Welfare Reform, Enclosure, and the New Economy
Trish Ventura

Respond to pventura@new.ufl.edu

In 1996 the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act (PRA), better known by its ideologically charged sobriquet welfare
reform, was signed into law.  By dismantling sixty years of Aid to
Families with Dependent Children and replacing it with Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families, the PRA represents nothing less than a
complete public policy reversal.  It imposes a strict five-year lifetime
limit on eligibility, provides less money for welfare, and focuses on
moving large numbers of recipients into work--largely underpaid and
unrepresented labor.  As welfare rolls drop from an all-time high of
over 14 million in 1993 and '94 to around 6 million by 2000 (Department
of Health and Human Services), the administrators of the program focus
not on solving the problems of poverty but on getting people off
welfare--which is rarely the same thing.  The presumed characters in the
narrative undergirding these programs are clear: when AFDC was created,
its presumed recipient was a tragically helpless white widow who would
otherwise be forced to abandon her children to enter the world of paid
employment.  The presumed recipient of TANF is a greedily helpless woman
of color who would use her children to deliberately avoid work if
allowed.  TANF aims to close off the supposed loophole that allows women
of color to avoid the labor market.  Thus, the Personal Responsibility
Act's centerpiece is the employment requirement.  However, given the
direction job growth is taking, work is not going to be a stepping stone
to financial security.  In fact, we can expect the numbers of working
poor to grow.

Of course, after decades of demonizing welfare recipients, convincing
employers to hire them is a PR challenge.  That is where organizations
like The Welfare to Work Partnership come in.  Founded in 1997, The
Partnership promotes the hiring of welfare recipients.  But when we
examine the five initial companies who formed the Partnership, we see
that all but one had very public struggles with organized labor the very
year they formed the Partnership (the one that did not is Burger King
whose interest in a low-wage workforce is obvious).  Thus, we see that
welfare-to-work, like the Personal Responsibility Act, reflects the
larger market itself; here corporations enjoy tax benefits and increased
profits while dismantling organized labor and moving jobs to desperate
workers who will settle for low wages and no benefits because they
believe they have no other options.

From these kinds of developments, I conclude that the elimination of
welfare actually operates as a kind of enclosure movement for advanced
capitalistic societies.   In exploring this proposition, I argue that
the rhetoric of post-Fordism is no longer able to encompass the
implications of the PRA and the New Economy in general and end by
arguing for a different kind of framework by which to understand the
current cultural formation.