Every Mother Is a Working Mother : Federal ‘Workfare’ Bill Ignores Economic Realities

Workfare legislation, touted as welfare reform, is moving quickly through Congress. The House has already passed its version, and the Senate is expected to vote this week on the Family Security Act, introduced by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.)

Workfare, which is already being tried in several states, including California (unsuccessfully), forces women to participate in mandatory work, education and training programs in order to receive welfare--Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Ultimately Moynihan’s bill would cut the welfare rolls but not poverty. It mandates mothers to leave their children when they are 3 years old--in some cases as young as 6 weeks old--for training or for work in jobs with lower-than-average wages and benefits, if any. This would weaken unions, undercut bargaining power (especially for other women on the job) and foster racism.

Moynihan’s bill comes with a capped budget that would provide $130 per person per year for education and training. That would hardly equip anyone with the skills necessary to build earning power outside the home.

Most religious, labor, women’s, peace, homeless, welfare-rights, children’s-rights, civil-rights and other advocate groups have come to oppose this legislation. Yet in seven hearings only one welfare-rights group, but not one welfare recipient, was invited to testify. This astounding arrogance of the legislators made possible an unrelenting and mostly unchallenged attack on welfare mothers, blaming them for every social ill imaginable--including the “disintegration” of the black family. Little was said about why women and children are on welfare--about the effect of Reaganomics, underfunded and understaffed schools, lack of economic alternatives to poverty, drug trafficking and the government’s role in that, and racism, among other things.

Racism is a pervasive factor. Although most people on welfare are white, in proportion to the general population a greater percentage of black people and other people of color are on welfare. This is due to a legacy of racism and injustice that the presence of a black middle class can’t hide.

The basic premise of workfare is that parents are responsible for their children. No one would quarrel with that. But work-fare proponents interpret “responsibility” only as working for wages outside the home. Full-time homemaking and child-rearing are not considered work.

We disagree. Not only do welfare mothers deserve an entitlement for the hard job of raising children in poverty; all mothers deserve more support from society. Most industrialized countries pay all mothers a family allowance. Among the exceptions: the United States and South Africa.

What we want are choices, to build earning power outside the home or to work full-time in the home, not to be mandated to take on more work. We’ve earned our right to welfare and a lot more.

Workfare doesn’t value the work that women do in the home, in our communities or on the land. It is not women who are dependent on society. Society is dependent on women. Without women’s work--compensated by wages or not--the wheels of government, industry, commerce and community life would grind to a halt. A RAND Corp. study puts the value of housework in the U.S. economy at $700 billion a year. AFDC costs $18 billion a year.

Despite our enormous contribution, what women get back in benefits and services is pitifully small, and growing ever smaller. We bear the brunt of the burgeoning budget for intervention in other countries and for weapons that destroy the life that we work so hard to create and sustain. Meanwhile, AFDC benefit levels have dropped 38% in the last decade, making approximately 100,000 women and children on AFDC homeless.

In 1985, with the support of thousands of women, the Wages for Housework Campaign succeeded in getting the United Nations to agree that governments should count women’s work in the home as productive and include it in the gross national product. The implications for welfare policy are far-reaching. Although the United States twice agreed to this resolution, present workfare legislation completely ignores it.

Moynihan, in particular, has betrayed his own early support. In 1973 he wrote: “If American society recognized homemaking and child-rearing as productive work to be included in the national economic accounts . . . the receipt of welfare might not imply dependency.” Lately he is fond of saying, “I looked up one day, and women were working.” In reality, he looked up one day and saw women working the double shift of homemaking and a wage-paying job. This week in Washington he said, “It is now understood that mothers can and do work,” in explaining that they should work outside the home. Obviously he doesn’t understand that every mother is a working mother.

Those who hang their hopes on workfare should know that it has not been proved to work. The effect of existing mandatory workfare programs on job placement has, at best, been questionable. Even before full implementation, California’s “model” program, GAIN (Greater Avenues for Independence) is a fiasco. It does not even have the budget to mandate participation.

The mean-spirited and shortsighted workfare legislation on Capitol Hill will do nothing to end poverty, but it will increase the stress and distress of those already suffering the most. It is not too late to campaign against workfare and its devastating implications. As the legislation moves to the next step in Congress, probably to a conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate versions, legislators will hear from their no-longer-silent constituents. The voices of the poor and our advocates will no longer be ignored.