Forcing Welfare Recipients to Apply Informal Social Resources in their Transition to Work: A Policy of Self-sufficiency or Indifference?
Published in The Roundtable, vol. 3, no. 9 (November 2000), p. 11

By Tom Lengyel
director of research and evaluation services

The research department is one year into the national research project Faces of Change: Welfare Reform in America. The project amounts to a qualitative study of these changes through the personal narratives of people across the United States whose lives have been altered by the elimination of welfare entitlements and the substitution of various temporary supports, incentives, and sanctions.

The research team recently analyzed the first cohort of 149 stories and presented its preliminary findings and policy analysis at two workshops during the Alliance’s national conference. One of our most interesting findings concerns the way families have attempted to adapt to gaps in services and support they need in order to get to work on a regular basis.

The authors of these stories report with some frequency that they encounter difficulties with transportation, child care, and their jobs for which there are no accessible institutional remedies. Consider some of their accounts:

• "When I was working security, the hours will change so if I was scheduled to work after daycare hours I had to find a relative to baby-sit," a 20-year-old mother of two, who has had three jobs in the last five months, living in Roxbury, MA.

• "My family does do child care which is hard. It seems when they are unavailable then I have no back-up," a 22-year-old mother of two who is currently looking for work in Lemon Grove, CA.

• "I have to borrow cars from other people to make my doctor appointments, to get groceries or any other necessities I need. Sometimes when my physical health is bad, I need to have my friends drive me where I am going because I am unable to drive," a 32-year-old disabled victim of domestic abuse living in Raleigh, NC.

• "My boss picks me up for work, and brings me back home and I respect her for that," a 38-year-old mother with three children living in rural Delaware.

The common thread in these strategies is that the authors fall back on personal relationships — often with relatives, neighbors, or friends — to accomplish tasks that are vital to work and health. Essentially, they are applying their supportive social capital in the solution of issues that non-poor workers can pay for, whether that means contracting with a child care provider or owning a car.

Since a major stated goal of welfare reform is to make former welfare recipients self-supporting and self-sufficient, this appears to be a desirable result. It has the ring of requiring people to be resourceful. The interpretation assumes that informal social resources are available and reliable, and regenerate themselves in the natural course of community life. Unfortunately, recent research with the same population directly contradicts this assumption.

The helpfulness of these resources was another matter altogether. Respondents to the survey were asked to characterize the degree of helpfulness of each social resource they used. Welfare recipients reported that formal, institutional supports were the most helpful assets in their lives, more so than for non-recipients. Furthermore, important informal resources, including spouse or partner, and friends, proved to be of significantly less help to those touched by welfare than for those who were better off. The picture that emerged was that the social resources of the poorest citizens are already heavily burdened, and that informal social relationships within the family and neighborhood might be overburdened.

In this context we are right to question the wisdom of welfare reform policies that, by leaving gaps in the framework of child care, transportation, and other supports for family sustaining employment, force poor people to fall back on their own heavily burdened social networks. If we, as a community, are committed to the betterment of all households, we must be prepared to invest our wealth to that end, rather than merely count the dollars saved. Our findings argue that the debate over reauthorization of TANF should focus on establishing a more consistent and extensive web of institutional supports that parallels those already available to families whose economic status is less precarious.

Acknowledgement: I wish to recognize the contributions of the other members of the research team to this work, including David Campbell, Ellen Amstutz, Rachel Burrows, Kirsten Stingle, and Liza Weinstein.