After Time Limits: An Exploration of the Consequences of Denying State Support
Ellen K. Scott
University of Oregon
In the context of increasing demand for low-wage workers in the new economy, as well as institutionalized discourses of independence, self-sufficiency, and the imperative to work, Congress implemented a federal program of welfare reform in 1996. Subsequently, Cleveland Ohio established a plan to strictly implement cash welfare time limits beginning in October 2000. At that time, anyone who had received benefits for 36 months would be cut off of cash benefits, with no exemptions. The welfare department also implemented a plan requiring caseworkers to meet with clients to determine that they were aware they would soon lose their cash benefits and to help them develop a plan for supporting their families so their children would not be placed at risk when cash assistance ended. What then happened to welfare recipients and their families in the aftermath of the implementation of this policy? Using data collected under the auspices of Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation’s Project on Devolution and Urban Change I examine that question.
Between 1998 and 2001, Andrew London and I guided the collection of in-depth, qualitative, longitudinal data through multiple interviews with 38 initially welfare-reliant women residing in profoundly disadvantaged neighborhoods in Cleveland. For this presentation, I draw on the data from the last interview conducted with the 14 women who were cut off of cash benefits. I will briefly touch on the nature of the services offered on the eve of their termination from cash benefits, the sources of financial support that replaced the lost cash benefits, and the consequences of this transition for families.
Although the Cleveland welfare department was fairly consistent in assuring that families continued to receive Food Stamps and Medicaid in the first year after they were cut from cash benefits, there was little to no involvement in families’ lives beyond the provision of those benefits. Women found that come the last check, they were then fully expected to fend for themselves financially, with no other assistance from the state with job searches or cash support, even in cases of dire emergency. Some found low-wage work despite the contracting economy. Some relied on families and/or boyfriends. We found little change in their material well-being when women transitioned from welfare to work or reliance on personal networks, but this is not cause for celebration as most women remained at or below the poverty line. There was also little change in the family routines when single parents managed to avoid work and sustain their in-home carework with financial contributions from their network. For those who neither found work in the formal labor market nor had family on whom they could rely, the story was typically very distressing. Some resorted to doing sex work in order to survive and, in some cases, to support a drug habit that emerged around the time that cash benefits were terminated. State involvement was reduced to removing children from two families, or it disappeared entirely in families where the children were older. Although all our cases do not paint a terrible portrait of the costs of denying state support, some do.
Across outcomes (employment, reliance on network members, or neither), and despite apparent need, the women we interviewed constructed independence as the complete absence of support from either the state or personal networks. Their rejection of interdependency reflected hegemonic discourses of self-sufficiency and fundamentally contradicted the idea that one could be independent through access to “adequate and appropriate support” (as suggested by the International Independent Living Movement). Perhaps it is not surprising that these welfare recipients who have been bombarded with the “work-first” ethic have adopted so resolutely this logic of individualism. But this suggests that we may have a long way to go before a different ethic of care might mobilize “welfare users” to demand access to adequate and appropriate support for a healthy interdependency and in so doing reject the logic of autonomous individualism.