Blog 10

Ten years ago Clinton proposed to “end welfare as we know it” through training and education, childcare and medical service to liberate people who were stuck in the welfare system. He said that people must work because welfare is a second chance not a way of life. The result was that TANF gave women positive incentives that they never had to get out of poverty. In fact poverty rates for all children fell and especially for black children whose poverty rates fell by twenty five percent.
Although these are great successes, most families say that even though they are working, they aren’t making it out of poverty. In order to find a job, women need to attend weekly meetings that they can’t miss or else they’ll lose their TANF benefits. When they do find a job, physically getting can be a challenge and make ends meet is still an obstacle because a lot of the jobs available only offer minimum wage salaries. Even with a large number of people at work, they are still not self-sufficient because many are still depending on other forms of public assistance to care for their families. It is estimated that 60% of the families who lost cash benefits have signed up for Medicaid, food stamps and disability benefits. Unless problems like day care, transportation are fully addressed it may be impossible to move TANF to the next level. (NPR.org)
After the welfare reform women had to used various adaptive strategies to survive. They had find ways to make their work schedules coordinate with their child care schedules. Also, they had to budget the little money they had and fight to get what they didn’t have from public assistance. After the welfare reform they especially had to fight for “work” subsidies to obtain center based child care. Center care was the best option available because it provided more subsidies, was more flexible and stable and usually provided educational activities for their children. Also the agency workers were knowledgeable and helpful to mothers who needed help “working the system”.
These survival strategies show the interrelations between work and care through the welfare-to-work programs. Many mothers turned to these programs to find work and to take advantage of the subsidies offered for child care. Although they were finding work there was still the challenge of finding ways to be flexible with there schedules. For example, like Brittany from chapter 3, she had an internship way across town on top of another job that were both extremely far from her home and her child care provider. She had to use the employ a strategy mean leaving her daughter in the care of her sister for days at a time because it would be utterly impossible to make it to all four locations and back on the same day.
Chaudry’s recommendations on the welfare reform were that the government should increase funding for children’s programs and unify the system. He also thinks that the government should create a policy that acknowledges single mothers in the working world. He suggests that jobs be set up to where people can earn higher wages over time in order to break the poverty cycle. There should be less red tape! Public assistance programs should be easier to access and simpler in general. They should also be coordinated in a way that is educational and beneficial for children.
Robert Rector, who co-created the welfare reform of 1996, had very dissimilar recommendations. He believes these women should have finished school before they started their families. He wants the percentage of women who have children out of wed-lock, thirty-eight percent, to decrease dramatically. He also thinks that everyone needs to work and contribute to the labor force. It was suggested that education is the only real way to get out of poverty and secure employment but he doesn’t think that the program should support mothers going back to school. She claims that is expects them to be on the payroll and not to go back to school.
Vivyan Adair, associate professor of women's studies at Hamilton College agrees more with Chaudry’s views. She thinks that those who are willing and able to work and attend school and care for their families should be encouraged to lift themselves out of poverty. She thinks we should we support and reward women who have had children out of wedlock and want to go to school. They should not be viewed as unworthy and incapable because is so we are shunning an entire population that has massive potential.
The last videos made it clear that anti-poverty policies still need to be reformed. In Waukesha Wisconsin, the Salvation Army passes out lunches to 5 days a week to children who would otherwise go without food. These are the children who depend on the free lunch programs during the school year but struggle have food in their bellies during the summer. In Reno, Nevada, there are currently 170 people in living in tent city. In the last 23 years Nevada’s unemployment rate jumped almost 60 percent in the last year. The problem is that the rate of pay is staying the same while cost of living is rising.