In recent decades, growing numbers of Americans have faced precarious job markets, stagnant wages, large debt burdens, and soaring rents, all factors fueling a widening income gap and contributing to a vanishing middle class. Political and economic elites have failed to adequately navigate these changes, and the bill for this neglect is paid with increasing economic inequality, heightened distrust of government, and deep political divisions. Eva Bertram’s The Workfare State carefully examines the emergence and persistence of one core component of this policy failure: a system of social protection that ties income assistance to employment.
Bertram questions why U.S. federal policy addresses poverty by mandating work, despite increasingly unstable work conditions. Her explanation is rooted in the structure of the Southern economy and dynamics of the U.S. two-party system: Divisions in the Democratic Party and the low-wage Southern labor market explain why political leaders “rewrote the social contract for poor families between the 1960s and 1990s” (p. 4). Thoroughly researched and carefully argued, this study reveals that the demise of need-based welfare entitlements and the persistence of a work-based approach to public assistance is not principally the result of Republican-led retrenchments or party polarization. Rather, from inception to implementation, workfare is by and large a Democratic project. Although Democratic policymakers typically support redistribution more than Republicans do, and workers tend to fare better under Democratic administrations (Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy, 2008), Democratic initiatives exacerbated inequality by creating and entrenching a workfare state.
Bertram draws on historical analysis of legislative records paired with quantitative data capturing partisan and regional divisions on key roll call votes to make this argument. She begins by examining the New Deal origins of federal welfare provisions, though the bulk of the book traces the chronology of workfare from the 1960s to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, with particular emphasis on the pivotal role of conservative Southern Democrats. A few trends stand out.
First, public assistance began as a “thin entitlement,” not a robust welfare state. The 1935 Social Security Act provided aid to the elderly, single mothers with dependent children, and the blind and disabled—populations all broadly labeled “unemployable.” Notably, Southern Democrats did not launch an assault on the welfare state as such, but rather on specific provisions that affected the region’s disproportionately black low-wage labor force. While Southern states used their discretionary authority to allocate relatively generous provisions for the elderly poor and disabled, the same jurisdictions marginalized aid to families with dependent children (AFDC, formerly Aid to Dependent Children [ADC]) and sharply restricted access on the basis of race and class. Employing legal loopholes, caseworkers routinely refused aid to unmarried mothers on the pretense of “unsuitable” home life, and disproportionately excluded black families by labeling parents “employable”—a strategy used not only to deny benefits but also to shore up seasonal labor and domestic service markets.
Second, in the 1960s and 1970s, Southern Democrats used their veto power to chip away at cash assistance for poor families and replace it with coercive labor requirements, while reinforcing public support for the elderly and disabled. In one of the most intriguing aspects of the analysis, Bertram delves into the legislative battles over President Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP)—an alternative to the controversial AFDC that would extend federal benefits to all poor families. After securing passage in the House, a coalition of moderates and conservative Democrats in the Senate successfully framed the debate as welfare (entitlement to cash assistance) versus workfare (coercive labor) and killed the “welfare” bill in favor of work. Although the South comprised half of all poor families nationwide (and two-thirds of poor black families) and was slated to benefit from the influx of federal funds, the bill also threatened the region’s stratified economy and white supremacist order (p. 71). Southern conservatives feared that Nixon’s FAP would provide low-wage workers with the ability to refuse jobs or working conditions. At the same time, an income guarantee would undercut threats wielded by employers to withhold pay as a tactic to prevent Southern blacks from exercising political power. As a result, Southern Democrats opposed cash assistance for the poor and threw their support behind Supplemental Security Income (SSI) (thereby creating new federal programs for the elderly and disabled while excluding poor families and children) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) (thereby providing tax subsidies for working poor families while excluding the nonworking poor and the working poor without children).
Political efforts to weaken traditional welfare programs culminated when Democratic President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress institutionalized workfare in 1996. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) ended federal entitlements to public assistance in favor of state discretion and mandated work requirements for most welfare recipients.
Finally, Bertram provides meticulous evidence that what was left of social insurance after a barrage of political retrenchments was hollowed out by structural economic changes since the 1970s. New Deal welfare architects relied on the principle of work (with a public assistance safety net only as a last resort) based on an assumption that employment would mitigate poverty. However, since the 1970s, the decline of unions, increasingly stratified labor markets, falling or stagnant wages, and declining pension and health benefits in low-wage sectors confounded the New Deal model. While economic growth in the 1990s masked many of the inadequacies of workfare, the 2008 recession amplified its shortcomings when work was not readily available.
While there is much to admire about The Workfare State, there are also several limitations. First, while the notion that workfare is principally a Democratic project is convincing, it obscures crucial changes in the composition of the political parties. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Democratic Party included liberals and conservatives in their ranks. However, by the 1980s and 1990s, conservative Southern Democrats had moved into the Republican Party, which became more ideologically homogenous, unified, and aggressive in its assault on need-based welfare programs. Rather, a more surprising disjuncture that Bertram’s analysis reveals is the shift among moderate and liberal Democrats from a principled (if futile) battle for welfare entitlements to entrenched support for workfare standards. This is nowhere more evident than when Senator Chuck Schumer, currently the highest elected official in the Democratic Party, set forth the party’s vision for young Americans facing economic anxieties: tax credits for employers and training for workers (Chuck Schumer, “A Better Deal for American Workers,” New York Times, 24 July 2017).
Second, the analysis obscures the nation’s broader history of social provision. Workfare is aptly characterized as a retrenchment, but this is based on the New Deal welfare standard. A more extensive time frame would reveal that opposition to public assistance for the poorest among us is the norm—despite intermittent reforms for the elderly, disabled, veterans, and widows (Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 1996; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 1995). Moreover, Social Security, the GI bill, and the Affordable Care Act have also been limited and hollowed out for the poor and racially marginalized, even when representatives imposing such limits lack majority control of Congress.
Finally, Bertram would strengthen her case by theorizing race and gender beyond the South. While she appropriately portrays workfare as an effort to uphold the Southern economic and political order, liberal Democrats also used work as an instrument to transform “destructive dependents” into “constructive citizens.” Notably, Robert Self skillfully characterizes Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty as an effort to rehabilitate predominantly black male breadwinners through job training and affirmative-action programs. Liberal Democrats promoted work as an antidote to social unrest, urban riots, and the “deviant” family structure of matriarchy and welfare (Robert Self, All in the Family, 2012). In the end, both liberals and conservatives converged on the principle of work and the patriarchal family.
The analysis also led me to more carefully consider social constructions of women and mothers. While work requirements for single mothers provide a measure of social control and uphold low-wage labor markets (p. 24), women’s unpaid domestic labor is also central to the wage system. Conservative ideologies venerating white, upper-class women as free from the workplace and obligated to men and children reinforce this gendered division of labor—even while economic realities have made this standard impossible for most families (see Wendy Brown, States of Injuries, 1995). Working-class women thus increasingly face a “double-bind,” confined simultaneously to both low-wage work and unremunerated domestic labor.
In short, The Workfare State provides a thoughtful and cogent analysis, and an incisive and sobering reminder that a two-tiered system of social provision is a core legacy of the Democratic Party. Middle-class beneficiaries of the New Deal welfare state enjoy employment-based health insurance, pensions, and Social Security benefits, while the working poor rely on stop-gap protections such as EITC and Medicaid. As Bertram makes clear, workfare has ultimately widened inequalities, while leaving the neediest among us with the lowest levels of protection.
