Thread by @elisaminoff

As the Trump administration and states roll out plans to take away Medicaid and SNAP from families who do not meet work requirements, see our new report on how we got here.

#racistrootsofworkrequirements

Thread.

https://twitter.com/CtrSocialPolicy/status/1226901161292201990

TLDR:

1. Work requirements hurt families and discount much of their labor, including their caregiving work.

2. They are rooted in a long history of coercing and exploiting black people’s labor, going back to slavery.

At their most basic, work requirements take away assistance from families who do not work a certain number of hours a week.

They are premised on the assumption that people do not want to work in the wage labor force, and therefore should be coerced to work by public policy.

The racist stereotype that black people don’t want to work has been invoked from the very beginning to promote work requirements, and they are one in a long line of policies designed to coerce and exploit black people’s labor, and buttress white supremacy.

The painful irony is that black people have always worked at high rates. Slavery required full employment. In the century after slavery, black women were significantly more likely to work in wage labor force than white women, and black men almost universally worked.

Black people have also been at the forefront of campaigns to recognize and value the full scope of labor people contribute to their families, and to society. But policies have enforced a narrow definition of “work” that discounts much of people’s labor.

In decades following the Civil War, denying assistance to black families was one of several ways states and the federal government forced them to work for low wages, under the exploitative terms white people set.

During the New Deal, southern states continued their longstanding practice of withholding assistance from black families—and only black families—to force them to work in the fields.

In the 1930s, a black tenant farmer reported: “You go up there [to the relief office] and they tell you they ain’t got nothing and these old poor white folks come out with their arms full of stuff.”
See work by Cybelle Fox:
press.princeton.edu/books/paperbac…

As black people moved to the North, work requirements followed. During the 1960s, national debates over public assistance became racialized.

The share of black people in photographs illustrating stories about poverty and public assistance in magazines like Time rose from 27 percent in 1964, a number which closely tracked their share of the poor population, to 72 percent in 1967 (see work of Martin Gilens)

In 1962, liberals pushed for supports/services to get more AFDC participants into the workforce, but as @kmtani has argued, they “opened the door to … harsher policies by characterizing welfare recipients as damaged”

@kmtani In 1967, Congress established the first national work requirement in AFDC. Under the law, states were required to refer “appropriate” AFDC participants to work and training programs. They gave it an up-beat name: the Work Incentive Program, or WIN.

@kmtani Black feminists in the welfare rights movement pushed back against these policies, demanding that women’s work at home and in the labor force be valued. They called the new work requirement WIP, harkening back to the punishment used by enslavers. See work of @VTfeminist

@kmtani @VTfeminist Researchers in the 70s: “welfare recipients and other low income persons (along with most Americans) have a strong work ethic, want to work and, when feasible, do...There is no study which shows that a significant segment of the American population prefers indolence to work.”

@kmtani @VTfeminist That’s still true! Nevertheless, political interest in work requirements grew in the 80s, as Reagan talked about welfare queens and Larry Mead talked abt need “to restore conventional work norms… to the authority they had in the inner city before civil rights”

@kmtani @VTfeminist Congress experimented with welfare-to work demonstration programs in the early 80s; expanded work requirements with the bipartisan Family Support Act of 1988; and gave them sharp teeth when it replaced AFDC with TANF in 1996.

@kmtani @VTfeminist Under TANF, few families get the assistance they need. While in 1996, 68 of every 100 families living in poverty received some direct financial assistance through TANF, today only 23 out of every 100 families today.

cbpp.org/research/famil…

@kmtani @VTfeminist As with earlier iterations of work requirements, the WR in TANF have disproportionately affected, and harmed, black families. States with larger shares of black families are more likely to impose the harshest sanctions for not meeting work requirements.
urbn.is/2SAZWbc

@kmtani @VTfeminist Within states, caseworkers are more likely to sanction black families and other families of color than their white counterparts. urbn.is/379frwx

@kmtani @VTfeminist To this day, we see that when work requirements are proposed, they are often designed to harm black people most.

cssp.org/2018/05/michig…

@kmtani @VTfeminist Ultimately all families are harmed by work requirements, which deny people much-needed assistance and discount the real work people do. It’s time we recognized work requirements as the failed policy they are.

@kmtani @VTfeminist Thanks so much to the amazing group of people who offered feedback on this report: @MarkHGreenberg @willpjones3 @VTfeminist @KhalilGMuhammad @CC_Rosenthal

@kmtani @VTfeminist @MarkHGreenberg @willpjones3 @KhalilGMuhammad @CC_Rosenthal P.S., it’s #BlackHistoryMonth. If there’s ever a time to pay attention to the #racistrootsofworkrequirements it’s now.