Did Welfare Reform Worsen The Depression In Working Class Incomes?

I am inclined to think that Bill Clinton based his “end of welfare as we know it” on optimism. He knew that, contrary to the negative press workers got from the business press, workers preferred to work. It gave them dignity and an income and a value to their families. Because he lived among people whose lives had an upward trajectory Clinton believed that was the nature of things.

The welfare rolls had become a pool of joblessness. Described that way it’s hard not to think of the situation being caused by the welfare safety net. Was it as self-perpetuating as it was described, or was it, perhaps, simply that a certain number of working age people were always going to be unemployable or underemployed for lengthy periods regardless of willingness to work. Were they, as a class, to blame for their situation. There are people who will always be hard to employ or find it difficult to stay employed. There is a spectrum of capability; it is not simply a matter of will and character or the lack of it. These people deserve to eat and have a place to live because they are Americans, and the government is the last resort for that. Often their unemployability is due to the trauma of military service or simply caused by traumatic events or disease which we know tend to be underdiagnosed and under-treated among the poor.

Clinton signed welfare reform but the Gingrich Revolution is the author of this term-limiting of welfare. They spoke in the same hearty American language of optimism but also in a different American language of punitiveness and judgment. Conservatives tend to be more binary in how they assess problems, and more willing to blame the ones needing help. Clinton wanted to achieve innovations and reform perceived problems. He believed welfare reform might solve the problem of persistent unemployment. It actually may have hidden the problem, and created another.

There is another tendency among conservatives to believe ending the spending solves the problem it was being spent on, but even if people with problems and limitations that make them harder to employ die off sooner (and less expensively, and thus more efficiently in conservative terms) new people with these difficulties are born and enter the work force each year. There are some problems that can’t be solved but require palliative care. Think of some categories of unemployment like chronic leukemia, which has to be treated but cannot be cured and doesn’t go away.

Did the end of welfare as we know it exacerbate the degradation of working class prosperity Americans had enjoyed for two generations?

This long depression in working class incomes dates roughly to the Reagan administration and the careful neutralization (and Reagan’s cheerful co-opting) of organized labor, but may it also have been deepened and lengthened by the removal of this durable safety net? The welfare safety net didn’t assume that one’s joblessness was only temporary––an optimistic view that everybody can find a job if they look for one. That everyone is capable of work their whole life. That anyone not working is malingering or of poor character. It might have carried a stigma but it didn’t withhold help.

The removal of the reliable safety net (which had no mechanism for shutting out the least employable) left various deterrents to people who needed assistance. (The taxpayer could wash his hands of those deterred from seeking help; problem solved.) Workers could wear out the government’s tolerance for their inadequacies even if the inadequacies didn’t go away. Eventually the govt would label them as incorrigible and undeserving. Thus simple need became a stain on your character, making it even more difficult to find employment and keep it.

When the safety net was taken away it also increased the desperation of the pool of less employable people at the bottom. Did this increased desperation and larger pool of people who could no longer find help depress wages? How could it not? I’ve read about the wage-depressing effect of undocumented workers willing work longer for less money because of their insecure status here, but the removal of the safety net was probably a much greater depressant on wages. Both increased the labor pool and increased its desperation. In a sense workers who weren’t working but not starving were like union workers who could strike because there was a union fund for that. Greater desperation helps employers.

I believe the lagging minimum wage is a result of a labor market that is tilted to favor employers in more ways than most Americans realize: by declining union organizing, by the presence of less demanding undocumented workers, and by the desperation caused by the loss of a safety net, each leveraging the others.

Why are unions and workers the only ones ever labelled "militant"?

We were discussing a certain local union the other evening and the word "militant" was very quickly applied. I had a hard time visualizing these people with axe handles. Seriously. Elementary school teachers militant? I can't even imagine high school teachers raising their voices. Militant? It's ridiculous. Stubborn, maybe. Determined. Possibly strident, aggressive, assertive, even unreasonable. Militant? No. But the term is useful because it automatically stigmatizes the labor side of any disagreement.

Strange how the word militant is always applied to the labor side of the dispute and only to the labor side. Whether there is anything remotely violent or militaristic about the union behavior. But the label "militant" automatically alienates anyone reading about the dispute because it implies violence.

History paints a vivid picture of organized violence directed by employers against workers. It was the owners' side which sent in armed Pinkertons and the National Guard and armed street thugs in the early days, who infiltrated organizing efforts, fired, blackballed and otherwise intimidated workers trying to form unions, etc. In Colorado and Chicago and the Appalachian and western coal fields it was striking miners who were shot down and killed in the hundreds. But it's only workers who are labelled "militant". Hired armies, sometimes uniformed, sent to intimidate workers trying to organize were never called "militant". Why?

There is the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado where a tent city of coal workers and their families was attacked for 14 hours by hired police with bombs and machine guns. Militant?

There was the Memorial Day Massacre in 1937, when unarmed steelworkers and their families were gunned down by Chicago police after attending a rally on the south side. Militant?

The history of official police in this country begins with gangs of vigilantes sent out to discourage uprisings (the perpetual fear of the minority white population who lived off slave labor) and to hunt down fugitive slaves but also to intimidate the slave population who might just be thinking of escaping or might "need a little encouragement" to work harder. Sometimes it was simply sport.

The term "militant" stems from the word "militia" which was regularly applied to both ad hoc and official band or posses of armed uniformed men organized for the purpose of intimidating the low paid and unpaid and slave workers who always outnumbered their employers. But "militant" is never applied to the employer side in a labor dispute. Why?

Today, the most dangerous subversive organizations in America tend to be well-armed white right-wing groups who adopt the label of "militia" or "posse", but militant is seldom applied to the rightward side of the political spectrum, just as little attention and very little news coverage is directed there. Why?

To this day, "militant" is an adjective blithely, unquestioningly, automatically attached to nonmilitant and nonviolent workers. Workers who have the nerve to ask for more and seem determined to get it. Often they are receiving as little as their employer can get away with paying them, so this more they are asking for is ordinary fairness. And the determination they show towards gaining satisfaction is usually proportionate to the patience they've shown waiting to receive fairness. Fairness is seldom offered willingly, but that recalcitrance by management is never called militant. Why?

We've been reading about the Minnesota Orchestra lockout. Which side is more "militant" here? Certainly the orchestra management is more militant than the violinists and cellists. A lockout is far more militant behavior than anything the players have demonstrated, but militant is never applied to management. Why?

We can call the owners' side selfish, arrogant, greedy. (Although the word "greedy" is usually applied to workers who tend to earn a lot less than the people they are negotiating with. These days workers who are working several jobs to patch together less than a living wage are routinely called greedy.) But we don't call the owner/management side of any labor disagreement "militant". Why? Does it violate the Chicago Style Book? Did Strunk and White outlaw this usage?

Why does militant always apply only to the side of the underclass, usually in cases where there is no whiff of violence, no threat of violence, no suggestion "if we don't get this we might do that", not even implied violence. Why not use the word "firm" or "resolute" or "stubborn" or "uncompromising"? Militant is always the label, and we are instructed to visualize muscular angry men with axe handles and burning torches.

Why do we even picture axe handles? There's a history there. In Pennsylvania in 1877, mine workers trying to organize were confronted by state police augmented by hired thugs armed with pick and axe handles. Violent mobs that were sent out to intimidate blacks trying to assert their rights in the South were often armed with axe handles. Where did you get a sufficient supply of axe handles? From factories producing axes and axe handles. Supplies of uniform weaponry were always on the side of management and authority. But it has always been workers who are labelled militant. Why? Why are we obediently following the same bias today?

A Different Kind of Strike

From Thomas Frank, writing in Harper's.

"A series of psychological studies appeared recently showing that the rich are quantitatively less nice than others. My object in the latest issue of Harper's Magazine, is to ask how that might be remedied, how the rich might be made nicer. My answer:

"Let us consider a different sort of strike, one that might help the emotionally arrested rich in their time of need. I propose a twenty-four-hour refusal to fawn. A servility strike. A day without deference..."

The Day the Middle Class Died

Today's must-read is from Michael Moore. Sometimes he's a bit annoying. Sometimes he's a blowhard. Sometimes he goes too far (endorsing Nader over Gore). Sometimes he's right. He's right about this.