American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Kenny’s sense of betrayal came in a double dose; his previous girlfriend had relapsed, too, and the last thing he wanted was another doomed affair. But he had slid back on his own first try. Hesitantly, he stayed, and Opal appeared to get clean, though he could never be sure. Kenny pushed her to get a job, and so for the first time did welfare. Opal made just enough effort to keep them both at bay. Jason Turner had just launched Pay for Performance, but by acknowledging her addiction, Opal managed to avoid a work assignment. Instead, she was sent to a brief outpatient program and told to look for a job on her own. It wouldn’t have taken much of a sleuth to suspect she was stringing things along. In the logs she turned in over the next three months, she claimed she applied for 240 jobs, or about one every three hours, including six at the same Taco Bell, all without an offer. (“They don’t check—come on.”) Eventually she went back to the nurturing class and found a job at McDonald’s, where she got fired for eating an apple pie and calling her boss “a fag.” Someone at the nurturing program then helped her find the hospital job—with a path to full-time work at $10 an hour. However circuitous her path, Opal made her way into the best-paying job of her life.

  She spent her first paycheck on crack. “I had been thinking about it a long time,” she said. “I had wanted to do it so bad.” Every addict’s relapse is painful, but Opal’s carried a special mix of guilt and defiance, since living with Kenny amounted to having a drug counselor at her side. Kenny’s whole world was The Program—the nightly meetings, the sobriety club, the Twelve Steps as Ten Commandments. Kenny was drawn to the program’s authority; Opal was programmed to defy it. “Why can’t she just get it?” he would wonder. “Why don’t you leave me?” she would say. She would binge. He would explode. She would cry and promise to quit. Despite himself, a part of him always believed her. He cheated on her; she caught him; they fought. When peace had been made, Opal would sometimes explain her thinking. “Opal looked at it like this,” Kenny said. “If there’s food, the rent’s paid, kids took care of—she owed herself to get high.” She told him—she told herself—she could handle it.

  By the summer of 1997, Opal’s brinksmanship with welfare was skating toward a new brink. She had slid past the JOBS program (with its weak penalties) and survived Pay for Performance (with luck), but the program the state was about to unveil, Wisconsin Works, called itself loophole free. The first thing that was radical about W-2 was its theory of “universal engagement”: everyone was supposed to join in. The sick, the addicted, mothers with young kids—everyone was supposed to do something if they wanted a check. The second radical notion involved what they were supposed to do: work. Not just look for work or prepare for work, but spend at least part of the week in some sort of community service job. Most states avoided community service jobs, which were expensive, difficult to administer, and in the small-scale experiments of the past had shown a poor record of leading to private employment. In betting on them, Wisconsin hoped to achieve at least three things. One was diversion: forced to work for welfare, those with other options would leave. Another was acculturation: participants would learn the so-called soft skills, like grooming and punctuality. And a third was reciprocity: rather than getting something for nothing, the poor would give something back. The state promised to create the jobs by the tens of thousands.

  If W-2 seemed unusually tough, it also seemed unusually generous. While the jobs would form the core of a “simulated workweek,” they were supposed to be tailored to each recipient’s needs. Other services - could be layered on, like drug treatment or GED classes. And Wisconsin promised child care and health insurance, not only to families in W-2 but to a wider group of the working poor. Another distinctive element of W-2 lay in its administration: much of it would be privatized, with profit-seeking corporations invited to join nonprofits in submitting bids, in what the state called an effort to improve efficiency. Certainly there was much to worry about. Could everyone really work? Would the jobs prove useful, to recipients and society? Would the most vulnerable be driven from the rolls, like the miserable Amber Peck? Had the state gone too far in eliminating training—consigning people to a dead-end future of impossibly low wages? Still, by accompanying the rhetoric of work with the girders to support it—child care, health care, and the semblance of a last-resort job—Wisconsin’s plan for “ending welfare” displayed a rare seriousness. To his credit, Thompson seemingly had created a program as big as his boasts.

  And Opal seemed a good window through which to observe it. Though I didn’t know she was using drugs as I watched her spoof the job-search class, I found her compellingly bilingual, fluent in the language of the streets and of the working-woman’s world a notch above. With her disarming mix of intelligence and self-deprecation (“I like that welfare check”), she seemed just the kind of woman whose fortunes could swing either way. I included her in a preview of W-2 I wrote for The New York Times Magazine. Opal and the girls caught a bus downtown to a photo shoot, and a few weeks later a memorable cover appeared. In the back stood the serious, dark-suited men who had launched the welfare revolution, Tommy Thompson and Jason Turner. Across the front in pink shirts skipped Opal’s girls, as if to a promising future. In the middle sat Opal, wearing a janitor’s uniform, a finger wave from Jewell, and an enigmatic smile. Opal, of all people, was the W-2 poster child. “Has a job, but can she keep it?” the cover line asked.

  TWELVE

  Half a Safety Net: The United States, 1997-2003

  As Opal swabbed hospital floors and slid back toward addiction, the new American safety net was appearing, one state at a time. Politically, the battle had been fought with glib slogans about trusting states over “arrogant federal bureaucrats.” But the challenge at hand was immense. On one side stood 4.5 million poor single mothers with an unknowable mix of problems. Nine out of ten said they were jobless; nearly half had preschool kids; most got little (if any) help from their children’s fathers; and about half lacked a high school diploma. Who - could say how many like Opal were secretly smoking cocaine? On the other side were fifty state bureaucracies whose historical line of work had been limited to mailing them checks. They were operating in a politically charged atmosphere, with a low-paid, undertrained staff and substantial financial risks; if caseloads went up, they had billions to lose. The optimistic scenario was that states would undergo a vast “mission change,” converting the old check-writing offices into job-placement machines. Federal law did allow another option: just kick - people off the rolls.

  Texas set some time limits as short as a year. Michigan set no time limits at all, pledging to use state funds for families who exhausted their federal aid. Oregon invested in casework, Rhode Island in child care. Mississippi placed its faith in the Lord, with Governor Kirk Fordice asking churches to pick up the charity load. “God, not government, will be the savior of welfare recipients,” he said. While I started with doubts about state control, the effort brought much to admire. After decades in the check-writing trade, the average office was talking up jobs and however fumbling its ways—“that thing with cows, gets real deep”—moving people into them. Services expanded, especially child care, and for a surprising number of people, like Angie and Jewell, a small push or pull was all it took. At the same time, just as feared, many families got lost in the chaos—dropped from the rolls whether God proved their savior or not. And that’s not to mention the bigger question framing the postwelfare years: how far would a low-wage job go in changing a poor family’s life? Yet with caseloads plunging everywhere, the law had barely taken effect before it was crowned with claims of success. “The debate is over,” Clinton said a year after signing the bill. “We know now that welfare reform works!” At that point, the average state program was about six months old. From the White House down, one trait most welfare abolishers shared was a weakness for their own PR.

  For all its surface variety, the focus of the new system could be summarized in a word: work. The states pushed poor women to find it faster, keep it l
onger, and look for it as a condition of aid. Virtually - every state regarded an entry-level job as preferable to the education and training efforts they had run in the past. And recipients who broke the rules risked big penalties, often the loss of all cash aid. Despite all the congressional talk of shoring up the two-parent family, no state made a serious attempt to reduce births to single mothers—a root cause of welfare but a socially charged one, and a problem to which there was no obvious solution. When word leaked that aides to New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani planned “family-strengthening activities,” the soon-to-be-divorced leader not only dropped the idea but publicly denounced it. Politicians like to do what they know how to do, and they more or less knew how to run job-search programs. From Harlem to Watts, waiting-room posters sounded a similar call: “Life works if you work first.”

  About three-quarters of the states made applicants do something before coming on the rolls, a process Jason Turner called “securing the front door.” In some places, the requirement involved nothing more than sitting through a single orientation, though even that kept some people away. In New York City, where Turner became welfare commissioner, a required job search dragged on for four weeks, diverting about half of those who would have applied. With one missed day in a four-week program, a New York City applicant could be forced to start all over. One Harlem manager said the highlight of her career came the day she reopened the office as a “job center” that required applicants to complete a search for work. “Half the people said, ‘Job center? I didn’t come for no job center!’ This man said, ‘No, no! Ah-plee-ca-cion! Ah-plee-ca-cion! No job, no job!’ ” She laughed so hard at the memory of her scattering clients she could barely finish the story. “I could not believe that those two little words—job center —could clear the area.”

  There’s no doubt the hassles drove off people who had other ways to get by. But they also drove off people who needed help. The diversion effort in New York City involved not only the mandatory job search but aggressive attempts by front-line workers to verbally dissuade people from applying. In what a federal judge called a “culture of improper deterrence,” many refused to even distribute applications during an aid-seeker’s first visit to the office. “No matter how you phrase it,” explained the newsletter of a Queens welfare office, “the goal . . . is the same: redirect the participant to another source.” One consequence, in New York and beyond, was that eligible families stopped applying for other programs, such as Medicaid and food stamps, which were supposed to be part of the remaining safety net—at a cost of skipped meals and untreated disease. Nationwide, about two-thirds of the adults who left welfare lost Medicaid, even as the number of uninsured grew. Among children eligible for food stamps, the proportion of those who actually received them fell by about 20 percent. Scared, angry, or simply confused, all kinds of families stopped thinking of the welfare office as a place to get help.

  For those who made it onto the rolls, states had to place a rising share in specified “work activities.” A dozen activities qualified, from short-term training to sweeping the streets. By far the most common was the job-search class, which Riverside, California, among other sites, had shown the quickest and most cost-effective way of moving - people off the rolls. Some classes left recipients to search on their own; others armed them with résumés, leads, and donated suits. Their quality ran from mediocre to downright awful. I once sat through a class in Riverside, California, at the peak of its job-placement fame. “Hopefully we can get you employed as soon as possible,” the instructor began. “I shouldn’t say hopefully. . . . I keep losing my train of thought.” Down the hall, the recipients took upbeat, alliterative names—Kind Kathy, Willing Wanda, Dependable Dave. Then they gave themselves a round of applause and turned to a video that declared, “The employed lifestyle is better!”

  There was no shortage of silliness involved. But among the early lessons was that that even silliness worked: requiring people to do anything was usually better than leaving them to do nothing. For Acerbic Angie or Jazzy Jewell, the hassle was a goad to make better plans. For some others, any activity offered a respite from lives stunted by terrible isolation. In Milwaukee, I spent two weeks at the YWCA’s “Academy of Excellence,” where one woman was so timid as it began she could barely speak her name. Another flamboyantly announced, “Ain’t no such thing as bad sex, y’all!” then fled in tears when the talk turned to violent boyfriends. A certain esprit did evolve, even in such a care-worn group. The women wore mortarboards at their graduation, and some brought their kids to watch them collect the only diploma they might get.

  While job-search class might not seem tough, the penalties for skipping it were. In nearly three-quarters of the states, recipients who missed an assignment could lose their whole check, a penalty known as a “full-family sanction.” As a weapon of welfare reduction, time limits got much more attention, in part because the concept was easier to understand. But sanctions had a much bigger effect. By 1999, sanctions had eliminated a half-million families from the rolls—about six times the number cut off by time limits. Because of sanctions, between a quarter and a half of those enrolled in the typical program wound up losing all or part of their check.

  At times, the tough penalties were all for the best. In Oregon I met a methamphetamine addict who said losing her check helped save her life. “That was part of the reason I went into treatment,” Lori Furlow said. With weaker sanctions, New York found it harder to persuade troubled clients to get help. About a third of New York City’s huge caseload was in the penalty process at any given time, and officials there griped about the “happily sanctioned”; able to ignore the work rules and still collect three-quarters of their cash and food stamps, some people did just that. But if weak penalties hurt some clients, so did strong ones—that’s the dilemma of sanction policy. The goal should be to lure people in, not to drive them away. There was so much confusion in the system, however, many people who lost their checks didn’t even know what they were supposed to be doing. Taking an in-depth look at one hundred sanctioned families, Utah found that about half had problems their caseworkers hadn’t realized: illnesses, chronically sick kids, boyfriends who beat them if they left the house. “We were sanctioning people we shouldn’t have been sanctioning,” said Bill Biggs, the official in charge. It’s natural to think that the plunging rolls followed a rational order, starting with the easy cases and proceeding to the hard ones. In truth, the process of “ending welfare” played out like a freak storm, hitting here and missing there. The sick, the addicted, the depressed and confused—all joined the employable and the secretly employed in a mass flight from the rolls.

  For those unwilling or unable to hold jobs, the rules could be unforgiving. But the new system also brought needy workers new support, with child care, tax credits, and health insurance among the main examples. Overall spending on poor families grew in the postwelfare years, even as its focus shifted from nonworkers to the working poor. The expansion of the earned income tax credit is the obvious case in point. By the end of the decade, it offered workers up to $3,900 a year, a sum that went far in smoothing the transition from the rolls. For a typical woman leaving welfare, that turned a job that paid $6.50 an hour into one worth $8.35. Sixteen states, including Wisconsin, layered their own credits on top of the federal one. Not coincidentally, two days before he signed the welfare bill, Clinton also signed a law that raised the minimum wage (to a still-paltry $5.15)—another nod - toward the notion that “people who work, shouldn’t be poor.”

  There were other supports for new workers. The number of children in subsidized child care doubled in just three years. By the end of the decade, thirty-three states spent more on child care than they did on welfare checks. Although there were no formal guarantees, in practice everyone leaving welfare for work qualified for at least a year. In addition, all states expanded child-care programs for the broader population of low-income workers (not just those on the welfare rolls). In some states, the programs were
modest and waiting lists long. Still, in general, child-care shortages kept fewer people from working than initially feared. Nearly all states loosened the asset rules that had made it hard for recipients to own reliable cars; some helped workers buy them. Nearly every state let recipients who found jobs keep more of their welfare checks during a transition (through something called an “earnings disregard”). The states also got much better at collecting child support, more than doubling the percentage of the cases in which the absent fathers paid. Even then, only about half the women leaving the rolls collected anything, but those who did averaged about $2,000 a year.

  The health insurance story was less encouraging. Despite Clinton’s hopes of a medical safety net, as Angie left welfare in 1996 about half the women streaming off the rolls wound up uninsured, as did nearly 30 percent of their kids. Medicaid’s tight eligibility rules were part of the problem, but so was the unwelcoming bureaucracy; many families didn’t get enrolled even when they qualified. In 1997, Congress took a step in the right direction by creating the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which spends about $4 billion a year to insure the children of needy workers. By the end of the decade, most states covered children up to twice the poverty line, meaning a family of three stayed eligible as its income approached $28,000. But adults remained out of luck, typically losing their Medicaid eligibility before their earnings reached $10,000. Even at the end of the decade, 37 percent of the adults leaving welfare had no health insurance. It’s unconscionable that by staying on welfare, Opal could see a doctor for free while Angie and Jewell each lost coverage and went without needed care.