Critical Social Welfare Issues

Tools for Social Work and Health Care Professionals

Arthur J Katz, Abraham Lurie, Carlos Vidal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135407339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Teoría, práctica y referencia médicas

Critical Social Welfare Issues is a collection of lectures by noted social welfare experts that addresses paramount issues facing society and suggests recommendations for positive change. It is a useful handbook for social workers, psychologists, educators, health professionals, and human service administrators and a valuable text for students studying social welfare policy and social work in health care.The result of the Distinguished Lecturers Series instituted at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Critical Social Welfare Issues brings nationally recognized and outstanding social work and allied health care scholars and practitioners together for their views on topics such as:

• welfare reform and homelessness in the U.S.
• crisis in child welfare and women as victims
• the changing structure of African-American families
• the growing Hispanic population and the unique challenges they face
• mandatory vs. voluntary HIV testing for newborns
• the infrastructure of the social work profession
• the for-profit market system for social work and health care
• the future for health care professionals
• de-professionalization in health care
• professionals and the political processAs the Editors explain, Critical Social Welfare Issues addresses "the rapidly changing context in the various fields of practice of professional social work and other health care areas. The crises that are identified are newly emerging and part of a long historical process which has been exacerbated by current political and economic changes and events.... The threat currently seems to be coming not only from governmental political forces focused to tax reductions and right wing ideologies but for the first time from the non-government sector, the for-profit market system which is projecting huge profits from health care, education, and corrections among other social welfare arenas."

Chapter 1

Class War and Welfare Reform

Richard A. Cloward
Frances Fox Piven

The program we call welfare provides a bare subsistence income to more than four million women raising children. It costs $22 billion dollars, less than 1 percent of the federal budget, and only 2 or 3 percent of most state budgets. Yet this small program has become the target of big guns, both intellectual guns and political ones. Liberals and conservatives agree that welfare is the nation’s major problem, is bad for the country, and is bad for the poor. Presumably, it drains public budgets and reduces work effort. And by allowing poor mothers to opt out of paid work, it saps their initiative, and nourishes cultural and psychological disabilities. As a result, welfare is said to worsen poverty, not to speak of its ostensible role in fostering crime, illegitimacy, and the growth of an “underclass.” The proposed remedies vary, but they usually involve cutting benefits and forcing mothers into the labor market.

These themes have been developed in an enlarging stream of conservative literature: Nathan Glazer’s “The Limits of Social Policy” (1971) and Martin Anderson’s Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States (1978) were among the opening salvos. George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty (1981), Ken Auletta’s The Underclass (1982), and Charles Murray’s Losing Ground (1984) expanded the attack. 1992 was a banner year for the conservative assault on welfare, with the publication of Lawrence M. Mead’s The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “How the Great Society ‘Destroyed the American Family,’” by which he means the black family, and Micky Kaus’s The End of Equality. As for liberals, they rallied around David Elwood’s Poor Support (1988), which differed from conservative proposals mainly in that it placed greater emphasis on education and training before expelling mothers from the rolls.

To cope with these new issues, critics of welfare urge putting women to work. Their claims for this reform are as unreal as their depiction of the problem. Near miraculous social and cultural transformations are predicted once welfare mothers join the labor market. Cohesion will be restored to family and community, crime and other aberrant behaviors will disappear, and poverty will decline. Mickey Kaus (1992), who advocates replacing welfare with a WPA-type job program, invokes a grand historical parallel: “Underclass culture can’t survive the end of welfare any more than feudal culture could survive the advent of capitalism” (p. 129).

Not unexpectedly, the 1992 presidential campaign featured welfare reform. Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.” Polls showed that this was Clinton’s most popular campaign issue. There have since been various studies and commissions, and the recommendations are all similar: provide some training, develop more workfare programs coupled with new sanctions, and impose a two-year lifetime limit on welfare.

Work and the New Class War

There is no economically and politically practical way to replace welfare with work, given the contemporary conditions of the contemporary labor market. After the great post—World War II boom, which lasted until the early 1970s, the American economy went into decline. For a quarter of a century after World War II, the American economy enjoyed unparalleled expansion, and economists wrote books with titles such as The Affluent Society (Galbraith, 1958). But wages peaked in 1973, and then declined, a response in part to intensified competition from Europe and Japan, and later from newly industrializing countries, which devastated the auto, steel, textiles, electronics, and machine tool industries in the United States, reducing manufacturing employment from 30 percent of the workforce in 1960 to less than 20 percent in 1990. Meanwhile, the service sector grew, with its low wages and meager benefits, and economists wrote books with titles such as The Deindustrialization of America (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982), or A Future of Lousy Jobs: The Changing Structure of U.S. Wages (Burtless, 1990), or The Age of Diminished Expectations: U.S. Economy Policy in the 1990s (Krugman 1990).

In response to these global changes, which threatened profitability, American business declared “class war.” Businesses pillaged the economy. They shored up profits by closing plants and moving capital out of the old high-wage industrial regions and into low-wage regions here and abroad. They turned to speculation—in real estate and in the financial markets, including mergers and leveraged buyouts of industrial assets. They looted the multibillion-dollar defense-contracting sector and the savings and loan industry. Following Reagan’s election in 1980, business taxes were cut, depriving the Federal Treasury of two trillion dollars by 1992 (Sasser, 1993).

Most important, business abandoned its postwar policy of accommodation with labor, using the threat of plant closings accompanied by capital flight to strike fear in the hearts of workers. Capital’s power over labor was enlarged all the more by other changes. One was the end of the Cold War, and the gradual shrinking of defense employment. Another was the laying off of workers by corporations seeking to reduce costs. And still another was the flooding of the labor market by great numbers of women who were trying to shore up family income, as well as by millions of immigrants from Asia, Mexico, and other Latin American countries. Unemployment averaged 4.4 percent in the 1950s, 4.7 percent in the 1960s, 6.1 percent in the 1970s, 7.2 percent in the 1980s, and job prospects look little better so far in the 1990s. Consequently, every measure of labor’s power fell. Overall, the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector fell from 29.1 percent in 1970 to 12 percent in 1990 (Brody, 1992, p. 33).

With labor cowed, business could make enormous cuts in its permanent workforce, hire temporary and part-time workers instead, and slash wages and benefits. By the 1990s, 30 million people—over a quarter of the U.S. labor force—were working in jobs outside the regular full-time workforce. Nonsupervisory personnel (who make up 81 percent of the workforce) suffered an hourly wage decline of 15 percent between 1973 and 1992.¹

The spoils reaped by business in the war against labor were large enough to constitute an historic shift in the distribution of income and well-being in American society. Overall, the simultaneous growth of poverty and wealth was unprecedented in the twentieth century (Krugman, 1990, p. 20). This was partly a simple and direct consequence of lowered taxes for the rich and social program cuts for poorer groups.

Between 1977 and 1992, the poorest tenth lost 20.3 percent of its posttax income. The top tenth gained 40.9 percent, the top 5 percent gained 59.7 percent, and the top 1 percent gained 135.7 percent (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1. Changes in Posttax Family Income, 1977–1992 (in constant 1992 dollars)

	Decile Rank	Changes in Income
	poorest tenth	−20.3%
	second	−11.2
	third	−10.9
	fourth	−9.8
	fifth	−10.5
	sixth	−4.7
	seventh	−1.0
	eighth	3.8
	ninth	8.4
	richest tenth	40.9
	top 5 percent	59.7
	top 1 percent	135.7
	all deciles	−9.1

Source: Congressional Budget Office.

And poverty increased. By the official measure, poverty had fallen from 22.4 percent in 1959 (39.5 million people) to a low of 11.6 percent in 1977 (24.7 million people). Then it rose to 14.2 percent in 1991 (35.7 million people), the highest level in a quarter of a century. Moreover, the official poverty measure greatly underestimated poverty. When the poverty line was first calculated in the 1960s, the average family spent one-third of its income on food, and the poverty line was set at three times food costs, adjusted for family size. By 1990, food costs had dropped to one-sixth of the average family budget because other components—such as housing—had inflated at far higher rates. If the 1990 official poverty line of $ 13,360 for a family of four had been recalculated to reflect changes in the real costs of these components, it would have been about 155 percent of the official rate, or $21,700. By that measure, poverty soared. From the same 22.4 percent in 1959 (39.5 million people), it fell to a low of 17.3 percent in 1972 (35.6 million people), and then rose to 25.6 percent in 1989 (62.8 million people)—or to almost twice the numbers shown by the official indicator.²

The most dramatic measure of the reordered class structure was wealth accumulation—aggregate household assets, whether homes and other real estate, stock, bonds, paintings, jewelry, or yachts. Studies by the Federal Reserve show that between 1983 and 1989—the core Reagan years—the richest one percent of families increased their share of net private wealth from 31 to 37 percent, and they did so at the expense of all other social strata. The share of the next richest 9 percent fell from 35 to 31 percent, and the bottom 90 percent lost 1 percent, from 33 to 32 percent.³ In a characteristically opaque statement, Alan Greenspan, chair of the Federal Reserve, remarked of this finding that material distribution has become “more dispersed”; Claudia Goldin, an economic historian, put the data in perspective when she said the following: “Inequality is at its highest since the great leveling of wages and wealth during the New Deal and World War II.”⁴ Plainly, business won the war against workers.

Welfare and the New Class War

Even as this degradation of workers worsened, all eyes turned toward welfare, and one heard a growing chorus of antiwelfare rhetoric about the “cycle of dependency.” Thus, Daniel Patrick Moynihan grandiosely proclaimed to the press that “just as unemployment was the defining issue of industrialism, dependency is becoming the defining issue of postindustrial society.”⁵ Lawrence A. Mead (1992) bemoaned the way that “dependency” signals “the end of the Western tradition” (p. 237). The national press announced that “dependency” had reached “epidemic proportions.” By these accounts, rising unemployment, declining wage levels, and disappearing fringe benefits need not concern anyone. “The old issues were economic and structural,” according to Mead (1992), and “the new ones are social and personal” (p. 221).

What is not understood is that this attack on welfare and, relatedly, on other income programs is an extremely significant part of the new class war. To see the connection, it is useful to remember an old Marxist idea, that the unemployed constitute a “reserve army of labor” used by capitalists to weaken and divide the proletariat. Desperation pits the unemployed against the still-employed, thus weakening labor’s bargaining power, but income security programs reduce unemployment and temper desperation. These programs remove millions of people from the labor market and protect millions of others from the ravages of unemployment. The consequence is to tighten labor markets and reduce fear among those still in the market, and thus to strengthen workers in bargaining with employers over wages and working conditions.

Not surprisingly, programs with such potentially large effects generate conflict. They also, from time to time, spur a good deal of highblown and usually unilluminating commentary by the experts of the day. A main theme, in the past as now, is that public income programs do more harm than good by leading to indolence and demoralization among the poor. Reams of such criticism accompanied the passage of the English poor law reform in the 1830s, which eliminated “outdoor” relief in favor of the workhouse. Writing more than a century later, and in a far more compassionate spirit than is typical, Karl Polanyi (1957) nevertheless reiterated the same arguments in his analysis of the 1795 Speenhamland relief-in-aid-of-wages plan, inaugurated by the landed nobility in response to the rising civil disorder among the peasantry who had been displaced from their traditional agricultural occupations during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Under this system, the poor were required to work fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Class War and Welfare Reform
• Chapter 2. Revisiting the Unseen: Some Unresolved Issues in Homeless Advocacy and Research
• Chapter 3. The Crisis in American Child Welfare
• Chapter 4. Mandatory versus Voluntary HIV Testing of Newborns
• Chapter 5. The Changing Structure of African-American Families
• Chapter 6. From the Tenement Class to the Dangerous Class to the Underclass: Blaming Women for Social Problems
• Chapter 7. Health and Human Services for Profit
• Chapter 8. Legal Regulation and Accreditation: Obstacles to Practice
• Chapter 9. Challenges of Managed Care for Health Professionals: Implications for Social Work Practice
• Chapter 10. The Substitution Phenomenon of Professionals in the Health Care Industry
• Chapter 11. Troubled Preschoolers Making Trouble Later: Is There a Solution?
• Chapter 12. Cultural Diversity Among Hispanic Families: Implications for Practitioners
• Chapter 13. Power Issues in Social Work Practice
• Index