Welfare cutbacks pit worker against worker
September 1997

Loretta Ross is the Director of the Center for Human Rights Education in Atlanta. She is the former Research Director of the Center for Democratic Renewal. One of the first African American women to direct a rape crisis center, she was also the Program Director at the National Black Women's Health Project. What follows is part of her talk on Welfare, Scapegoating, and Human Rights which she gave at the Urban Justice Center in New York City, February 26, 1997

Today I am going to talk about welfare reform, scapegoating and human rights, but I first have to back up and do a reality check. I know that I'm a regular working person, a working-class person. I know that if I spent only 2% or 3% of my monthly income on my rent, my food, my health care, all of my human needs, if it would only cost 3% of my budget, I'd throw a party with the rest of the 97%, trust me. But like most working-class people, I'm spending a whole lot more of my budget on my basic needs than 3%. Yet the irony of our present discussion is that we're dealing with a country that only spends 1% of the federal budget on welfare. We're dealing with these battles in states that are only spending 2% of their budget on welfare, yet there's this insane obsession with welfare, as if it's going to save our economy, balance the budget, get rid of the deficit, and make America a leaner, meaner and stronger country. As if welfare reform was going to cure everything. So there's something really crazy-making about even talking about the concept of welfare reform, when it is not the biggest problem that we face as a country. I would argue that we have some other major problems out there...

Since 1910, when you had very few people receiving any kind of public assistance, now we have about 12.8 million people in the country receiving some form of public assistance. Contrary to myth, and there are a lot of racist myths and stereotypes, 38% of the people who are on welfare are in fact white. 37% are African American. Native Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans compose the rest of the 25%... One of the reasons that the AFDC program was even created was the Depression, when you had millions upon millions of poor people out there. It created a lot of community protest that threatened to make this country ungovernable. One thing I've found out about the rulers of our country, the elites who rule our country, is that any time we press their backs up against the wall, they throw a bone to the dog to shut us up. So it was the ungovernability of the country that led to the creation of many of the New Deal programs. Now we're in a period of going from the New Deal to the Raw Deal as we dismantle those same programs that we felt necessary as a society to have...

Given all of that, I want to focus on why, since welfare is still only 1% 2% of our budget, whether you're talking at the federal or the state level, where does this obsession come from? Why are we totally preoccupied as a society with dismantling welfare, as if it was going to save us, and most importantly, which is a real tough question that I think needs answering, why is the middle class, who are only a paycheck away from welfare, so busy participating in dismantling the very safety net that they will probably need if our economy keeps going in the direction that it's going? What makes people so eager to work against their own best interests? ...

The racism of the attempts to dismantle the welfare system become really apparent when you track the system over time. In 1931, only 3% of the people on welfare were African American. This was due to a number of reasons. First of all, most of the welfare programs were urban programs in the 1930s, while the majority of African Americans still lived in the rural South, which had no programs. So if you don't live where there are programs, you don't get any money. There's a logic to that. But even in the urban areas where there were subsidy or public assistance programs, usually the decision about who was eligible to be on these programs was made by a caseworker or social worker who routinely in a very racist way decided that blacks were just uniformly undeserving of support. So despite the very intense poverty of black people in the 1930s, still we averaged only about 3% of the recipients of public assistance for that period... But by the 1940s or 1950, people began to migrate to the North where these programs were. That's when the real racial stereotypes about who was on welfare began to strongly emerge. It's a little-known fact that by the mid-1950s, nineteen of our states had laws on their books that would limit the number of children that women on welfare could have. So this again is not an original idea that we're hearing nowadays, but surfaced as early as the 1950s. You began to hear the stereotypes of welfare queens.

I also believe that these stereotypes and this characterizing of blacks as being both undeserving and unfairly taking advantage of the welfare system was also in response and relationship to the growing civil rights movement of the 1950s. I don't think it's just coincident that a lot of the negative descriptions and talk against black people also happened at a time when black people were beginning to become a mass-based movement fighting back. I think there's a relationship there.

One other set of theories that were extremely popular in the 1950s were the population explosion theories that were being promoted by groups like the Draper Fund and the Rockefeller, basically a Malthusian concept that was saying that poor people just simply had too many children, and if we didn't check the number of children that poor people were going to have, then there was going to be a population time bomb set off and the world would lose the capacity to feed all the people. We hear versions of this now. Those same theories are resurfacing now, but they now have an environmental analysis. If we don't stop the reproduction of poor people we'll ruin the environment. In the 1950s the argument was that if we don't stop the reproduction of poor people the U.S. will not be able to dominate the war against communism. It's the same old B.S. With a different spin on it. It happens over and over again.

So you ended up in the opposition to welfare in the 1950s seeing a form of racial nationalism that of course was characteristic of the far right. ...I think [KKK leader] David Duke was being absolutely consistent when in 1975 he made opposition to welfare a cornerstone of Ku Klux Klan policy. He was just being very logical. In the 1960s we had the war on poverty by President Johnson... [who] and greatly increased the number of people who are eligible to receive public assistance by expanding the criteria for who could get it. It moved away from being just widows to people who were raising children alone, for whatever reason. You no longer had to prove that your husband had died and you hadn't murdered him in order to get support.

But the war on poverty, of course, was totally aborted by the war on Vietnam. The money that we were supposed to spend in eliminating poverty we spent in eliminating Vietnamese. The war on poverty really never did get off the ground, and even with its poor attempt to address the issue of poverty, by the time Nixon became President in 1972, he began the official dismantling of the welfare system, cutting down, cutting down, cutting down, and of course it's been a staple of the Republican Party platform ever since the New Deal, Roosevelt's days...

One of the things that also is consistent in this process is singling out immigrants for attack. The new welfare reform legislation that was passed kicks off just about all immigrants--the legal ones, I'm talking about, because illegal ones don't even qualify. But legal immigrants out of the welfare system, out of the public system. It's believed that about 5% of people who are on public assistance are legal immigrants, requiring them to become U.S. citizens in order to receive any form of public assistance. In the immigrant communities in which I work, this is presenting a particular hardship. A lot of the people who are legal immigrants who are on public assistance are elderly people who have retired from the work force. So requiring a 75-year-old woman to reenter the work force is just inhumane. That's where the source of a lot of their opposition is. It isn't the working-age immigrants that are on public assistance for the most part of the immigrant community. It is their parents that they have worked real hard to bring over here and have retired who are actually being targeted for being kicked out of the system. That's particularly cruel, not to mention the fact that a lot of children with disabilities are being jettisoned out of the system as if they're excess baggage...

Right now I think we're entering a phase of our national life where we only define somebody's human worth by their ability to be a worker in our society. If you can't work you don't deserve anything. That's where we're moving to as a society, that your relationship to corporate America really determines your rights as a citizen. I think that is a very dangerous trend, one of the trends that I think also define our pre-fascist state here in this country.

The other thing that the racists argue is about the length of time people stay on welfare. Study after study has proven that more than half the people who get on welfare stay on it for less than two years. They're doing precisely what "they want them to do." We're dealing with a very small number of people who could develop what I guess they could call "welfare dependency," although I have a problem with even using that term because ... every time the unemployment rate goes down too low, the Federal Reserve increases the interest rate to keep the unemployment rate high. ... That is a policy of keeping people poor. So if you're going to create the poverty that creates poor people, then I think you have an obligation to meet the needs of the people you have defined as disposable as far as your economy goes. ...

What is happening with the welfare reform system is that we're seeing what some of us down in the South, because we're not that far from our sharecropper past, are calling the "re-enslavement" of people, where people are being forced out of "the system" into minimum-wage jobs that do not provide a livable wage, so you can work your fingers to the bone and never get ahead, and put these underpaid workers in direct competition with higher-paid workers, so you're pitting classes of workers against each other. As if the new work force created by workfare or work first or whatever your state calls it wasn't enough, then we have a national movement to not only incarcerate more people but then exploit the incarcerated people for their labor. So that we're now creating two separate sets of very low wage workers that in my mind is [a] most significant threat to the union movement, to the working class... Because a lot of jobs, particularly in the South, a lot of corporations are coming to the South because they can relocate their manufacturing plants to those communities that have a large prison population and then use that prison labor to undercut any other domestic labor force in the country. It's even better than setting up a sweatshop overseas, because then you don't have to pay for the transport of the goods back overseas and the shipment of raw materials to wherever your sweatshop is. You just ship them to Alabama, to Tennessee, to Georgia, to Mississippi, and that's what's happening, over and over again.

What's really sad about that process--there's a lot of parts of it that are really screwed--what really is troublesome is the underdevelopment of the organized labor movement of the South to respond to this crisis. We're dealing with states that define right to work really as the right to not work. We have very few employee protection laws in the South. A company could fire you at will, not pay benefits, all the worst things that are done to workers. They create the template for doing them in the South. So we have this re-enslavement process with prison and welfare labor challenging the rights of other people in the work force. Then it's all accompanied by a drum roll of states' rights rhetoric, just like when we had the Civil War and states were fighting for the right to remain slave states. Now states are fighting for the right to determine their own individual treatment of the poor. 'There should be no federal standards out there. Each state should determine whether or not it is going to feed, house and clothe poor people.' Unfortunately, there are a lot of dangerous people in the Deep South you should not ever want to give that kind of power to. For example, the federal government tried to set up this standard, saying that after five years people have to be permanently kicked out of the system for their lifetime. Wouldn't you know that the state I live in, Georgia, narrowed it down to four years, and now it's going three years. They had to go one better than even the national standard. But we're also consistent with that, because when they created three-strikes-and-you're-out at the federal level Georgia did two-strikes-and-you're-out. ...

...I believe that it is very important to connect all the rhetoric against poor people and all the rhetoric against welfare with the people who are responsible for planting that seed in our society, not planting it like they planted it and went away, but these are people that for the last sixty years, ever since AFDC was created, have been trying to get rid of it. They were opposed to it under Roosevelt's administration. The difference between the 1930s and the 1990s is that they have been so successful in getting people to look down on people with welfare, as if none of us could ever ... lose our job or something, but they've been so successful that they've even got the victims of the lies believing the lies. There was a time when you could tell a lie on somebody and that didn't make it true... But now they've been so successful [with 750 right-wing think tanks] that you find a lot of people of color believing that somehow people on welfare are just morally challenged. 'They can't do any better or won't do any better and we should stop helping them out because after all, this is my tax dollar.' And that's a shift. That's a real shift in how people think.

For more information contact The Center for Human Rights Education, P.O. Box 311020, Atlanta, GA 31131 (404) 344-9629.

For information about obtaining cassette copies or transcripts of this or other programs, please write to: David Barsamian Alternative Radio, P.O. Box 551, Boulder, CO 80306 (800) 444-1977. (c)1997

previous article [current issue] next article
Search | Archives | Calendar | Directory | About / Subscriptions |

Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional eXTReMe Tracker