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Workfare instead of welfare

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

I received the post Maine Just Changed Their Food-Stamp Policy… Every State Should Do This (Conservative Tribune) from a friend.

The friend wondered whether the following was a good idea. They thought it might be, but asked if I could confirm.

“[…] adults 18 to 50 years old with no children and who are able to work must do so or volunteer for 20 hours each week. Otherwise, their benefits will be limited to three months over a three-year period”

This is one of those superficially seductive ideas that keeps coming up. Basically, should the U.S. privatize and marketize the remaining social components of its safety net? Should it remove the last vestiges of mercy from its society?

They are not us

This idea assumes that people on welfare are lazy. That their inability to support themselves and their families and subsequent desperation is purely their own fault. That they deserve their fate.

But—and I think this is the most important part of all—if we believe that those on welfare deserve to be treated poorly, then those of us not on welfare are free to believe that we earned our much better lives.

There is no mercy in such a system, no acknowledgment that the system treats some much worse than others. That luck plays a large role in the lives of both the most disadvantaged and the most advantaged.

There are so many factors dooming people to poverty in America. Programs like this, that force their participants to dance for their supper, are a cruel joke. They make those of us who will never have to be part of one of these programs feel vindicated, but that feeling comes from a petty, stupid and cruel place.

Lazy. Stupid. Ignorant.

Given this presupposition, it of course makes sense to punish others for being poor, to extract what we can from them instead of supporting these parasites.

There are so many reasons other than laziness that people can’t get jobs:

  • There aren’t enough jobs that pay living wages
  • The jobs that are available are soul-killing or physically dangerous
  • The education system is a joke; There is no training for good jobs
  • The continuing education system is weak to nonexistent
  • Many “decent” jobs are out of reach for anyone without at least a bachelor’s degree
  • There is prejudice everywhere against the poor
    • Don’t have nice clothes? Forget office work
    • Can’t speak without an accent? Or slang? Forget office work
    • Bad teeth? Forget a whole slew of jobs
    • Not pretty? Overweight? Same thing.
    • Black? Hispanic?

Tantamount to slavery

Instead of giving the poor help to get them back on their feet, we give them what amount to jobs. I suppose this sounds good to some. There’s a lot of work to do and not enough people to do it.

If they don’t comply, they no longer get the benefit of the doubt. If they don’t comply, they get their super-generous benefits of a few hundred dollars per month for only three months and then nothing for thirty-three more months.

If you can’t find a job of your own—or are unwilling to do so—you have to do the job you’re given by the state. This is just a transformation of the unemployment program, though. Instead of making you seek out jobs in your area of expertise, these new programs just give you a job.

And what do you get paid for this job? The article says “or volunteer 20 hours each week”. If you have to do the work to get benefits, then it is, by definition, not volunteering. But what they mean by “volunteer” is that you’re doing the job for no salary, other than the benefits (which you used to get for free).

Welfare benefits are notoriously meager. Most recipients are scraping the bottom of the barrel by the third week of the month, no matter how well they stretch them. This is not a luxurious lifestyle.

So, even if you do get paid for your work, the salary is almost certainly far below minimum wage.

Life in the hands of the state

Under such a system, people will have a job of sorts, but far less chance to get control back over their lives.

If you spend 20 hours per week working at this shitty, super-low-paid job, do you have time to find a better one? No, you probably do not. Do you have time for your continuing education program? No to that too. What about your kids? Who takes care of them while you work? Hire a babysitter. It’s good for the economy.

It’s hard to imagine that society that converts its welfare program to something like this will pay a living wage. And you can forget about benefits or any thought for how a life is supposed to work under this regime. That’s not the taxpayer’s problem because they’re already being generous enough by throwing a few dollars and a job the recipient’s way.[1]

Don’t like it? Don’t take the extravagant benefits, you lazy bastard.

And stop whining about your kids.

You shouldn’t have had them if you can’t take care of them.

Freeloader.

And your kids are future freeloaders.

Race to the bottom

These programs are not new. Back in the 90s, the “workfare” program was the brainchild of Bill Clinton (yep, the so-called progressive). Mayor Rudolph Guiliani implemented it in NYC by making welfare recipients work in the park system.

What happened? Their salaries were on the order of a dollar or two per hour and so they were much cheaper to hire than the current park staff. The current staff was let go and replaced with much–lower-paid unskilled labor. A win all around, right? The skilled and trained labor lost their good jobs.

Taxpayers win because they also don’t have to pay for benefits or pensions or anything. Awesome, right? Because nobody who mattered knew anyone with a good job in the park system, so the park workers might as well not even exist.

So what happens with all of those people who just lost their jobs? No problem. They go on welfare and can go right back to work in the park, but at 1/10 of their former salary without benefits or a pension. Sweet.

This kind of program gets rid of good jobs and makes everyone race to the bottom, working harder for less. It’s capitalism at its finest.

No more unions, no more pensions, no more benefits. Not for the poor. They don’t deserve it. If they did, wouldn’t they already have it?

Being poor is not a crime

The problem with this workfare kind of thinking is that it demonizes those out of work or down on their luck. It takes the few that are really lazy, makes anecdotes out of them to convince people that everyone is like that, and then making slaves out of them, more or less.

You can’t say, as the governor of Maine did, that you’re doing “all that you can to eliminate generational poverty and get people back to work” if you haven’t actually created real jobs and real job training. If the only jobs around are life-draining and crappy—and you have to get two of them to survive—are we surprised that people don’t want to do them?

Do some take advantage? Sure, they do. Do we doom the majority that actually need welfare programs and could benefit from them just to punish the few that ruin it for everyone? Do we have to do it? Is it that we can’t afford it? Or that we spend money on everything but the poor?

This program will drive people off of welfare—not because they don’t want to work, but because they don’t want to get trapped into the forced-work program of the state. They want dignity and control over their own lives, even though they’re poor. Can’t we afford to give them that?

There’s no money in helping people

If we need to spend billions and trillions to deploy to Iraq or to build the next generation of super-weapons or to start giant new agencies—like Homeland Security and the TSA—ostensibly to fight terrorism, no one says a thing.

Spend a few millions on the poor without them somehow paying us back and we’re up in arms.

We have no sense of proportion. We are not very nice.

Behavioral therapy

And we are cruel to those less fortunate. Because ill fortune is mostly why people are poor: they aren’t lucky enough to have been rewarded for the right behavior. Life has taught them that it’s not even worth trying anymore. They’re not necessarily inherently stupid or lazy; they have just learned the lesson that their lives taught them.

We continue to try because our experience has trained us that if we work hard, we achieve. How many years would you continue to work hard if you never achieved? If you were never rewarded, not even once? If life swatted you down? Every. Single. Time. Would you really keep getting back up?

Would you work as hard as you do if you were paid $150 a week after taxes? Would you keep looking for that job with the same energy after the first year of joblessness? At what point do you say “yes” to something criminal just to get some cash to feed yourself or your family?

And then you’re going to jail. Because you’re a criminal and deserve it. Because being poor pretty much is a crime.

Standing in judgment

We find it so easy to judge people about whom we know nothing. And it’s easy to lump all the poor together because most of us don’t know any of them or don’t have to sympathize with them. Or we hear stories about them from TV. Stories written by people who also probably don’t know any poor people. Or from cops, who have an adversarial relationship to them, granted them by the state. It goes on and on.

We don’t know them but we feel perfectly comfortable judging them. Only a society without empathy could make a so-called welfare system life this.


[1] I’d be delighted to be proved wrong, but am not expecting it.