Ellen Reese

Backlash against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Part I. Welfare Opposition: Causes and Consequences 1. Deferred Dreams, Broken Families, and Hardship: The Impact of Welfare Reform 2. Attacking Welfare, Promoting Work and Marriage: Continuity and Change in Welfare Opposition Part II. The First Welfare Backlash (1945--1979) 3. The 1950s Welfare Backlash and Federal Complicity 4. Explaining the Postwar Rise of Welfare Opposition 5. Southern Welfare Backlashes: Georgia and Kentucky 6. Western and Northern Welfare Backlashes: California and New York 7. Setting the Stage: The Failures of Liberal Innovation Part III. The Contemporary Welfare Backlash (1980--2004) 8. The Rise of the Republican Right and the New Democrats 9. Business Interests, Conservative Think Tanks, and the Assault on Welfare 10. Congressional Attacks on Welfare, 1980--2004 11. Rebuilding the Welfare State: Forging a New Deal for Working Families Appendix 1: States That Restricted Eligibility for ADC (1949--1960) Appendix 2: Variables and Data Sources Used in Quantitative Analysis Notes References Index

The Punitive Turn in Social Policies: Critical Race Feminist Reflections on the USA, Great Britain, and Beyond

This article reviews Loic Wacquant’s (2009) book Punishing the Poor, arguing that critical race or intersectional feminist theory and scholarship on the state provides important insights on social policy developments that are overlooked or under-theorized by Wacquant. We draw heavily from our own research on welfare state restructuring and grassroots welfare rights activism in the USA and Great Britain, but we also review other relevant scholarship on welfare and criminal justice policies. We conclude with both a research agenda for further critical race and feminist analysis of recent transformations in the state, and a political agenda informed by critical race feminism for those interested in challenging the punitive trends in policies towards the poor.

The causes and consequences of U.S. welfare retrenchment

ABSTRACT In this study, I examine the political forces behind the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and its impacts on low-income families. I argue that welfare reform was actively promoted by a cross-class alliance of ideologically conservative and low-wage employers, politicians competing for the white vote, and conservative movement organizations (namely, the Christian right and anti-immigrant organizations). These groups gained public support for welfare reform policies through an emotionally powerful discourse appealing to racist stereotypes of the poor, public anxieties about single motherhood, and broadly held moral values and beliefs. PRWORA fails to address the structural bases of poverty among female-headed households and its implementation has created material hardships for many of them.

Organizing Temporary, Subcontracted, and Immigrant Workers Lessons from Change to Win’s Warehouse Workers United Campaign

Since 2008, Warehouse Workers United (WWU) has organized thousands of low-wage warehouse workers in Southern California’s Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, many of whom are temporary, subcontracted, and immigrant workers. Warehouse Workers Resource Center (WWRC), formed in 2011, has provided additional legal services and other resources to warehouse workers. Combining protest tactics, a legal and media strategy, and a commodity chain organizing strategy, WWU and WWRC helped warehouse workers to win back millions of dollars of stolen wages and to pass new regulatory legislation for employers of warehouse workers. In coalition with other labor organizations, they also obtained an agreement by Walmart to improve its workplace safety standards. This case study, based on field research and interviews with key informants, provides important lessons for those seeking to organize marginalized workers in other industries and regions.

The Contours of Color at the World Social Forum: Reflections on Racialized Politics, Representation, and the Global Justice Movement

This essay critically reflects on our experiences and observations, as a multi-racial research team from the USA, of the politics of race and racism at the 2005 meeting of the World Social Forum which took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The challenges of discussing issues of race, ethnicity, and racism at the WSF are considerable given (1) the over-representation of whites and the wide variety of racial and ethnic groups participating in the WSF, (2) national differences in race and ethnic relations and the discourses used to discuss such relations, and (3) the political silences about racism that pervade Brazil and many other countries. Overcoming such challenges is crucial to making the WSF and the global justice movement more inclusive of people of color, raising consciousness about racial and ethnic oppression and its role in the current global economy among political activists, building effective transnational coalitions among anti-racist groups, and envisioning a truly just and democratic world.

North-south contradictions and bridges at the world social forum

This paper uses the results of a survey of participants at the World Social Forum that was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2005 to examine North/South issues and differences within the progressive sector of global civil society. Our purpose is to reflect on the problems of overcoming contradictions among and within counter-hegemonic transnational social movements in order to promote more effective cooperation in global social justice projects.

Barriers to Latino Warehouse Workers’ Health Care: Survey Results from Inland Southern California and Policy Implications

ABSTRACT This article uses original survey data to explore the barriers to health care access among Latinos who are low-wage warehouse workers, providing a window on health care vulnerabilities of workers of low wages that are especially acute among undocumented immigrants and contingent workers. About one third of respondents had visited a doctor in the past year, whereas about two thirds lacked health insurance. Results from our logistic regression analysis show that, controlling for other factors, unemployed workers, direct hires, and those with health insurance had significantly greater odds than those without these characteristics to have visited a doctor in the past year. Along with changes in immigration and health care policies, reducing employers’ reliance on temporary staffing agencies is imperative for improving these and other low-wage workers’ health care access.

Latin American Social Movements and the Social Forum Process

Since its founding meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, the World Social Forum (WSF) has quickly become the largest international gathering of progressive social activists seeking to resist neoliberal globalization and to democratize the global economy. Organized annually or biannually by an International Council and Local Organizing Committee in various cities and countries, the WSF has drawn as many as 155,000 people in 2005, with participants from more than 150 countries. Local, national, regional, and thematic forums have also been organized throughout Latin America. Although their role is contested among those espousing horizontal and autonomous forms of organizing, socialist parties and politicians in Latin America have actively participated within and even helped to fund the social forum process. Youth, who predominate among attendees, organized their own Intercontinental Youth Camp. Social forum meetings, and the processes through which they are organized, have helped to strengthen and expand international, cross-generational, and cross-movement ties among Latin American social movement activists, and helped activists to share ideas and deepen their political consciousness. Formal social movement assemblies, which endorse international days of action and transnational campaigns, and public marches and other collective actions occurring during these meetings have helped to move these meetings beyond “talk shops.”

The World and US Social Forums Judith Blau and Marina Karides, editors Lexington Books. 2009. 252 pages.

After reading this book one is struck by the fact that in the 21st century one’s race continues to limit the opportunity to succeed in America. Pager argues that “rather than being merely a problem of the past, direct racial bias continues to shape employment outcomes in ways that contribute to persisting racial inequality.” Moreover, she asserts that “race must not disappear from our discussions of public policy or our conversations about the problems of prisoner reentry.” Pager’s book deserves to be read widely by anyone interested in prisoner reentry as well as those interested in stigma and discrimination based on one’s race or ethnicity.

29.95 paper

Currently, the dominant debates about state and national welfare programs in the United States focus on how just how little we should be spending on them and just how strict work requirements for receiving welfare should be. Brian Steensland’s The Failed Welfare Revolution: America’s Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy reminds us that our country’s welfare debates were not always so narrowly circumscribed. Based on careful archival research, this book provides the first comprehensive scholarly account of the rise and fall of proposals for a guaranteed annual income (GAI) in the United States, from their emergence in national policy discussions in the early 1960s to their defeat within Congress in the late 1970s, and their persistent influence on the national welfare reform debates and attacks on welfare entitlements in the 1980s. Steensland’s book makes three main arguments. First, he argues that “the main obstacle to GAI legislation was the cultural distinction that Americans draw between different categories of poor people” (p. 3). Here, he claims that cultural perceptions of the worthiness of different types of poor people and broad support for maintaining such moral distinctions, limited support for GAI proposals, which threatened to undermine them: