When Welfare Disappears

The Case for Economic Human Rights

Kenneth J. Neubeck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415947800
• eBook ISBN: 9781135403119
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This groundbreaking new book offers a history of welfare, an accurate portrayal of welfare recipients and an understanding of the diverse characteristics of lone-mother-headed families affected by welfare reform. Through detailed research, award-winning author Kenneth J. Neubeck offers a unique comparison of other industrialized nation's welfare policies compared to ours, and presents a new argument for curtailing the end of welfare as we know it: the case for respecting economic human rights.

1

Introduction: Combating Poverty, Respecting Economic Human Rights

Nora reached her 60-month lifetime limit [of eligibility for welfare benefits] and had her $499 monthly cash assistance discontinued. She is a single mother with three children, ages 6, 3, and 2 months. Nora faces the following barriers to becoming self-supporting: She does not have a high school diploma. She works as a school crossing guard—a job that pays only $460 monthly. She receives only $200 per month in child-care assistance, while the cheapest child care she can find for her two youngest costs $774 per month. Nora will not be able to look for a better-paying job until she can find affordable child care.¹

Nora is but one of millions of “lone mothers” in the United States, mothers who “are potentially the sole [caregivers] and sole supporters of their children.”² While being in a family headed by two adult partners is clearly no guarantee that a family will avoid poverty, families headed by lone mothers in the United States are far more likely than two-parent families to experience economic deprivation. The Urban Institute compared the economic hardships experienced by U.S. families with children headed by noncohabiting single parents (the vast majority of whom are women) to the hardships experienced by families headed by married couples. It found that 57.3 percent of single-parent families were “low income” in 2002, having incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, compared with 22.8 percent of married-couple families. Almost 30 percent of U.S. families headed by noncohabiting single parents were living in poverty in 2002, compared with only 6.6 percent of families headed by married couples.³

To obtain cash assistance to help meet her family’s basic subsistence needs, Nora was forced to seek admission to the welfare rolls. Welfare’s existence derives from federal legislation authorizing “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families” (TANF). Applicants for TANF must meet strict means tests in order to receive cash benefits. Some two million families were receiving such benefits in 2002.⁴ While TANF is jointly funded by the federal government and the fifty states, each individual state has created and administers its own TANF program. Although states must abide by general federal guidelines, programs vary in terms of eligibility requirements and benefit levels; however, all TANF programs are similar in that their cash assistance does little to lift lone-mother-headed families, such as Nora’s, out of poverty.

Connecticut, where Nora resides, is an extremely affluent state, and its TANF program is generous compared to other such programs. Nora and her three children received almost $6,000 per year in income assistance from the state of Connecticut before their benefits were discontinued. Still, her yearly welfare payments were less than a third of the federally-set poverty line. In 2002 a family consisting of an adult and three children under 18 was considered poor by the federal government if its annual income was under $18,307.⁵ Nora’s yearly welfare payments, when supplemented by her earnings from employment as a crossing guard during the school year, barely brought her family above 50 percent of the federal poverty line.

Under individual state TANF programs, cash assistance to poverty-stricken mothers and children is only minimal. Regardless of the seriousness of a family’s economic needs, such aid also is provided only for a temporary period of time. Federal legislation sets a lifetime limit of sixty months for cash TANF benefits. Individual states are, however, free to be more restrictive, and many are. Connecticut, for example, has a twenty-one-month time limit for cash assistance. In 2002 it ended a policy of granting six-month extensions—not to exceed the five-year federal time limit—to those TANF families found to be in especially chronic need, replacing it with a policy that allows families only three such six-month extensions. Nora and her family are among many thousands of impoverished lone mothers and children across the United States who have hit their state’s maximum time limits and been cut off from further cash welfare benefits.

It is important to stress that TANF legislation allows welfare to be extended only to those impoverished families who can meet eligibility requirements, one of which involves work outside the home. Regardless of whether mothers want or need to be with their children, or have other family members in their household needing care (e.g., elders who are ill or disabled), in order to receive TANF cash benefits mothers must engage in work activity. They must put the responsibilities of being a worker before those of mother and caregiver. If mothers cannot or refuse to do so, they risk loss of their family’s cash benefits, either wholly or in part. At the time of this writing, federal legislation required that most TANF recipients work a minimum of thirty hours per week—a minimum many members of Congress have sought to increase.⁶

Most TANF recipients, whose physical and mental health permit, show willingness to accept employment outside the home, even without the threatened loss of TANF benefits. Indeed, many lone mothers receiving TANF have a history of work experience. But large numbers of those on the welfare rolls are like Nora; they do not have much formal education or they lack the kinds of skills or job experience in demand by employers. Moreover, they frequently cannot find affordable (as well as accessible and dependable) child care that would facilitate their working outside the home. Those mothers on the TANF rolls, who place their children with caregivers and hold down jobs, typically earn poverty-level wages. Low earnings likewise plague mothers who leave the rolls because their TANF eligibility has ended. For lone mothers, moving from welfare to work more often than not means being trapped in the economically precarious and vulnerable ranks of the nation’s working poor, a sector of the U.S. labor force that has grown markedly in recent years.

Over a quarter of families headed by noncohabiting single parents live below the poverty line. The economic deprivation experienced by lone mothers is one reason that almost one in five children under 18 lives in poverty in the United States, a rate higher than that of any other affluent nation. Moreover, in recent years the numbers of children living in “severe poverty” (children living in families who have incomes below 50 percent of the federal poverty line) have been on the increase.

Yet, despite this chronic and severe impoverishment, the number of mothers and children on the TANF rolls has dropped by more than half over the last decade or so. While some families have used up their eligibility for TANF under state time limits, many lone-mother families eligible for TANF are simply not receiving assistance. Moreover, the number of families, who are eligible but who are not on the TANF rolls, has been on the rise. In short, while millions of poverty-stricken lone mothers and their children struggle to meet basic subsistence needs, the safety net that should be providing cash assistance toward meeting these needs delivers little or even no help at all.

Like many other impoverished lone mothers, Nora clearly is going to need a lot of aid and support if she is to overcome the serious barriers that stand in the way of her ability to provide adequately for herself and her children. In light of the barriers Nora faces, should the meager cash benefits that she and her children were receiving have been summarily discontinued? In principle, shouldn’t a lone mother who finds herself unable to adequately provide for herself and her children receive some type of income assistance? And why should cash assistance be both inflexibly time limited and so small as to do little more than maintain lone mothers and their children below the federal poverty line? Doesn’t living in severe and chronic poverty circumstances harm both mothers and their children? What happens to impoverished families when welfare disappears? Shouldn’t access to an adequate standard of living be a fundamental human right?

International Acknowledgment of Economic Human Rights

Some sixty years ago, nations around the world collectively agreed that every person on earth possesses certain fundamental rights simply on the basis of being a member of the human species.⁷ Without respect for their rights as human beings, these nations held, individuals cannot live in freedom or with dignity. The establishment of a broad consensus as to the existence and importance of universal human rights stands as perhaps the most significant international development following World War II. Indeed, the horrors of and destruction stemming from that war, including the genocidal Holocaust, played a major role in galvanizing international sentiment as to the desirability of codifying fundamental human rights and of establishing ways to respect, protect, and fulfill them.

A broad multinational consensus on the existence of human rights was formalized in 1948 when the General Assembly of the newly established United Nations (UN) adopted and proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The opening words of this historic document call for “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”⁸ The Universal Declaration was unanimously approved by forty-eight members of the UN General Assembly. Eight other member nations abstained from voting, but there were no negative votes. The United States was a leader in the drafting of the Universal Declaration’s provisions and voted for its adoption.

Provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights address a wide range of fundamental human rights, such as the right to be free from torture, slavery, or arbitrary arrest and detention and the right to freedom of expression and to participation in elections. Beyond such civil and political rights, provisions of the Universal Declaration also address economic rights—human rights that involve people’s basic subsistence needs. These are presented as no less deserving of respect by nation-states than civil and political rights.

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration is of particular importance to the plight of impoverished lone mothers and their children. It states, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care, and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”⁹ This article goes on to say that “motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.”¹⁰

In the United States, support for the concept of economic human rights had been voiced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as early as 1941.¹¹ In that year’s State of the Union Address to the U.S. Congress, he reflected on the goals of the United States and its World War II allies in terms of the need to collectively pursue the universal establishment of “four freedoms.” President Roosevelt considered freedom of speech and freedom of religion to be essential, along with freedom from fear. But economic security was identified as equally important, as evidenced in his fourth freedom, “the freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings, which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world.”¹²

Later, in a 1944 State of the Union Address, President Roosevelt advocated the adoption of an Economic Bill of Rights; in effect, a second bill of rights to supplement that protecting civil and political rights under the U.S. Constitution.¹³ Voicing the need to plan for both peace and the establishment of a high domestic standard of living in a post-World War II United States, President Roosevelt stated, “We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” While noting the crucial importance of protecting people’s political and civil rights, he held that these rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.”

In his 1944 address, President Roosevelt stressed that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” He went on to declare that “necessitous men are not free men” and called for “a new basis of security and prosperity for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.”¹⁴ President Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights included the right to employment and to wages high enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation; the right to a decent home, education, and health care; and protection from economic fears due to problems over which people had no control. President Roosevelt died in 1945, but his economic human rights concerns, shared by others worldwide, were directly reflected in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948.

The creation of the Universal Declaration benefited greatly from leadership provided by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, President Roosevelt’s widow, who served on the Commission on Human Rights created by the United Nations. The Universal Declaration is a statement of human rights ideals and principles—a declaration of aspirations and goals. It provides common standards for how all people should be treated, regardless of who they are or where they live. However, while the forty-eight nations that officially sanctioned its adoption in 1948 were presumably in favor of its provisions, the Universal Declaration was not actually a treaty to which nations were legally bound under international law. It was instead a step toward treaty creation. Even so, its themes have been incorporated into the constitutions and laws of most of the 191 members of the present-day United Nations, and it is considered to have achieved the status of “customary international law.” From its creation, the Universal Declaration has carried great moral force for people worldwide and has frequently been cited by oppressed groups seeking to justify and to legitimate their struggles against governmental policies and actions that violate its provisions.

Once the Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948, the UN Commission on Human Rights moved forward with drafts of treaties that would legally obligate nations to implement the human rights provisions it contained. Accordingly, the commission produced what is known as the International Bill of Human Rights. It includes two major treaties, each addressing a different set of rights. One treaty is known as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The second, of more immediate importance to this discussion, is called the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. These two human rights treaties were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966 and, once having received the number of nation—state ratifications required under the United Nations’ rules, they entered into force in 1976.

The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights states that “the widest possible protection and assistance should be accorded to the family,” particularly “while it is responsible for the care and education of dependent children.”¹⁵ The covenant recognizes freedom from hunger as a “fundamental right of everyone,” as is “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” It provides for “the right to work, which includes the right of everyone to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts.” The covenant states that work must be carried out “under just and favorable conditions” and must include remuneration that provides workers with “fair wages,” wages that allow them and their families a “decent living.”

Echoing Article 25 of the Universal Declaration, the Covenant provides for “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing, and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.”¹⁶ In ratifying this treaty, nations agree to take immediate and appropriate steps, in keeping with their resources, to progressively ensure the realization of the human rights it addresses.¹⁷

U.S. Actions Mixed Regarding Respect for Human Rights

By helping to draft and then by voting for the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Combating Poverty, Respecting Economic Human Rights
• Chapter 2 U.S. Welfare Policy: From Supporting Motherhood to a War against the Poor
• Chapter 3 Building Character through Adversity: General Outcomes of Welfare Reform
• Chapter 4 Varieties of Little-Noticed Suffering: Deconstructing Welfare-Reliant Families
• Chapter 5 Combating Family Poverty: How Other Affluent Nations Are More Successful and Why This Is So
• Chapter 6 Establishing Respect for Economic Human Rights in the United States
• Notes
• Index