Putting Poor People to Work: How the Work-First Idea Eroded College Access for the Poor

CHAPTER TWO. THE EMERGENCE OF THE WORK-FIRST PRESCRIPTION

CHAPTER TWO THE EMERGENCE OF THE WORK-FIRST PRESCRIPTION Where did “work-first” come from? How did this particular philosophy gain such overwhelming acceptance and power among policymakers at all levels and with the general public? How did it displace the human-capital ideas that animated much of social policymaking in the late twentieth century and are still powerful in mainstream educational policymaking circles? Why did work-first begin to dominate discourse and practice in welfare and workforce policy? This chapter tackles these difficult questions. Ideas are powerful actors in the policy process. The ideas present in formal policy, more so even than formal language or mechanisms, may be reified, so that they come to exert their own independent influence apart from the policies in which they emerged. They act as signals and focal points, even spreading their message beyond their originally intended scope. Work-first is such an idea. Once work-first became ascendant, its principles became “hardwired ” into federal policy through a series of policy mechanisms. Thus, an understanding of how this idea emerged will help us to assess its full impact. WELFARE, JOB TRAINING AND THE HUMAN-CAPITAL NARRATIVE The American welfare system extends back to 1911, and its history has been extensively documented and analyzed (see, for example, DeParle 2004; Gordon 1994; Katz 1986, 2001; Piven and Cloward 1993; Skocpol 1992; Somers and Block 2005). Our intent is not to reproduce all of the arguments or findings of these studies, but rather to explain the context from which the work-first perspective emerged. To do so, we selectively review this history, using a dual focus: ideas regarding investments in skills and training on the one hand, and reducing welfare rolls through rapid employment on the other. Three important themes emerge from this literature. First, “welfare” as it is identified in the public imagination has rarely enjoyed consistent, enthusiastic support from either policymakers or the general public. David Ellwood (1988) put it most succinctly: “Everybody hates welfare” (4). Second, historically , training and education have not played a central role in welfare-policy debates. Although the concept of providing job training and public employment for the poor first emerged in the 1930s during the Great Depression, welfare, education, and employment policy mostly steered clear of each other until the 1960s. Last, issues of work and the obligations of recipients increasingly became a central, and often contested, aspect of welfare policy as welfare moved from an entitlement to a temporary support system (Katz 2001; Mead 1986; Rogers-Dillon 2004). These changes corresponded with changes in women’s workforce participation, shifts in the racial composition of welfare rolls, and growth in both teenage childbearing and the number of women bearing children out-of-wedlock. Welfare policy has its origins in the “mothers’ pensions” movement in the early twentieth century. Pensions were designed to allow widowed mothers to support their children at home without having to work (Youcha 2005). Initial programs were state-based and designed both to support mothers and to encourage suitable child-rearing practices (Skocpol 1992). Many states established child-care and home-management standards for recipients to encourage them to conform to middle-class social standards (Abramovitz 1996). By 1929 all but four states had passed some form of mothers’ or widows’ pension program, although the states varied significantly in their generosity (Teles 1996). In 1935 the state pensions were subsumed under the Social Security Act and the new program was renamed Aid to Dependent Children, or ADC (Skocpol 1992; Gordon 1994). Because women were not expected to work outside the home while raising young children, and because the children of these women usually were not born out of wedlock, ADC—though not overwhelmingly politically popular—was generally supported by the public. But over time changes in the ADC population and women’s labor-force participation undermined support for the program. In 1939, Congress removed most widows from ADC, and instead made them eligible for the more generous Old Age Insurance program if their deceased husbands were eligible for bene fits. Henceforth ADC would be populated primarily by a politically vulnerable population of unwed single mothers (Katz 1989; Skocpol 1992; Teles 1996). Beginning in the 1940s, eligibility criteria for ADC were tightened and work was more often promoted as a viable option for single mothers. CaseTHE EMERGENCE OF THE WORK-FIRST PRESCRIPTION 19 workers began to refuse ADC to women...