with scant schooling and few skills.
The nation is implementing harsh policies that harm families in
the name of helping them and that are likely to increase poverty
and unemployment. In such times it is important to propose and
analyze alternative policies for aiding families and children.
United States leads in child poverty
Studies of several Western industrialized countries (Canada,
France, the former West Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the
United States and the United Kingdom) indicate that in the mid-1980s
the United States had the highest poverty rates, especially for
families with children (see notes).1 While all these countries
were experiencing high unemployment rates and economic dislocation,
their effectiveness in reducing poverty varied dramatically. Among
the seven countries, only in the United States did tax policies
and income transfers have almost no effect on the poverty rate
of families with children. Here public policy reduced family poverty
by only 3.5 percent, leaving about 24 percent still poor. Canada
had the next lowest reduction, lifting approximately one in five
poor families with chil dren out of poverty, and leaving nearly
17 percent still poor. At the other extreme, the Netherlands and
Sweden had considerable success in reducing poverty. In the Netherlands,
there was roughly a 50 percent reduction, with a remaining poverty
rate of le ss than 8 percent (despite difficult labor market conditions).
In Sweden, over 60 percent were lifted out of poverty, leaving
about 5 percent of families with children still poor.
Government generosity does not create poverty
This success shows that government generosity does not lead to
higher rates of poverty, as conservatives in the United States
claim. On the contrary, countries with far more generous government
programs have significantly lower poverty rates than does th e
United States, which has both the lowest level of benefits and
the highest rates of poverty. With respect to the elderly but
not families with children, the United States has also proven
that benefits reduce poverty. Without government transfers, 50
per cent of the elderly would have been poor in 1995 instead of
10.5 percent.
Policies that reduce family poverty
What are the policies that succeed in reducing poverty among
families with children? First, all the European countries cited
provide a children’s or family allowance--a universal cash benefit
for each child regardless of the family’s income. A second ele
ment of the family policy in place in all European
countries--and virtually all other industrialized countries as
well--is some form of national health insurance or national health
service which assures all families and individuals access to health
care. Third, some of these countries provide universal, low-cost
or free preschool care to all or almost all children from the
age of two or three. Fourth, many industrialized countries provide
special benefits for divorced families, guaranteeing a minimum
amou nt of child support if the non-custodial parent fails to
pay.
Everyone accepts the importance of strong, stable families. The
question for the United States today is what social and economic
policies will most effectively help our affluent society to achieve
them. What is the appropriate role of government? The pol icies
of other affluent societies can guide us. Should our family policy
stress universal benefits--that is, benefits that go to all families
with children, not only to the poor? Or should policies be targeted
for the poor alone? Should we move tow ard a combination of the
two approaches? Many other countries use a complex combination
of tax policy, employment policy, universal social policy,
and specific programs targeted to the most vulnerable.
In thinking through a family policy for the twenty-first century,
we must recognize that most mothers today, particularly single
ones, are caught in a difficult and often painful role conflict
that is exacerbated by the unwillingness of American society to
recognize and respond to the real needs of families. As Lydia
Morris has pointed out:
Recent developments in the conceptualization
of citizenship have increasingly placed at least as much emphasis
on obligations as on rights, the prime obligation being work as
a means to independence. This places women in an ambiguous position:
either they earn their 'public' citizenship rights by their own
paid employment or they perform their 'private' family obligations
and remain dependent. This conflict can only be resolved by a
redistribution of the ‘private’ obligations of unpaid labor, or
by some acknowledgement of the 'public' service such labour performs,
or by increasing state involvement in the ‘private’ obligation
to care for children.2
This is exactly where the United States stands today. Women are
still expected to care for the home and particularly for the children.
But women -- particularly poor ones -- are increasingly expected
also to work for pay. While the industrial countries o f Western
European have developed a panoply of social supports for families,
American society has not redistributed the private obligations of
women on a significant scale to men or to the public sector. What
"welfare reform" really means is that women are being forced to
take on both roles full time without adequate salaries or adequate
help in providing for
their children. Many mothers provide care and love, food and clothing,
and values and discipline while holding down a full-time job and
earning wage s either below or close to the meager poverty line.
They are increasingly expected to do all this both without the help
of a man and without the help of society.
We need a universal family policy
We sorely need a universal family policy. It may seem quixotic
to propose a universal family policy at a time when conservatism
is in the ascendancy and when government programs are viewed with
widespread pessimism, cynicism and even distaste. So it is h elpful
to recall that American proponents of social insurance spent decades
sowing seeds that would not take root until the more fertile soil
of the New Deal.
Such a family policy should include the following:
- children’s allowances to all families with children under
the age of 18; comprehensive, universal,
- affordable health care through national health insurance
or a national health service;
- paid leave for parents at the time of the birth or adoption
of a baby;
- accessible, affordable preschool and after-school care for
all children; and
- a housing policy that expands the supply of housing that
is both adequate and affordable and insures that this housing
reaches all segments of the population, including those most
in need;
- and an education policy that improves all schools and that
brings the education of those most in need up to national standards.
Full employment and family policy
A central component of any family policy must be a national commitment
to a full-employment policy: decent jobs at livable wages for
all women and men who want them. Such a policy would also help
to ensure an expanding economy in which prosperity is shared,
as well as reducing poverty. The family policy proposed above
would result in the creation of millions of additional jobs.
Public policy must encourage the private sector to create jobs.
Direct creation of jobs by the public sector is essential as well.
During the 1930’s, in the midst of the Great Depression, public
works programs built much-needed hospitals, bridges, roads, stadiums,
and parks. Today we should do no less. Our public buildings, particularly
our schools, hospitals, and public housing, our bridges and tunnels,
our parks and playgrounds are sadly--and sometimes dangerously--in
need of repair and, dare we sugges t it, beautification. All levels
of government could thereby create millions of jobs at decent
wages while providing facilities that enrich us all.
If a work program is to lift people out of poverty, it must pay
a livable wage. Raising the minimum wage to a level at which a
family of four with a full-time worker would live above the poverty
line would lift millions out of poverty and would strengthe n
all families.
Another way to create additional jobs and to strengthen families
would be to reduce work time. I believe this would be particularly
valuable to parents of young children. A shortened work week must
be available with little or no reduction in pay. This po licy
can be partially financed from the ensuing
productivity increases.
If Americans doubt that the lives and well-being of working-
and middle-class people are intertwined with the lives and well-being
of the poor and near-poor, we only need consider what severe cutbacks
in human services mean for those who provide them. As Federal,
state and local governments cut funds for education, teachers
are laid off. As food programs, health care, and job training
are defunded, the poor will surely be harmed and harmed severely,
but those who provide these services will be harmed as well. Social
work, health care, and education have traditionally provided avenues
for the poor and the working class to move into the middle class.
If these opportunities are cut still further, what jobs will be
available to these workers, the vast majori ty of whom are women?
Will they, too, be forced to flip hamburgers for the minimum wage,
with no benefits and no career path?
How to diminish poverty
When we ask the exceedingly difficult question of what should
be done with the welfare system, the key question we should be
asking is, "How does an affluent society shrink the number of
people living in poverty?" According to the Federal governme nt’s
own estimates, the current welfare "reform" will add millions
of people, many of them children, to the ranks of the poor. We
know the pernicious effects of poverty--the social, psychological,
physical, and intellectual effects of deprivation, of marginalization,
of hopelessness. And like their wealth, the poverty of parents
is likely to be passed on to children. That children inherit poverty
and disadvantage challenges our commitment to provide equal opportunity
for all.
In the United States, the components of a universal family policy
would help diminish the number of persons living in poverty--as
they do in Western Europe. But a full-employment policy focused
on creating additional new jobs for those who want them, one that
raises the minimum wage to a living wage, is indispensable for
further reducing the number of poor by permitting most families
to be self-supporting.
For those who remain in need we should, I believe, maintain a
welfare system with standards set at the Federal level. The elements
of such a welfare system would provide a cash benefit at least
equivalent to the poverty line; the child care provided othe r
parents; training programs with stipends, leading to jobs paying
a livable wage; and income supplements for the working poor, to
bring their income at least to the poverty line.
Over three decades ago, Michael Harrington ended his powerful
exposé of poverty in America with these words: "The means
are at hand to fulfill the age-old dream: poverty can now be abolished.
. . . How long shall we look the other way while our f ellow human
beings suffer? How long?"3
Notes:
1. Katherine McFate, Timothy Smeeding, and Lee Rainwater, "Markets
and States: Poverty Trends and Transfer System Effectiveness in
the 1980's," in Katherine McFate, Roger Lawson, and William Julius
Wilson, eds., Poverty, Inequality and the Future of Social
Policy: Western States in The New World Order, New York: Russell
Sage, 1995. Poverty rates are standardized at 50 percent of the
median income of non-elderly households.
2. Lydia Morris, The Underclass and Social Citizenship,
New York: Routledge, 1994, p.134.
3. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United
States, Baltimore: Penguin, 1963, p.170.
Editor: June Zaccone, Economics (Emer.), Hofstra
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