By the Rank-and-Filer, June 2012
This was a guest lecture I gave to an undergrad course on the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality on the history and importance of welfare rights struggles to feminism.
I’ll start with a broad overview of welfare history, then discuss welfare rights movements and the right wing attacks on welfare, and close by reflection on what is relevant in thinking about those movements for feminism today.
History of U.S. Welfare
Welfare rights, and welfare systems, have their roots in the development of capitalism. The development of capitalism in Europe—and later its spread across the world—involved pushing millions of peasants off their lands and into wage labor economies. As workers were increasingly severed from access to land to grow their own food, their survival was dependent on regular access to wage employment. Capitalism, however, had major boom and bust cycles, requiring a huge number of new workers one year while production and the economy was growing, and laying them off another with the advent of an economic downturn. Without land or work, workers had no means of surviving through these economic slumps. Even in the best of economic conditions, capitalism would churn through workers rapidly, leaving many too old, too injured and too sick to continue working. These formers workers and extra workers and their families, over and over again, would rebel to demand access to the means of surviving. For many of them, they knew the wealth accumulated by owners and available to states was a product of their past work and the work of their family members and communities. From unemployment insurance to pensions to poor relief, forms of welfare grew with capitalism. People saw themselves as having a right to survive, a right to financial support, even when the factories no longer had use for them.
Here in the U.S., our current welfare systems evolved in two major waves of struggles. In the 1930s, massive organizing by workers, housewives, tenants and others won a national pension system known as Social Security and the beginnings of unemployment insurance for most worker, especially white workers. Agricultural workers and domestic workers, both industries with large numbers of African-Americans, were excluded from the right to organize and most benefits. After World War II, the U.S. Government granted home mortgages and education support to former soldiers and their families, again enforcing racial segregation. These racist policies set up the racial contradictions of the welfare state, contradictions we still see today in the racist, anti-black attack on welfare recipients.
From the 1940s into the 1970s, Blacks had moved North as the cotton economy collapsed in the South. They moved into Northern cities at exactly the moment that industrial jobs moved out—first to the suburbs, later to rural areas and eventually overseas. Those lower-skill working class jobs left in the cities, such as white collar employment and the building trades, worked to systematically exclude Black workers. In the 1960s, Blacks in the northern cities found themselves increasingly locked out of wage economies. As the Civil Rights Movement gained strength and scope, increasingly these northern Blacks began to fight back. They rose up in riots in the 1960s and early 1970s, mobilized into political organizations like the National of Islam, the Black Panther Party or the Revolutionary Union Movement, and demanded political and economic power.
Welfare Rights Movement
Black women were a major part of all this organizing, but Black women also lead another parallel movement: demanding access to welfare. In the 1960s, Black and Puerto Rican women organized in large numbers to demand and win access to Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a national welfare program to support poor single mothers. The program was set up to keep the numbers of recipients low and to work to humiliate and degrade recipients. These welfare rights activists demanded welfare benefits, and major changes in how those benefits were given to allow for dignity and respect. They took over welfare offices in mass direct-action demonstrations, partnered with anti-poverty lawyers in winning lawsuits, and built strong relationships with left social workers, the broader Black Freedom Movement, and many other movements of their day. The movement was tremendously successful, winning major improvements to welfare benefits for single, poor women of color in the 1960s.
The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was the major organizing umbrella for these welfare rights activists. Building one of the largest poor people’s membership organizations in the U.S., NWRO linked direct action organizing in Boston, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities with DC lobbying, strategic coalitions and legal battles.
In the mid-1970s, business elites began to organize aggressively to make workers and poor people pay the costs of getting out of the country’s major economic depression. They attacked labor unions, drove down wages, undermined worker protections and started a long process that continues today to keep wages from growing as face as productivity. But they also worked to drive down the social wage—benefits working people and the poor receive outside of work, usually from the state, that helps them survive. Welfare benefits were a major target.
This is a good moment to reflect on the differences between so-called universal or insurance-based benefits and means-tested benefits. Social Security pension benefits are tied to how many years you worked, and to your wage while working. Social Security is generally seen to be a benefit people are entitled to, a form of insurance that you buy in to and hence deserve to be paid out of. This isn’t actually quite true for Social Security, but it is perceived that way. Unemployment benefits are understood similarly, as a form of insurance a worker has paid into and has a right to take out of. Poor relief is different. Poor relief is a form of means-tested benefits, benefits that go to someone because they are poor and can’t support themselves. Often, poor relief and means tested programs are much more stigmatized, in the sense that people receiving such benefits are seen as bad or undeserving. Racism and sexism combine to make Black women a particularly vulnerable target to being cast as undeserving.
Attacking poor relief helps out in attacking workers. As people are forced off of welfare rolls, they are driven into the workforce, where they are competing for low-wage jobs against other workers. This competition helps drive down everyone’s wages. In a booming economy, these workers are absorbed into the increasing demand for workers. In a bad economy, these low wage workers can help drive down others’ wages to keep up profits for business owners.
Attack on Welfare
In the 1980s here in New York, Mayor Koch began to roll back the victories of the National Welfare Rights Organization’s New York City work by changing policy to push as many people off the welfare rolls as possible. This went along with policies in the mid-1970s, including attacking the wages and benefits of public sector workers, introducing tuition fees in the public university system, cutting subway service and raising tolls, and forcing through other programs that made the poor carry the costs of the city’s economic depression and budget deficits in a way that improved profit for the city’s business elites.
Similar policies slowly spread across the country. In the early 1990s, New York City again lead the way in attacking the poor with expanding workfare programs. Workfare had been around for a long time, but became increasingly popular in the 1990s as the need for low-wage service workers grew. The idea, broadly termed “labor market activation” in Sociology writing on the welfare state, and “work first” in welfare policies, is to move as many people as possible off welfare and into jobs. These jobs could be anything, include low-wage jobs with terrible conditions. In work first policies, getting into any form of work as quickly as possible takes importance over education, raising your children or any other considerations. As part of trying to move people off welfare and into jobs, workfare requires welfare recipients to do unpaid, menial jobs to receive their welfare benefit. These jobs might be in the private or public sector, though here in New York City are generally in the Parks Department or in cleaning government buildings. Workfare calculates the number of hours you must work a week based on your benefit, assuming you were being paid minimum wage. Workfare recipients were often forced to take poor childcare and to abandon education or long term career goals.
In 1996 Clinton took the example of New York City and made it national policy. The welfare reform bill, the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children and replaced it with TANF, Temporary Aid to Needy Families. TANF had a lifetime limit of five years on benefits, required workfare for nearly all recipients, and introduced incentives and programs for cities and states to aggressively work to get as many people off welfare as possible as quickly as possible. There is strong evidence that the vast majority of people forced off welfare either end up unemployed, or in poverty-level jobs. Welfare reform also severely limited access to benefits for refugees and documented immigrants.
Since welfare reform, the welfare rights movement has continued to organize. In New York City and elsewhere, workfare workers tried to form unions (and were legally barred from doing so), organized protests and lobbying to demand basic worker rights. Welfare recipients have successfully fought for improved access to childcare. In many states, immigrant welfare organizers managed to succeed in getting the state to make up part of the federal cuts.
Relevance today for feminism
Why does the welfare rights movement matter? Here I’ll lay out roughly three frameworks to understand the importance of the welfare rights movement, particularly for feminist struggles.
1. It teaches us about how patriarchy has changed
One, it teaches us something very powerful and very relevant about how patriarchy has changed. As capitalism has increasingly required the work of women over the last sixty years, we’ve seen a major restructuring for how misogyny has worked. Where patriarchy used to be very centered on keeping women out of of the workforce before the 1960s, since the 1970s we’ve seen increasingly capitalism work to move women out of the home and into the workforce. In part this has been because of an effort overall to lower wages since the 1970s. Working class people have largely seen their wages driven down in the last few decades to make it impossible to support a family on a single wage. Even the overall wages of working class families, even with two wages, has been driven down. It’s also been about changes in the economy, as there is a growing need for low-skill service workers in the booming sectors (in a handful of cities) of building services (like janitors and security guards), retail and domestic work. In major global cities like New York City, women forced off welfare have helped expand the labor pool for these low-wage jobs.
But this phenomena of how capitalism has restructured patriarchy is much broader than just Black women on welfare. Young Latina and Asian increasingly make up the main productive workers on the planet in sweatshops in Mexico, China or in the U.S. White professional women, while continuing to face sexist discrimination, have broken into major corporations, professional fields and academia. In taking up and responding to one of the demands of the feminist movement in the 1970s—access to work—capitalism has increasingly relied on women’s labor in the changing economy. Welfare rights struggles have been one of the major places where women have contested and challenged this process. There women have fought for the choice to stay home with their kids, and for the terms of this work: that work should pay a living wage, be coupled to access to affordable and quality childcare, should be jobs with dignity and opportunities for growth.
2. A relevant feminist politics should take welfare rights seriously
This brings us to the next reason welfare rights movements really matter. In the battle against sexism and patriarchy, there has always been a big divide between women based on race and class privilege. Since the 1970s, one form of this divide has widened: white, economically privileged women have won decent access into the labor market, while Black and Brown women have faced intensifying exploitation and poverty. In many cases, white professional women accessing the labor market depends on the labor for their household being done by low-wage Black and immigrant domestic workers. Precisely because of this polarization, battling sexism requires an awareness of these differences in how women face capitalism. As women have different experiences in entering the labor market, addressing sexism and women’s oppression separate from capitalism and poverty risks only addressing the needs of a narrow, very privileged group of white upper-class women. I’d argue a meaningful feminist politics today has to be rooted in a strong respect for the struggles of immigrant and Black women. And in the U.S., one of the main and most vibrant site of these struggles by poor women of color has been for welfare rights.
3. The issues faced by the welfare rights movement are feminist issues
Not only is the welfare rights movement lead by those women who continue to suffer the full brunt of sexism and misogyny, but the very issues they are fighting around have relevance for all women. Welfare rights activist insist on both living-wage employment and the right to choose to stay home and take care of children instead of work. They demand the ability to stay home and care for children be separated from dependence on a man, on a nuclear family, and insist that household labor is of value to us as a society. They demand that caring forms of household labor, like childcare and care for elderly people, be honored and adequately compensated if they happen in a family, or if they happen through a the market. Welfare rights movements are on the leading edge of a radically different vision for how we should organize the economy, based on valuing caring labor, so-called women’s labor, and insisting that the market, capitalist economy and profit shouldn’t be our main system for deciding whose work matters. The majority of working class and middle class women, even ones with decent paying work, continue to face the bind of doing the bulk of the childcare, elder care and household labor, and continuing to carry the burden of the market being our main system for deciding which work is rewarded and how.
I argue that the welfare rights movement is absolutely core to vibrant feminist organizing today, and represents one of the most important feminist struggles of the last century. The welfare rights movement speaks to the core issues of capitalism and our economy today. Welfare rights activists insist the poor shouldn’t carry the burden for the economy crisis or be excluded from growing wealth, that caring labor both inside and outside the home should be compensated and respected, that mothers should have a right to access paid work on their own pace, with access to good work and good conditions. Welfare rights organizing should be central to our understanding of gender issues and feminism. Unfortunately, racism and classism has largely kept the welfare rights movement from having this central place in our understanding of gender and gender liberation struggle.