Revisiting the Class-Parity Analysis of Welfare Work Requirements

Work requirements in welfare programs often are interpreted as enforcing cross-class parity in work-family balance; premised on the idea that most mothers are now working in the labor market, such requirements force welfare recipients to do the same. However, this class-parity analysis mischaracterizes both welfare law and prevailing work patterns. A legal analysis of policies toward two-parent families shows that work requirements typically encourage a breadwinner-caretaker division of labor, not a dual-earner pattern. Unlike policies toward single parents, these policies do not simply insist that all parents work. Moreover, longitudinal analysis of survey data reveals lower rates of continuous employment for mothers generally than what welfare rules require from single parents. Thus, relative to what most mothers do, a transfer recipient must work more if she is single but may work less if she is married. These findings show the need to integrate analysis of welfare policy's work and family dimensions. Welfare rights activists of the 1960s and 1970s invoked norms of equality to resist imposition of work requirements in welfare programs. They demanded that low-income women, often women of color, should be able to provide full-time caregiving to their own families just as more privileged women typically did and were encouraged to do A different sort of equality analysis figures prominently in the steady increase in the stringency of work requirements since the 1960s. Many interpret today's policies as enforcing parity between welfare recipients and higher-income women; both groups must work in order to make ends meet. In this view, providing assistance without requiring work was a relic of a bygone era before the late twentieth-century's dramatic increases in women's labor market participation. "Welfare reform made the circumstances of all mothers more similar" (Pateman 2005, 48)