Published: September 12, 2005
by: Rob Capriccioso
If some observers have expressed surprise at the depths of poverty on display in shattered New Orleans recently, New York Times reporter Jason DeParle is not among them. In a September 4 report for the newspaper, he noted that before Hurricane Katrina took its toll, New Orleans was unusually poor (27.4 percent lived below the poverty line in 2000) and disproportionately black (over two-thirds).
Thanks to welfare reform measures passed in the 1990s, a large proportion of the city's poor were not on welfare, however. Instead, they were members of a growing, and often struggling, demographic: the working poor. The number of Louisiana families on welfare shrunk from more than 70,000 in 1996 to approximately 13,000 before the hurricane struck—a reduction of more than 80 percent. But as ChildTrends and other data sources confirm, entering the workforce has not ended poverty for most.
Similar declines in welfare rolls have taken place across the nation, with the transformation watched most closely in Wisconsin, a pioneer in the welfare-to-work movement through a program known as W-2. That's why DeParle chose three Wisconsin families to profile in his latest book, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare (Viking Books: 2004).
DeParle recently shared his thoughts with Connect for Kids on the working poor and how contemporary policymakers address poverty in their decision-making.
How did you become interested in poverty issues?
I got interested in poverty before journalism, really. I did some volunteer work and spent a summer in India working in a clinic and then wanted to work in the poverty field in some way or another. I didn't know what I'd be able to do, so I became a journalist for a couple of years while I figured it out, and never left journalism. My interest in poverty issues goes back long before I got interested in newspapers. I was hired at the Times in 1989 to start a poverty policy beat and did it for more than a decade.
What led you to Wisconsin?
It was the place where the boldest changes in the welfare system were made the soonest. It was the natural place to go to see what would happen if and when the country ended welfare. I traveled there a lot on trips reporting for the Times through 1998. Then, I moved there for a year in 1999 to write a series from Wisconsin about the changes in the welfare system there. I had an apartment in Milwaukee and was there for most of that year.
And then you decided to write American Dream?
Actually, when the welfare reform law passed in the summer of 1996, I decided to do the book then. I decided to follow some families, but I didn't know who they would be yet. So, while I was reporting for the Times, I was keeping an eye out to see if I could find a set of families to follow for a book.
Why did you choose to focus on the lives of Opal, Angie and Jewell?
The three women are cousins. I met one of them, Opal Caples, in a welfare office in the summer of 1997. I was in Wisconsin working on a piece for the Times magazine. Opal was going through a practice job search class. She was very intelligent, very funny, and very captivating. I went up to her after the class to ask if I could talk with her some more and get to know her better. Through her, I met the other two women
After welfare reforms were implemented in Wisconsin, what kinds of jobs were people getting?
Lots and lots of people became certified nursing assistants, just like Angie... A bunch of people worked as childcare aides. Some did motel cleaning work, a little bit of restaurant work. There was some clerical training.
Update on Wisconsin Welfare Reform
In April 2005, the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau highlighted some concerns regarding the state’s implementation of welfare reform [1].
Were they making enough money to support their families?
Obviously, there's a great deal of variety in people's experiences. I think what was typical was that earnings went way up and tax [obligations] went way up. [So, for an individual], cash basically disappeared as fast as it came in and food stamps declined and plus you had some extra work expenses. When you weighed all this, in the end, people by and large broke even, or maybe got a little ahead economically, but not enough to really notice much of a difference in day to day living… Some people wound up worse off economically, and some people wound up significantly better off. I'd say, for most people, they wound up working a lot harder for little economic gain.
The conservatives would look at that and say that it's a great victory: They've substituted their lost welfare income, and now they're working for it... Other people could say, look at that, they're working very hard and they have nothing to show for it. It hasn't resulted in their economic betterment...
What were the aftereffects of welfare reform on the women's kids?
That's one of the most disappointing aspects of the whole situation. The hope was that once mothers went to work they would become role models for their kids… There would be new hope in the families. I saw little, if any, evidence of that. The mother in the main family I followed, Angie, her kids experienced her work just as an absence, rather than an inspiration. Their level of school absenteeism actually rose after she went to work...I don't want to argue that everything was great when Angie was on welfare...On the other hand, I didn't see anything in their experience that suggests they were any better off once she went to work. Both of her oldest two children ended up dropping out of school.
TANF: What’s the hold up?
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is the monthly cash assistance program for poor families with children under age 18. The House of Representatives passed another 3-month TANF extension on June 29, 2005. It was the tenth short-term extension in four years. Congress has attempted to reauthorize the program for four years without success.
"Everyone involved with it thinks 'how bizarre,'" says DeParle regarding the fact that Congress can’t settle on details of full-fledge reauthorization of TANF. "The welfare bill has been the most widely praised piece of social legislation in a generation and yet Congress can't seem to even reauthorize it. The issues being debated are, in comparison to those from a decade ago, quite minor. It's caught up in the divisive politics of contemporary Washington... In terms of changes to TANF, I think they're going to be relatively modest."
Have policymakers made some wrong assumptions about the well-being of kids in today's welfare reform picture?
It just made much less difference for better or for worse in the lives of the kids than I think policymakers assume. I think it's easy to assume that mothers going to work are going to become role models. I think often the kids aren't thinking about whether their mom is on or off welfare. They're caught up in a whole bunch of other street pressures, peer pressures, economic pressures. Particularly with young kids, they're most concerned about whether or not their mom is there for them.
Was health care an issue for the families?
Yeah, two of the three women I followed became certified nursing assistants, providing health care for people all day long, yet both of them lost health insurance themselves for the better part of three years… Jewell had bleeding ulcers and was hospitalized for treatment and wound up having her wages garnished to pay back the bill, which would not have happened if she stayed on welfare—but did happen as a result of her going to work.
What did the families think of the Wisconsin welfare reforms?
That's interesting—if you asked them, they would be contemptuous. But Angie and Jewell essentially left the welfare system and went off to work on their own. One could certainly argue that W-2 did its job of pushing them into employment. They did it on their own; it wasn't like they were placed into jobs by the W-2 agencies.
They themselves, however, felt like it was a system that didn't care about them—that it just hassled them. Jewell would not even begrudgingly give it any credit; Angie might begrudgingly say that they pushed her into getting a job. For the most part, they would describe it as a system that did not have their well-being in mind.
Former Republican Governor Tommy Thompson led the effort–what were the families' perceptions of him?
Mostly negative. Opal at one point said that he just cares about rich people. The families were African American and definitely perceived a racial bias. The welfare rolls in Wisconsin, particularly in Milwaukee, are disproportionately African American. They did argue that if the rolls were predominantly white in Wisconsin, lawmakers wouldn't be cracking down on welfare.
In the mid-1990s, President Clinton also championed welfare reform...
...Yep, but they liked Clinton—hard to explain if you're just thinking about welfare policy alone, I guess. Clinton suffered basically no loss in popularity among African Americans nationally because of his signing of the welfare bill. I think the families I followed perceived him as somebody who cared about people like them…
Characterize today's politicians when it comes to welfare reform and poverty issues.
Clinton's notion was that if you got rid of welfare, then you get rid of the anger towards poor people and a more generous era would ensue. I think he's proven to be half right. There clearly isn't the anger at poor people that there once was. Very few people run for political office these days threatening to crack down on poor people. On the other hand, the big point about the welfare debate is there kind of isn't one anymore. So, contrary to Clinton's hope that you'd inaugurate a second phase of more supportive politics of working poverty, we haven't seen that. It's been overshadowed in part because of national security issues and because of 9-11 and because of budget problems...
Where were dads in American Dream?
Missing. None of the three women [or their kids] grew up with a stable man in the house to help provide a second income and a second set of hands and eyes in childrearing. Both the women and their kids felt their lives would have been different had they had that.
Rob Capriccioso is a staff writer for Connect for Kids.
http://www.connectforkids.org/node/3380
Links:
[1] http://www.legis.state.wi.us/lab/reports/05-6Highlights.htm