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Introduction

On the surface, mandatory work and work-related activities for welfare recipients seem immensely popular with the public. Poll after poll documents broad support for them. Consequently, over the years many proposals have been made to require welfare recipients to work in return for assistance (“workfare” or “work experience programs”) or to engage in other specific work-related activities (e.g., subsidized and unsubsidized employment and on-the-job training). We call this approach a full-engagement welfare program.

Supporters see such mandatory activities for welfare recipients as a way to build the job skills of recipients who do not have an extensive employment history while fulfilling the reciprocal obligation between recipient and government. It does not hurt that such programs also “smoke out” recipients who are working (usually under the table) unbeknownst to the agency. Moreover, work experience programs in particular also encourage recipients who can find a job to do so, because their choice is either work experience or a “real job,” as they put it. Even if mothers are not helped to find jobs, many supporters believe that purposeful activity rather than inactivity may be better for most welfare mothers.

Yet, the political process has been hesitant to respond to the wide support for workfare. Until the passage of the 1996 welfare reform law, opponents of mandatory work were able to water down the work requirements that, since the 1960s, have regularly been proposed in Congress. A major reason the opponents have succeeded is that participation mandates, especially with regard to work experience programs, also inspire intense opposition. In the 1970s, for example, the opponents of workfare programs successfully labeled them “slavefare”--because disadvantaged mothers would be forced to work for the minimum wage or less5 in jobs that should pay much more. Critics also argued that a mandatory work program would create a second-class workforce that would be paid less than regular workers for doing the same work while displacing regular employees. In 2002, one advocacy group called New York City’s Work Experience Program (WEP) “a public employment program, in which workers are performing critical services for the citizens of the city for no pay and keeps people trapped in poverty while displacing a full-time union workforce.” Most public service unions also oppose work experience programs, largely because they fear losing public jobs (“worker displacement”).

State leaders, even very conservative ones, have shied away from work experience programs not just because of the political controversy they generate but also because of the costs and administrative challenges they involve. Such programs--again, especially those involving real work experience--are difficult to operate; they pose tremendous administrative challenges in finding and managing sites as well as in keeping track of participants and sanctioning them when they fail to comply. They are also expensive: as much as two or three times more costly than cash assistance (particularly if every participating mother claims child care assistance). 

Douglas J. Besharov is the Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar in Social Welfare Studies at AEI.