Working After Welfare


Book Description

Taps into the quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered in the Women's Employment Study (WES), offering insights into the lives of women in an urban Michigan county who left welfare for work and the role their family decisions play in their labor market decisions. Describes the day-to-day struggles these women face and the reasons they tend to remain in low-wage, dead-end jobs.




Mothers' Work and Children's Lives


Book Description

This book examines the effects of work requirements imposed by welfare reform on low-income women and their families. The authors pay particular attention to the nature of work, whether it is stable or unstable, the number of hours worked in a week, and regularity and flexibility of work schedules. They also show how these factors make it more difficult for low-income women to balance work and family requirements.




Doing Without


Book Description

The welfare reform legislation enacted in 1996 was applauded by many for the successes it had in dramatically reducing the number of people receiving public assistance, most of whom were women with children. Today, however, more than a decade later, these successes seem far less spectacular. Although the total number of welfare recipients has dropped by more than fifty percent nationwide, evidence shows that poverty has actually deepened. Many hardworking women are no better off for having returned to the workplace. In Doing Without, Jane Henrici brings together nine contributions to tell the story of welfare reform from inside the lives of the women who live with it. Cases from Chicago and Boston are combined with a focus on San Antonio from one of the largest multi-city investigations on welfare reform ever undertaken. The contributors argue that the employment opportunities available to poorer women, particularly single mothers and ethnic minorities, are insufficient to lift their families out of poverty. Typically marked by variable hours, inadequate wages, and short-term assignments, both employment and training programs fail to provide stability or the kinds of benefitsÑsuch as health insurance, sick days, and childcare optionsÑthat are necessary to sustain both work and family life. The chapters also examine the challenges that the women who seek assistance, and those who work in public and private agencies to provide it, together must face as they navigate ever-changing requirements and regulations, decipher alterations in Medicaid, and apply for training and education. Contributors urge that the nation should repair the social safety net for women in transition and offer genuine access to jobs with wages that actually meet the cost of living.




Leaving Welfare


Book Description

Compares welfare leaver outcomes across geographic areas and the nation as a whole. Proposes ways to enhance income support programme that would help welfare leavers economically and encourage them to stay in the workforce.




Work After Welfare


Book Description




Making Work Pay


Book Description

Leading experts and journalists offer an incisive, wide-ranging critique of welfare reform. In the four years since Congress acted to "end welfare as we know it," millions of people have been forced out of government assistance programs into low-wage, dead-end jobs with few, if any, benefits. Making Work Pay brings together the foremost thinkers in the fields of social policy and public affairs to examine the effects of the new national prosperity on the working poorto ask what happened to the second half of President Bill Clinton's welfare reform, which was supposed to "make work pay." As Robert Reich notes in his introduction, "like other ideas that have had the misfortune of becoming political slogans, 'making work pay' went from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence." This book, which originated as a special double issue of The American Prospect magazine, brings coherence to the original notion, and updates it for a new century. In Making Work Pay, leading policy analysts and journalists examine the broad fallout of welfare reform: Marcia Meyers shows how welfare offices undermine welfare reform; Naomi Barko reveals how the gender gap in wages hits low-income workers hardest; Harold Meyerson describes the growing movement to organize low-wage workers; and Michael Massing details welfare-to-work programs that actually work. Arriving as Congress considers the reauthorization of welfare reform, and including reports of state programs, Making Work Pay is a timely contribution to a pressing debate.




Welfare Reform


Book Description

In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.




Five Years After


Book Description

Friedlander and Burtless teach us why welfare reform will not be easy. Their sobering assessment of job training programs willenlighten a debate too often dominated by wishful thinking and political rhetoric. Look for their findings to be cited for many years to come. —Douglas Besharov, American Enterprise Institute A methodologically astute study that sheds considerable light on the potential for and limits to raising the employment and earnings of welfare recipients and provides benchmarks against which the impacts of later programs can be compared. —Journal of Economic Literature With welfare reforms tested in almost every state and plans for a comprehensive federal overall on the horizon, it is increasingly important for Americans to understand how policy changes are likely to affect the lives of welfare recipients. Five Years After tells the story of what happened to the welfare recipients who participated in the influential welfare-to-work experiments conducted by several states in the mid-1980s.The authors review the distinctive goals and procedures of evaluations performed in Arkansas, Baltimore, San Diego, and Virginia, and then examine five years of follow-up data to determine whether the initial positive impact on employment, earnings, and welfare costs held up over time. The results were surprisingly consistent. Low-cost programs that saved money by getting individuals into jobs quickly did little to reduce poverty in the long run. Only higher-cost educational programs enabled welfare recipients to hold down jobs successfully and stay off welfare. Five Years After ends speculation about the viability of the first generation of employment programs for welfare recipients, delineates the hard choices that must be made among competing approaches, and provides a well-documented foundation for building more comprehensive programs for the next generation. A sobering tale for welfare reformers of all political persuasions, this book poses a serious challenge to anyone who promises to end welfare dependency by cutting welfare budgets.




Securing the Right to Employment


Book Description

Basing his proposal on plans developed by New Deal social welfare administrators, Harvey analyzes the feasibility and desirability of using public sector job creation to secure a right to employment. He shows that such a policy would provide more effective relief from the problems of poverty and unemployment than do existing arrangements while permitting a major expansion in the production of public goods and services without increasing tax burdens. The economic side-effects and administrative problems associated with the policy are carefully explored and found manageable. Finally, the book concludes with an assessment of the political interests that stand in the way of policy initiatives like the one proposed. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




After Welfare


Book Description

Do contemporary welfare policies reflect the realities of the economy and the needs of those in need of public assistance, or are they based on outdated and idealized notions of work and family life? Are we are moving from a "war on poverty" to a "war against the poor?" In this critique of American social welfare policy, Sanford F. Schram explores the cultural anxieties over the putatively deteriorating "American work ethic," and the class, race, sexual and gender biases at the root of current policy and debates. Schram goes beyond analyzing the current state of affairs to offer a progressive alternative he calls "radical incrementalism," whereby activists would recreate a social safety net tailored to the specific life circumstances of those in need. His provocative recommendations include a series of programs aimed at transcending the prevailing pernicious distinction between "social insurance" and "public assistance" so as to better address the needs of single mothers with children. Such programs could include "divorce insurance" or even some form of "pregnancy insurance" for women with no means of economic support. By pushing for such programs, Schram argues, activists could make great strides towards achieving social justice, even in today's reactionary climate.