10
Embracing Discrimination?
The Interaction Between Low-Wage Labor Markets and Policies in Aid of the Poor
Heather Boushey
Poverty has been an enduring feature of the economic landscape in the United States. Welfare reform advocates and policymakers have continually debated the most effective and efficient way to eradicate, or at least ameliorate, American poverty. The current reform argument is that welfare policies have fostered dependence on the state, led to burgeoning out-of-wedlock births, and destroyed the sanctity of the two-parent family by supporting only single mothers. Critics of the welfare state see this as a drain on the nation’s resources. Furthermore, the allocation of increasing amounts of taxpayers’ money to welfare programs has not eliminated poverty. In this sense, many analysts appear to agree: policies to eradicate poverty have not been successful—the number of poor people in the United States has not dropped substantially over the past three decades.
This chapter will explore the failure of poverty policy by addressing the gaps in theories that underlie the current policy debate. A basic definition of poverty is to be without access to income—that is, to not have a well-paying job. One important aspect of the current debate is that it ignores the fact that access to good jobs is not gender or race neutral. Discrimination and inequality characterize the labor market. Social and economic policies are also not gender or race neutral and in fact often reinforce the discrimination that permeates labor markets. This analysis distinguishes itself by pointing out that discrimination in the labor market is linked to the construction of poor relief policy. Many analysts of the welfare state note that welfare support is meager and insufficient to provide for a decent standard of living (Albelda et al. 1996), and many also note that there are not necessarily adequate jobs to be found (Spalter-Roth et al. 1995). What is missing is an exploration of the interactive relationship between these two phenomena. It is no accident that women and minorities dominate both the welfare rolls and low-wage labor markets; in fact, it is because gender and race greatly influence labor market status that poor relief also acquired discriminatory tendencies.
The development of poor relief is a contingent, historical process grounded in the conditions of labor markets within a particular location. Policies in aid of the poor have not developed uniformly across nations, nor have they progressed consistently within nations. Rather, poor relief has taken on a distinctively national character and has expanded and contracted sporadically. The form of poor relief in general has been to provide subsistence or assistance where market relations fail or are deemed socially inappropriate, while the specific nature of poor relief varies with local conditions. Gender and race constructs are a historically contingent development that fundamentally impacts the form and purpose of poor relief in the United States. In particular, there is a clear interaction between low-wage labor markets, and their characterization as gendered and racialized, and the system of poor relief that has sprouted especially from the history of race relations in the southern states.
This chapter develops the theoretical underpinnings of the system of poor relief in the United States. The aim is to show how the development of poor relief follows from the construction of low-wage labor markets where accumulation is the driving force behind this process. The theoretical goal is to bring race and gender to the fore of the analysis of the labor supply process by explaining how differentiation by race and gender is an integral part of both the historical development of the welfare state and the continual recreation of low-wage labor markets. The first section outlines the theoretical approach. The second section describes the historical development of the system of poor relief in the United States. Both sections pay particular attention to how the constructs of gender and race impact the development of low-wage labor markets and poor relief, respectively. The final section discusses the implications and conclusions.
The Generation of Low-Wage Labor Markets and the Process of Gender and Race Discrimination
The process of accumulation in general entails the continual regeneration of a low-wage labor supply. Low-wage labor markets in the United States are disproportionately dominated by women and minorities. Work on labor market discrimination has found that the ascriptive characteristics of gender and race are determining factors in wages and employment (Albelda 1985; Boston 1988; Bergmann 1989; Fuchs 1988; Gittleman and Howell 1994; Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991; Reich 1981; Reskin and Hartmann 1986). Labor market discrimination against women and minorities is sustained and recreated through the creation of wage differentials (Williams 1991; Mason 1993). Thus, some workers are systematically excluded, on the basis of their gender or race, from higher paying segments of the labor market to sustain a constant supply of low-wage labor.
We begin this analysis with a general discussion of persistent wage inequality because the starting point of a complete theory of labor market discrimination must be to develop a lens through which we can see the simultaneous and interactive processes of oppression that occur within capitalism. Capitalism is, by its very nature, an oppressive process that breeds inequality. This is the core of Marx’s critique of the capitalist economic system. Through explicating how capitalism differentiates among workers, we will be able to understand how discrimination is endemic to both labor markets and the poor relief system in the United States.
In the classical Marxian approach, it is through the process of competition that the laws of capitalism are realized. Competition, among labor and among capital, mitigates against the equalization of wage rates (Botwinick 1993). First, under capitalism, firms compete against one other for market shares and profits (Marx 1986b). Marx’s distinctive analysis of capitalist competition allows us to see how persistent and substantial differentials in profit rates can be explained (Shaikh 1980). This is extended to an analysis of wage differentials in that “the overall range of wage differentiation in any particular labor market will largely depend on a particular firm and/or industry’s conditions of access to its potential labor reserves” (Botwinick 1993, 114). Second, workers and capitalists compete against each other over the extraction of surplus value. In the initial stages of capitalist development, capitalists increased the rate of profit through absolutely increasing surplus value—increasing the length of the work day without equal increases in wages. In the modern era, surplus value is generally increased relatively1 through increasing the productivity of labor (Marx 1986a). The struggle between labor and capital will determine how much of the surplus value capital is able to appropriate.
The dynamics of capitalist accumulation also regulate both the supply and the demand for labor such that an excess supply is always reproduced. Marx termed this process the continual regeneration of the reserve army of labor (Marx 1986a).2 Once we recognize that underemployment—the re serve army of labor—is a permanent feature of the labor market, labor mobility will not operate as a sufficient condition to equalize wage rates. The constant pressure of desperate pools of unemployed workers will significantly weaken any potential upward pressure on wage rates at the low end of the labor market. Concurrently, this will tend to exert downward pressure on above-average wage rates at the upper spectrum of wages through the replacement of the high-wage workers by these cheaper and possibly more acquiescent workers in the reserve army of labor. Marx’s analysis of aggregate labor markets suggests that movements in the wage level tend to be limited by both movements in the productivity of labor and movements in the reserve army of labor. Differential costs of production will essentially form “centers of gravity” around which actual wage rates will fluctuate. Labor organization is a crucial component of this process because it is only through struggle with capital that labor may be able to gamer wage gains from increased productivity or limit the impact of the reserve army of labor on wages.3
Wage differentials are then the result of three dynamics: (1) capitalist competition and technical change, which creates differentials in the conditions of production, productivity, and profitability; (2) continual regeneration of the reserve army of labor of the unemployed; (3) uneven effects of organized labor.
Having established within the Marxian model that capitalism in general recreates wage and employment inequality, we can now explore the systematic method in which this occurs on the basis of ascriptive characteristics of workers. The generation of jobs with substandard working conditions and the assignment of women and minorities to these jobs are both consistent with capitalist competition. Thus, beginning with capitalism in general, we derive the conditions for discrimination to exist. Gender and race discrimination and income inequality are symptoms of the dynamics of wage differentials. In this view, the genesis of the reserve army of labor is not simply reducible to actions of the capitalist class. Workers compete with each other for good jobs and thus, they too, are implicated in the dynamics of the reserve army.
The classical Marxian analysis provides only a starting point for an analysis of gender and race discrimination in the labor market. Understanding why particular ascriptive characteristics of workers define labor market positions entails an understanding of the structures capitalism is embedded in. There is an extensive literature that covers discrimination by gender and race and addresses these aspects of our economy. The literature on discrimination is, for the most part, carefully sectioned into two tracks: work on gender discrimination and work on racial discrimination. What is needed is a theory that can explain how and why both gender and race discrimination coexist under competitive capitalism. In her critique of segmented labor market theory, Albelda (1985) argues that white women and black men and women have always been separated from white males in the labor force. Labor market segmentation is actually a process whereby white women and black men and women are being integrated directly into the capitalist work system. Both characteristics are important to understanding the structure of labor markets. Glenn (1985, 1992) notes that it is imperative that gender and race be not merely additive aspects of the model. Rather, “a necessary step is the development of models which view race and gender stratification as part of a larger system of inequality” (Glenn 1985, 47). There are well-developed models of patriarchy (Hartmann 1981) and of colonial subordination (Fanon 1967), but few theories that attempt to explain both processes simultaneously. Glenn argues that these two systems of oppression cannot be seen merely as parallel because there is a dialectic relationship between gender and race, if only because individuals belong to both groups. The fact that both groups experience similar oppression under capitalism should also lead us to question whether they can be analyzed as phenomena independent of each other or of capitalism in general. Glenn (1991) points out that even the analysis of social reproduction (Humphries and Rubery 1984) is limited by not acknowledging a racial component. Social reproduction is constructed around racial categories whereby white women have occupied white-collar and lower professional positions while women of color have been disproportionately employed as service workers carrying out public reproductive labor. The dynamics of gender and race are intertwined in the economic and social system whereby the relative privilege white women enjoy in the labor market is conditioned by the existence of women of color who provide social reproductive labor.
Another difficulty in the literature on discrimination is that much of it relies on a theoretical foundation that gender and race discrimination are temporary phenomena not endemic to capitalism (Phelps 1972). These models, then, cannot help us understand why discrimination persists in the face of educational or job tenure parity. One key to understanding the dynamics of gender and race discrimination as simultaneous and linked processes is to explain why they continue to exist under capitalism and why these populations are overrepresented in low-wage jobs. It is here that we return to the theory of differential wages. In this model, wage differentials are not dependent on particular forms of discrimination, but persistent inequalities are continually recreated under capitalism. There is space for a complete theory of discrimination, but the model cannot determine who will occupy the discriminated positions. Given the work on discrimination by race and gender, it makes sense to think how the strength of these workers vis-à-vis the capitalist system has crucial implications for whether or not they will be able to gamer their share of income. One way is to think of gender and race as markers that identify groups of people who are more easily discriminated against, given the historical development of social structures. Looked at within this broader social construct, gender and race discrimination aimed at women and minorities in the labor market is linked to their disadvantaged position vis-à-vis capital relative to white men. Historically, these workers did not have the support of the more advantaged group in their struggles over wages.4 Thus, the extensive work on gender and race dynamics can be integrated into the broader dynamics of capitalism in general and we can develop a model of gender and race discrimination embedded in the capitalist process of accumulation.
This strand of inquiry has been explored by political economists Rhonda Williams and Patrick Mason. Mason (1993) extends Botwinick’s analysis of wage differentials to include the possibility of racial exclusion within competitive capitalism. Access to high-wage jobs is the concrete expression of discrimination based on the abstract understanding of discrimination as a labor allocation device for “determining service in the reserve army” (6). Williams draws on the way in which the competition among workers for access to good jobs is played out within the constructs of gender and race. She argues that “workers seeking to shelter themselves from bourgeoisie society’s most fragile and despised existence—life among the low-waged and unemployed—have ample reason to create and wield weapons to shelter themselves from other members of the working class” (Williams 1991, 77). The competition among workers plays out along the lines of gender and race through, in addition to other ways, union exclusion. Williams and Smith (1990) analyzed the influence of gender and race in the determinants of salary grade and job assignment in the service and maintenance union at Yale University. Their empirical results “suggest that Local 35’s wage setting process reproduces white supremacy within the union. All else equal, white men’s jobs receive significant and large wage and grade premiums” (71). White workers employ their power as the dominant union members to maintain their privileges in the labor market.
The classical Marxian model finds inequality, both in terms of wages and employment, to be endemic to the general process of accumulation. The continual regeneration of a reserve army is a part of this process and maintains a steady labor supply. The model does not tell us which workers will occupy these positions in the labor market; in fact, it is entirely unclear whether these workers should be identified by any particular ascriptive characteristics. The work done on gender and race discrimination points to the hypothesis that women and minorities indeed occupy these positions in the labor market in the United States. These groups experience systematic and sustained discrimination in terms of both wages and employment. To understand why, we needed to understand the underlying dynamics of capital accumulation and how this process has interacted with the structure of social relations among people in the United States. When approached from this perspective, the logic of poor relief programs in the United States becomes clear. Poor relief policies reinforce the dynamics of gender and race exclusion that originate in the labor market. This analysis is a first step in heeding Mason’s call to include state policy as a further level of concretization of policies of exclusion.
The Evolution of the United States’ System of Poor Relief
Poor relief in general is designed to reinforce the poor’s participation in paid labor while ensuring that mass upheaval does not erupt during economic downturns. Local control enables the consideration of local labor markets in the construction of poor relief policies. The U.S. labor market is characterized by wage and employment differentials based substantively on a worker’s gender or race. These patterns in the labor market are mirrored in policies in aid of the poor. The concrete structure of poor relief is limited by the dynamics of capital accumulation forever in search of lower labor costs and conditioned by the historical development of divisions based on gender and race in the United States.
The emergence of policies to alleviate fluctuations of the market began soon after capitalism’s first birth pangs (Polanyi 1944). At some point, every advanced capitalist economy developed programs to counteract the impact of the markets’ downturns on workers. Since capitalism and poor relief developed in tandem, one could argue that welfare policies functionally follow capitalist development. This would not be the entire picture. In some nations, such as the United States and Great Britain, the form the welfare state took is less generous and less universal than in continental Europe.5 The United States inherited its pattern of poor relief from the colonists’ native England. There, although the system of poor relief established by the Poor Laws of 1601 was national in scope, individual parishes had ultimate responsibility for their local poor (Trattner 1984, 12). Poor relief in the United States continued the tradition of local responsibility and the notion that communities are only responsible for their own poor. The Social Security Act of 1935,6 which nationalized poor relief in the United States, allowed the states to maintain control over many aspects of welfare programs—including benefit levels, work requirements, and the eligibility of childless individuals. Local control over these aspects both shifted responsibility from the federal government and allowed communities to regulate the poor relief with an eye to local labor market conditions and social structures characterized by gender and race divisions.
The variance in poor relief systems among nations is a function of many unique historical factors and the relationship between capital and the state in general. Esping-Andersen (1990) developed a typology for differentiating among welfare regimes in advanced capitalist nations where the differences among nations’ welfare systems are based on the specific formation of alliances between social groups, including, but not limited to, economic classes. Varying responses to the commodification of human labor comprises the history of the maturation of the welfare state in advanced nations and explains the more specific traits of the different welfare systems. Thus, although the general nature of poor relief is similar across nations, the specific outcome of poor relief policies varies. This analysis can be extended to explore the differences between localities in the United States since one of the enduring aspects of poor relief is substantial local control over eligibility and benefit levels. Poor relief reinforces the traditional structures of power and does not interfere with the needs of accumulation in particular localities.
In the United States, the underlying dynamic of the development of poor relief followed a cyclical pattern, linked to the needs of capitalist accumulation and organized primarily to pacify and maintain a stable, low-wage labor supply (Piven and Cloward 1971). This is opposed to other analyses of the welfare state, which view it as part of a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship with capitalism or as the evolutionary outcome of the simultaneous development of capitalism and liberal democracies (see Bowles and Gintis 1986; Offe 1984).7 The antagonistic interpretation of the history of the U.S. welfare state, well developed by Piven and Cloward, rejects the idea that symbiosis is the defining characteristic of the relationship between the state and the poor (see also Gough 1979). Poor relief is instead the result of the state’s response to cyclical changes in the labor market. Under capitalism, work is the primary means of organizing social life so that the breakdown of the employment structure—high unemployment or underemployment—leads to social upheaval. In general, poor relief is provided in times of economic and social turmoil and cut back when stability is reinstated. In effect, the state steps in to adjust labor supply when labor demand has shifted. State policies in aid of the poor are implemented to maintain civil order and sustain attachment to the labor force in times of economic turbulence. More specifically, the role of relief arrangements is to promote work at any wage, thus, “relief arrangements … have a great deal to do with maintaining social and economic inequalities” (Piven and Cloward 1971, xvii).
Poor relief is concretely structured by the specific gendered and racialized nature of the United States’ labor market. In the first analysis, social programs in the United States make a clear distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, which is traceable to the individual’s relationship to the labor market (Katz 1989). Programs such as Social Security and unemployment compensation reward labor market participation and are allocated for the deserving poor. These programs are universal, carry relatively generous benefit levels, and enable recipients to live above the level of abject poverty. Benefits are available to all citizens, regardless of income (up to a limit), personal habits, or individual characteristics. The programs for the undeserving poor, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and the Food Stamp program, are only available to citizens who qualify, based on their level of income, and carry stipulations concerning personal behavior. The benefits provided by these programs are sparse at best and are not meant to induce people to continue economic dependence on the state. This is clear when benefit levels of different types of programs are compared: in 1982, a foster parent would, on average, receive four times the amount of money an AFDC recipient would receive to raise one child (Pearce 1990). Although both programs are aimed explicitly at supporting children, the income support for a child in an AFDC recipient’s home is only a quarter of what a child can expect when living in a foster home where the parents’ employment status is not considered relevant to the child’s level of support.
Discrimination by gender and race both structure individuals’ relationships to the labor market and are interwoven into the construction of poor relief policies. Poor relief policies not only discipline low-wage labor in general, but more specifically, these policies reinforce the gendered and racialized character of low-wage labor markets in the United States. The development of this dynamic is a complicated historical process. Tracing this history will show how the dominant-class interest in “reproducing the members of society as gendered and racially conscious beings” plays out in the construction of policies in aid of the poor (Janiewski 1991, 71). Class interests in reproducing gender and race systems go beyond individual capitalists’ need for low-wage workers. The two systems, the labor market and poor relief, reinforce the continual regeneration of low-wage workers based on the ascriptive characteristics of individuals. Simultaneously, both systems reinforce the privileged nature of white male employment through both keeping minority and female wages down and, where necessary, keeping these individuals out of the capitalist labor market entirely. In reinforcing women’s domesticity, for example, the system of poor relief has helped reserve well-paid jobs for (white) men, further perpetuating women’s secondary position in the labor market. As noted above, competition among workers has often taken the form of exclusion where policies enacted by workers and their unions strive to reserve jobs for white men at the expense of working women and minorities. The implication of poor relief policies in the maintenance of low-wage labor markets is not, however, reducible to their interaction with the capitalist labor market. Poor relief policies that neglect workers outside the capitalist labor market help to maintain these workers’ dependency on their employers. Janiewski (1991) notes that this stabilizes the gender and race system by maintaining white male privilege (see also Glenn 1992). Poor relief in the United States has reinforced participation in low-wage labor markets in both the capitalist and noncapitalist sectors of the economy.
The undeserving poor includes women and minorities both because this serves a need for capital and because it is possible to discriminate against these individuals within the construct of American civil society. The literature on the undeserving poor, however, generally splits into three levels. The focus is to examine the potential recipient in terms of relationship to the labor market, gender, or race.8 These are not—as they are often portrayed—mutually exclusive categories. The differentiation of recipients by their gender or race follows both from the structure of labor markets and from the broader social constructions of gender and race. The characterization of undeserving poor as a gendered and racialized concept was institutionalized into national poor relief policy during the New Deal and continues in the discourse and practice of poor relief up to the current day.
The Social Security Act was implemented almost thirty years before the Civil Rights Act, and while it extended social rights to many Americans it also incorporated the nation’s racial divide. Southern congressional leaders were able to use their considerable committee power to shape the Social Security Act so that it did not interfere with labor supply patterns in the South (Quadagno 1994).9 Race became a significant factor in the allocation of poor relief under the act because it contained two important concessions to the southern leaders. The first was continued local discretion over benefit levels and terms of recipiency, and the second was the exclusion of black-dominated occupations from the Old Age Assistance program. Both concessions substantially reinforced the power of the southern elite over the black masses by making the latter entirely dependent on the wages and jobs the white elite offered. While working-class white males garnered a substantial safety net through the act’s programs, black Americans were unable to tap into these benefits.
Although the Social Security Act nationalized poor relief in the United States, individual states retained substantial control over the income maintenance programs for the able-bodied poor including, most importantly, AFDC. The states have discretion over benefit levels, the terms of recipiency, and whether or not they enact programs to provide income support for single men. Historically, the race component of the structure of poor relief played out most vividly in the southern United States. There, the definition of undeserving explicitly included all blacks—both men and women—who could work in the fields during harvest time for poverty wages (Lemann 1992, 5). Many states either denied benefits altogether to blacks or only allowed them to receive aid in the winter when there was no work in the fields. The United States Commission of Civil Rights found that this pattern prevailed as far north as southern Illinois. In the words on one poor relief recipient who testified in 1966:
I am a resident of Cairo. Soon as the month of May, the public aid would start sending letters to the recipients. Due to seasonable work, your grant is cut and you are supposed to make it up by doing this seasonable work….
The public aid recipient is a source of cheap labor for the farmer. We have asked my superintendent of public aid about forcing the people to the fields, why didn’t he wait and let us stay back until labor rise [i.e., until labor shortages forces wage levels up], and he said the poor farmers couldn’t pay any more, we’d have to go along with this going rate, and this going rate has been the same thing ever since I been in Cairo. (Quoted in Piven and Cloward 1971, 125)
Southern states also used exclusion clauses to deny welfare assistance to mothers who were deemed to be employable if “suitable” employment were available. Such employment, for a southern black woman, could be almost anything. In Georgia, a 1952 rule directed county welfare boards to deny all welfare benefits to mothers during the peak cotton-picking season (Piven and Cloward 1971, 135). Local leaders were able to sustain a strong labor supply because federal government poor relief policies did not interfere with local labor markets.
The second concession to southern congressional leaders was that blacks became ineligible for the programs designed for the “deserving poor.” Quadagno (1994, 1988) has documented how the Social Security Act also excluded the vast majority of blacks from the Old Age Assistance programs. In 1935, more than three-quarters of the nation’s blacks lived in the South, and 76 percent of black women were employed as either farmworkers or domestics in 1940 (Albelda 1985, 77). The bargain the southern congressional delegation struck denied old-age assistance to domestic and agricultural workers, and, as a result, only about 10 percent of the black labor force initially was covered by Old Age Insurance (Quadagno 1988). Where white Americans could wait out a spell of unemployment with the new unemployment insurance, most blacks were ineligible and thus more likely to work for white planters and industrialists at less than living wages.
Blacks still continue to receive less from Social Security than whites while proportionally paying more taxes for the program.10 Because Social Security coverage and benefits are lower for blacks, they are more likely than white parents to be a financial burden on their children in their old age (Oliver and Shapiro 1995). Black children, in turn, are less able to amass wealth (to buy homes or pay for a good college education) and move solidly into the middle class. This reinforces blacks’ status in the labor market as low-wage workers and makes their move into the middle class more difficult because they do not have the income supports that in general are given to whites. The construction of these policies never directly forced blacks into low-wage labor markets through legislative edict, but they did make it more difficult for blacks to escape poverty and low-wage work.
The consideration of gender adds another dimension to the concept of the undeserving poor and further complicates the relationship between capital and poor relief. There is a tension between the structure of the gender system, whereby women are supposed to remain in the home to care for children, and policies in aid of poor women. On the one hand, single mothers are provided with welfare benefits, but on the other hand, these benefits have never been substantial enough to enable poor women to live far above abject poverty. Many policymakers and reformers have stressed that welfare should not promote marital dissolution, nor should it be a substitute for male income. This has promoted analysts to suggest that poor relief policies punish women who are single mothers (L. Gordon 1994). However, another way to approach this tension is to see that women face labor market discrimination, which is reinforced by poor relief policies. The construction of poor relief discriminates against women by not providing a substantive safety net for unemployed women similar to the way it discriminates against black Americans. The outcome is the same: women are disadvantaged relative to (white) men in both the labor market and in the poor relief programs that support them in times of unemployment. These structures are mutually reinforcing.
Women form the bulk of welfare recipients, and, in the United States, the majority of poor relief programs are geared toward the maintenance of women with children to rear.11 Sapiro (1990) points out that not only are women the majority of poor relief recipients, but “it is not possible to understand the underlying principles, structures, and effects of our social welfare system and policies without understanding their relationship to gender roles and gender ideology” (Sapiro 1990, 37). She asserts that the welfare state fosters economic dependency on the part of women: “Our social policies assume that women are the primary caregivers, which means there is little assistance to be offered to women who are, in addition, breadwinners. Our social welfare system depends on women either being dependent or taking on what has become to be known as the ‘double burden’” (Sapiro 1990, 47).
Gender played a substantial role in the construction of poor relief from the dawn of the early Mother’s Pension programs instituted during the Progressive Era. In these programs, women were only deserving of relief if they were widowed or abandoned by their husbands, and even then they were subject to stringent housekeeping and chastity rules (L. Gordon 1994). Programs implemented to reduce female poverty at the turn of the century did not question the legitimacy of women’s economic dependence on men within the family. The Children’s Bureau was established in 1912 as the result of the efforts of white women in the Progressive movement who wanted society to recognize the value of mothering and to acknowledge that the public had a responsibility to assist mothers who were in financial need due to the absence of a spouse (Skocpol 1993; L. Gordon 1994). The Children’s Bureau opposed collective child-care policies; they believed they were a disservice to women for they would allow more women to work and be detrimental to the development of the nation’s children (L. Gordon 1994, 52).12 The early programs for mothers and widows strove to reconcile the implicit tension between supporting mothers’ right to aid and encouraging shiftlessness in men. Programs were developed with the idea that women and their children who were deprived of income through the dissolution of marriage by death or separation should be cared for by the state. This care, however, came with stipulations on the behavior of the woman in question; a woman’s dependence on the state was not to enable her to be truly economically independent and should under no circumstances promote men to shirk their familial responsibilities.13 Mother’s aid was always meager and was never intended to allow single mothers to live far above absolute poverty (L. Gordon 1994; Sapiro 1990). “Man-in-the-house” rules further enforced the conception that men, not the state, should provide economic support for women and children. If a welfare recipient consorted with men she would lose her benefits and be told that her boyfriend should support her and her children (Abramovitz 1988). States implemented these rules to ensure men were not shirking their familial responsibilities and were participating in productive, paid employment. In 1968, however, the Supreme Court struck these rules down: “Destitute children who are legally fatherless cannot be flatly denied federally funded assistance on the transparent fiction that they have a substitute father” (quoted in Piven and Cloward 1971, 308).
The Social Security Act not only institutionalized the racial divide into American poor relief policy but also enshrined the notion of women’s domesticity by maintaining the presupposition that women’s economic role was secondary to that of men’s. This reinforced women’s secondary role in the labor market by not providing women with the same safety net as (white) men. The act did not cover women’s primary occupations—teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers—and therefore systematically denied working women Social Security benefits that were generally available to working men (Quadagno 1994, 157). The act limited a homemaker’s ability to claim her husband’s Social Security benefits: until 1977, a woman had to be married for twenty years to qualify for spousal benefits, and still she must be married for ten years (Quadagno 1994, 229). AFDC’s program structure also assumes that women are not the primary breadwinners, that they are responsible for childrearing, and that children should be raised in a two-parent home. Each of these stipulations reduces the power of women in the labor market relative to white men through extending the concept of undeserving poor to include women without men to support them.
Poor relief reforms in the 1960s and 1970s continued to ensconce the racialized and gendered nature of the definition of undeserving poor. The War on Poverty programs still presumed that women should be financially dependent on male income. For example, Daniel Moynihan’s report entitled The Negro Family (U.S. Department of Labor 1965) argued that the breakdown of the black family was responsible for disproportionate numbers of black women on welfare. To solve the problem, black men needed to be given jobs so that they could support their families (Quadagno 1988, 17). Implicitly, the logic was that if black men had jobs, the family would remain intact. Women cannot support the family or are not breadwinners. In the late 1960s, the Work Incentive Program established that welfare mothers should work rather than remain in the home, but the program’s job training was still aimed at poor men (Sapiro 1990).
This logic is still at work: job training programs continually target poor men more often than poor women even though women are more likely to be poor and to have responsibility for children (Rose 1995). Further, to this day it is the poor woman who is punished if her man refuses to support her. At times, this has taken the form of criminalizing women’s sexuality. For example, in Boise, Idaho, in May of 1996: “A 17-year-old Emmett girl, nearly nine months pregnant, has been given a 30-day suspended sentence and three years’ probation for having sex. She was handed the sentence on Wednesday by Gem County magistrate Gordon Petrie after being found guilty of fornication, a state law that makes sex between unmarried people a crime…. The girl said prosecutors explained the charge was not about sex; it was about welfare and the high costs it puts on tax-payers” (The Nation 1996, 7). Most recently, President Clinton has “ended welfare as we knew it.” The congressional Republicans’ “Contract with America” had asked: “Isn’t it time for the government to encourage work rather than rewarding dependency? The Great Society has had the unintended consequence of snaring millions of Americans into the welfare trap. Government programs designed to give a helping hand to the neediest of Americans have instead bred illegitimacy, crime, illiteracy, and more poverty” (Contract with America, 65)
Welfare policy critics voiced two overriding concerns: rising illegitimate birthrates and the disincentive welfare provides to work. It is the latter that permeates the introduction to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, while the former provides the substance of the act: “Therefore, in light of this demonstration of the crisis in our Nation, it is the sense of the Congress that prevention of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and reduction in out-of-wedlock birth are very important. Government interests and the policy contained … is intended to address the crisis” (HR 3734, Title I, Sec. 101.10). The substantive change from previous legislation is that all states must require a “parent or caretaker receiving assistance under the program to engage in work …” (HR 3734, Title I, Sec. 402.A.1.A.ii). The aim is self-evident: make the poor work and maintain the sanctity of the two-parent family. What the act does not note is that this policy will impact women and minorities more than white men, given that these groups are excluded from other types of social insurance.14
Conclusion
Proponents of poor relief argue that it guarantees citizen welfare and provides a safety net in times of economic need. Welfare programs are seen for their positive impact in providing subsistence beyond the market. It is for these very qualities that conservatives decry welfare state policies.15 A fundamental issue, however, is the purpose of welfare: is it state benevolence designed to uphold the dignities of citizenship, or is there some other underlying determinant of poor relief implementation and practice? The argument here is that poor relief policies are not (nor have they ever been) designed to impede labor market participation. Further, these policies articulate existing patterns of gender and race oppression. Janiewski has stated that “Employers never recruited or managed workers as though they were colorless and sexless. They drew upon tradition to allocate work, power, honor, and resources while modifying the preexisting pattern to their purposes” (1991, 90). In this way, the structure of employment and the need of employers to have access to a continual supply of low-wage labor has played into the construction of poor relief. The privileged members of the labor market—predominantly white men—are eligible for the generous poor relief programs aimed at the deserving poor. The disadvantaged members of the labor market—predominantly women and minorities—have not historically been eligible for the substantive programs and, rather, have been recipients in programs that have explicitly aimed at pushing these workers back into the labor market at the lowest wages. The gender and race components of poor relief policies stem from discrimination embedded in the labor market. Poor relief policies reinforce a preceding parallel structure in the labor market. Linking these parallel developments shows the relationship between poor relief, labor market conditions, and gender and race exclusion.
Policymakers must acknowledge the link between the labor markets and poor relief in order to eradicate the gender and race bias in the composition of the poor. This endeavor is increasingly politically relevant as Congress has recently enacted a welfare reform program explicitly aimed at pushing welfare recipients toward employment in low-wage labor markets—even if this means welfare recipients must perform (unpaid) work for the state. This interactive dynamic between poor relief and labor market structures must be explored especially as welfare reform presupposes that all Americans have access to jobs at living wages. Policies such as pay equity, living wages, and affirmative action are a step in this direction because they strive to reduce labor market discrimination. This lessens the impact gender and race can play in the granting of poor relief since, without discrimination, these characteristics may not allocate women and minorities to the bottom of the labor market.
Notes
1. Recent strikes, such as the Staley workers in Illinois who battled over the length of the working day, were over absolute surplus value.
2. Humphries and Rubery (1988) point out that there are many ways in which women as a group may function as a labor reserve. If women’s labor is a buffer in the labor market, where relative female employment varies with cyclical and secular economic trends, then there should be procyclical variation in participation rates and wages. If women are entirely segmented, then women’s labor may fluctuate differently than men’s because they are not competing in the same labor markets. If women are substitutes, then their employment may increase cyclically as they are substituted for more expensive male labor. My chapter is beginning with the general hypothesis of the reserve army and is leaving these finer distinctions to a later work.
3. Note that skilled labor will receive higher wage rates than unskilled because of the extra costs of training skilled labor (Marx 1986a, 172). This does not suggest, however, that all workers with similar skills will receive a uniform wage.
4. There is an extensive literature on the history of discrimination by unions and the fight for the family wage. Brenner and Ramas (1984) argue that women were less able than men to defend their skills and were more constrained by domestic tasks, especially since adult women workers often had children to support or were widowed and were therefore very desperate. Without the spare time to organize, and with their lack of mobility due to the responsibilities of child care, it was difficult to search for work if the local employer paid low wages. Young women were more likely to organize but since they were usually only working temporarily, it was difficult to sustain union activity. The gendered division of labor, however, existed long before unions began their discriminatory policies. At the time of the drive for a family wage, in the 1840s, the unions were concerned about the competition they were experiencing from women, due to their lower salaries. They argue that the movement was more an effect of women’s lower wages rather than a cause. See also Sen (1980).
5. This is not to argue that the state is functional for capital as there have been programs, such as Affirmative Action, which attempt to address labor market inequalities. On another level, the programs examined here do enable people to exist without wage labor. Thus, even if poor relief does not eradicate inequality, it does decrease the percentage of the population of women and minorities that are absolutely destitute. These caveats aside, this chapter explores the darker side of poor relief.
6. The Social Security Act created most of the social programs we associate with the American “welfare state,” such as Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). ADC later became Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in recognition of the fact that the state transfers income to a family, not directly to a child (Sapiro 1990). In this chapter, the program is always referred to by its current name, AFDC.
7. The symbiotic approach has been extended to analyses of the development of social policy in the less developed economies with the argument that these nations will create social welfare policies as their economies grow. See MacPherson and Midgley (1987).
8. This is to say that analyses tend to focus on one issue, rather than all three simultaneously.
9. In the 1930s, southern political power was ensconced in the Democratic party. Poll taxes and literacy tests for voter registration meant that blacks and many poor whites were disenfranchised. This reduced opposition to the Democratic party majority; with no political opposition for congressional seats, southern Democrats were able to attain seniority and thus control key committees in the House and Senate (Quadagno 1994, 21).
10. Quadagno (1994) points out that because (1) there is a cap on the level of income that is taxable for Social Security, and (2) blacks earn on average less than whites, “black men were taxed on 100 percent of their income, on average, while white men earned a considerable amount of untaxed income” (161).
11. For further discussion of the composition of welfare recipients, see Albelda et al. (1996).
12. Collective child care was also deemed inappropriate for women because it would engender greater exploitation of female wage labor: “Some [settlement workers] feared that child care would makes things harder for women, allowing greater exploitation of their labor…. A quarter of a century later Grace Abbott, head of the Children’s Bureau, was arguing that such provision might lead mothers to collapse under the double burden of earning and domestic labor” (L. Gordon 1994, 52).
13. Linda Gordon (1994) has yet another insightful quote: when Hull House women discussed Chicago in 1895, they wrote “The theory that ‘every man supports his own family’ is as idle in a district like this as the fiction that ‘every one can get work if he wants’” (53).
14. Yoon and Spalter-Roth (1995) found that 74 percent of all unemployed male workers and 80 percent of all unemployed female workers do not receive Unemployment Insurance benefits. A higher proportion of women than men are likely to be screened out by basic criteria such as required weeks of work in previous job, base earnings, or necessary high quarter earnings.
15. This includes black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury, both economists, who argue that self-help, rather than government programs, constitutes the proper path for black economic progress in the United States. They believe that a “culture of poverty” was spawned by welfare state policies that hamper black progress through enabling dependence on the state, rather than the market, and propelling the “crisis” of the black family. For a critique of their views see Gooding-Williams (1987).