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Chapter 1 Producing the World in Everyday Talk The thing that got me at the ((legislative)) hearing was ((the legislator who asked)) "why do ((women welfare recipients)) ... have these children if they can't afford to raise 'em?" I was married. Sure my husband-he's 45 years old, 45 or 46-he ought to be working a decentjob and making a decent living ... Well I figured I could work and he could work together, you know, we could raise a family, we could have, you know, the little nuclear family, and everything would be hunky dory. (Rita Moore, 1 welfare recipient) When you stop and think of it, this really is the lowlyjob in ((the Department of Social Services)), because the clerks (sort of) control what you do, the people above you control what you do ... you are given all this responsibility and yet you don't really have any rights, I mean ... you're responsible for people eating, and ... paying their rent, and yet you really have no say in anything that goes on in the department, you have less say than any person in this department. (Judy Reynolds, welfare worker) Rita Moore and Judy Reynolds sat on opposite sides of the table in the vast bureaucracy known in the United States as "welfare." Rita, a diabetic in her late twenties, had been on and off the welfare rolls for almost ten years; she had experienced battering, divorce, rape, and homelessness, and was currently fighting for custody of her son. Judy was in her early fifties, and had been a street level bureaucrat for eighteen years. Married twice with three children, she had been unable to continue her education beyond high school, as a result ofwhich, she felt, she was "trapped" in her currentjob.Judy attributed her high blood pressure to workplace stress. Judy's workplace was the Kenyon County office of the Michigan Department of Social Services (DSS), located in Webster, a small town in rural Michigan. Her position, Assistance Payments Worker (hereafter referred to as AP worker, or simply worker), was just above that of clerical 1. With the exception of the state governor and the director of the Michigan Department of Social Services, all personal, place, and organizational names are pseudonyms. 2 Chapter 1 work in the department hierarchy and, along with clerical work, was not classified as "professional." judy's primary job responsibility was to administer financial support programs, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and food stamps, the programs most used by the recipients in this study. Specifically, the job entailed interviewing potential recipients, processing their applications, and opening, closing, and maintaining cases. Like her fellow workers, Judy was a member of her local union, which ostensibly was endeavoring to decrease workloads and increase pay. Rita was a member of Low Income People for Equality (LIFE), a welfare rights group based in the city of Madrid, 30 miles northeast ofWebster . Her work as a participant in LIFE consisted of educating the public about the plight and rights of low income individuals and families. To such ends, Rita took part in weekly LIFE meetings, worked on learning to "read" Department of Social Services policy manuals, attended legislative hearings, and participated in demonstrations at various government offices. The experiences of Rita and Judy are both unique and typical of the experiences of the 125 welfare recipients and street level bureaucrats I worked with for seventeen months in 1989 and 1990. Like most of the women in this study, Judy and Rita have spent their lives in Michigan, a state that has in the past two decades experienced considerable economic hardship, and in which both economic opportunities and assistance for the poor have been steadily decreasing. In a population of approximately nine and a quarter million, 12.9 percent (over one million ) received some form of poverty-related assistance in 1989. In 1990 the figure rose to 13 percent, and during the following year it reached 13.9 percent. Nevertheless, during this period the purchasing power of financial assistance dropped. In 1987 AFDC payments were at 61 percent of the federal poverty threshold 2 but by 1990 they were down to 55 percent; when food stamps are added, the figures are 83 percent and 80 percent respectively. In 1991 the AFDC minimum was the lowest in ten years (Michigan Department of Social Services 1991). All this occurred in a context of increasing unemployment, which, although down from the double digits of the early 1980s...

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