Since last August when Clinton made good his promise to 'end welfare as we know it', the federal government has been in the process of dismantling 60 years of social reforms. The full effects of the new welfare law will not be known until at least next summer, when its massive cuts in welfare, food stamps and most other forms of government assistance will have been carried out on a national scale. And no one yet knows what the next recession will bring, when hundreds of thousands of workers lose their jobs without a social safety net on which to fall back.
But Wisconsin's new welfare programme, now called 'Wisconsin Works', provides a glimpse of the future, since it provided the model which is now being followed nationally. Under Wisconsin's workfare programme, welfare recipients with children older than 12 weeks are required to work 30 hours a week for a monthly cheque of $555 which works out at about a dollar below the hourly minimum wage. And $4.25 is deducted from their cheques for every hour of work they miss, so that many welfare workers routinely earn as little as $2.88 per hour about half the minimum wage.
Wisconsin chose January, the coldest month of the year, to cut or end cash assistance to 12 percent of the state's welfare recipients. This led to a sharp rise in homelessness in the city of Milwaukee, where in the face of overflowing homeless shelters the Red Cross finally declared an emergency. Half the families living on the streets of Milwaukee in January had become homeless as a direct result of losing their welfare benefits.
The state of Wisconsin now requires that even parents in families with incomes which are 25 percent below the poverty line must pay for part of the cost of childcare. Needless to say, most cannot, which makes it difficult to hold down a job. Others are cut off due to bureaucratic errors or confusion over the welfare system's complicated red tape. Other families have lost their entire benefits due to so called 'non-cooperation' which might mean only that a welfare recipient missed a single appointment at the welfare office.
The city of New York, where welfare workers are being used to perform what were once union jobs, shows how the welfare cuts represent an attack on the entire working class. The city now employs 35,000 welfare recipients in its 'Work Experience Programme' (WEP), with the numbers projected to rise to 150,000 by the year 2000 more than the current membership of the biggest city workers' union. They perform jobs in hospitals, subways and in city parks and offices with welfare cheques that are, at $5 per hour, just a fraction of what union workers earn. And they face substandard working conditions often working without protective gear and without toilet facilities. Signs reading 'No WEP workers allowed' have actually been posted on toilet doors. WEP worker Sandra White, who ended up on welfare after she was laid off from her job as a bank worker seven years ago, said that she asked her supervisor how her dirty and unskilled workfare job would lead to permanent full time employment. She recalled, 'He said this was designed to humiliate you to get you off your butt, get off welfare and get a job.'
Clinton's welfare law is best known for forcing welfare mothers to work for their benefits and for its maximum five year lifetime limit for families to receive welfare. But it is actually a vast web of restrictions on welfare, food stamps and most other forms of government assistance all of them punitive, all aimed at devastating the lives of the poorest members of the working class while worsening the lives of all workers. Thus it cuts child nutrition programmes by nearly $3 billion over six years, at a time when 12 million children under the age of six don't get enough to eat in the US. Even so, Congress voted against offering emergency vouchers for food and other necessities to the children of parents who lose their benefits because they cannot find work. It also cut off all disability benefits to 135,000 children.
The new law's food stamp provisions are no less vicious. Most immigrants are to be denied virtually any government assistance including welfare, food stamps and even disability benefits. Almost 800,000 immigrants who already receive Social Security Income and who are unable to work will be cut off by the end of August. Those who are in nursing homes will be thrown out because the government will no longer pay for their care.
Some state government agencies have attempted to soften the blow of the new welfare law by applying for waivers, to continue benefits for some immigrants and to temporarily exempt areas with high unemployment rates. Clinton himself has said he favours softening the cruellest aspects of the law. But this shouldn't be mistaken as an act of goodwill. In fact, most states have developed welfare programmes which are stricter than required.
Clinton tried to give the appearance that he was helping to create jobs for welfare recipients last month when he announced that he had issued an executive order to all agencies of the federal government to hire people on welfare. As columnist Bob Herbert wrote, 'Listeners could be forgiven for imagining one-time welfare recipients hurrying off to their spiffy new government jobs. That was the image Mr Clinton intended to create.' But the jobs don't exist. Last year, for example, the government filled a grand total of 32 full time blue collar jobs in the Boston area, 31 in New York and 17 in Seattle. Prospects in the private sector for unskilled entry level jobs aren't much better. In Chicago, for example, there are six unemployed workers for every entry level job opening. The vast majority of welfare recipients will be unable to find jobs, no matter how hard they try.
'I think it is going to look like it did in the Depression,' argued Liz Krueger of the Community Food Resource Centre in New York. 'We'll have tent camps. I think we will have a boom in homelessness so extreme that nobody in modern times could have even imagined it.' It is worth remembering that the Depression gave rise to the greatest era of working class struggle in US history.