welfare by Gwen and Rep Patsy Mink

[dlcaa...@yahoo.com]

December 10, 2001

TANF REAUTHORIZATION
AN OPPORTUNITY TO
INVEST IN AMERICAN'S FUTURE

presentation by Dr. Gwendolyn Mink
To the ADA Economic Policy Committee

Introduction

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with
the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF
changed welfare in two fundamental ways. First, it severely constricted
poor families' access to income assistance. Second, it required
recipients to surrender rights and personal autonomy as a condition of
receiving assistance.

TANF chokes off access to welfare by repealing the entitlement to
benefits and by imposing stringent lifetime time limits.The repeal of
the entitlement means that, even if one meets all of the eligibility
criteria for welfare, one is not guaranteed a benefit. The imposition
of time limits means that after 60 cumulative months, one is no longer
eligible to participate in the federal welfare program even though one
has played by the rules and even if one's family continues to need
income support. Time limits have received particular attention of late,
both because the five-year clock is about to expire on the first big
cohort of recipients who have participated in welfare under the 1996
law and because the current recession makes time-limited former welfare
recipients especially vulnerable to desperate and unmitigated poverty.

The second major change under TANF has to do with the terms of
participation in the welfare system. Those terms require recipients'
submission to a rigorous disciplinary regime armed with expanded
coercive power to engineer their lives. Rules familiar to welfare
policy since the 1960s - rules promoting wage work, paternity
establishment, and child support enforcement - acquired new force in
1996 statutory provisions and in ensuing administrative guidelines that
spell out harsh punishments for applicants and recipients who do not
comply. The stiffened welfare rules forward two principal policy goals.
One is to compel labor market attachment among poor mothers
notwithstanding the care needs of their children. The other is to
pressure poor single mothers to form heterosexual, marital, two-parent
families.

Labor Market Participation
TANF forwards its labor market goals by requiring recipients to be
engaged in one of certain specified "work activities" in order to
continue to receive benefits. The work requirement stresses getting a
job, any job, regardless of whether the job's wages and benefits are
sufficient to support a family. Codifying the value of work for work's
sake, the work requirement specifically impedes recipients'
participation in education or skills preparation and enhancement, two
endeavors that would make movement into the labor market more secure
economically and more remunerating for participants.

With its "work first" discipline, TANF pays very little attention to
how work outside the home might, in fact, win economic security.
Recipients are impeded or discouraged from preparing for jobs at living
wages, in fact, while jobs at living wages are not guaranteed to
recipients who comply with work requirements. Moreover, the social
supports that make wage work affordable for those who work for low
wages are not assured. The childcare entitlement that existed in the
Family Support Act of 1988, for example, was rescinded for individuals
by the PRWORA.

The work requirement is enforced by sanctions, or punishments. An adult
recipient who does not engage in required outside work activities can
have her family's benefits cut or terminated. Although all states must
sanction recipients who do not meet the work requirement, the scope and
content of the work sanction are up to the individual states. Some
states terminate assistance the first time there is a work requirement
violation; some states reduce benefits incrementally, terminating TANF
participation after multiple violations; some states punish whole
families; some states punish only the adults to whom TANF rules apply.
Despite these and other variations, the overall sanction environment is
one that is extremely crucial to the enforcement of TANF's work
discipline. Recipients know that they are only a sanction away from
concatenating hardships, including possible homelessness and possibly
jeopardized custody of their own children.

There are a whole host of problems with TANF, not the least of which is
that it does nothing to promote economic opportunity or to reduce
poverty. Recent studies show that TANF's sanction policies actually
deepen poverty among those who fall under its bludgeon. Equally
important are recent findings by Sanford Schram at Bryn Mawr and Joseph
Soss at American University who have documented the extent to which
there are racial disparities in the imposition and scope of sanctions
states with more people of color participating in TANF tend to have
more extensive and more intrusive sanction policies.

Compulsory labor market participation under TANF is troubling also
because work rules and sanctions injure recipients's Constitutional
rights. TANF impairs vocational liberty, for example, in that it
legitimates only labor market work as work that has any kind of social
value. Moreover, in its insistence that any-job-will-do, as long as
it's in the labor market, TANF violates the vocational liberty to
perform care giving work for one's own family in one's own home. In
both respects, TANF vitiates the 13th Amendment's prohibition on
slavery and indentured servitude. It also singles out poor, mostly
unmarried, mothers in a separate caste, barred by statute from putting
care giving above wage earning.

Family Structure
The second aspect of TANF discipline targets the family decisions and
family structures primarily of mothers who are participants in the TANF
system. The PRWORA signals TANF's family formation goal in its findings
and in the statutory purposes it assigns to the cash assistance
program. Three of TANF's statutory purposes involve promoting
father-mother family life, including by reducing or preventing
independent childbearing by women. Because the goal of the 1996 law
really is to restore paternal headship, at least financially, it should
be of concern to people who are interested in and care about women's
rights, including a poor mother's right to parent independently.

The pro-marriage, pro-paternal family headship provisions of TANF
revolve around child support and paternity establishment enforcement
requirements. Ever since the early 1970's, federal welfare law has said
that participants in welfare need to cooperate in the establishment of
biological paternity and in securing and maintaining child support. The
1996 law ratchets that requirement up several notches by attaching
strong sanctions that states must deliver against non-cooperating
participants - women who either may not be able to identify
biological fathers or who may not want them involved in their families.
Mothers who do not provide government the information either to
establish paternity or to collect child support expose their families
to a mandatory, automatic 25% reduction in the family's benefits, which
TANF requires the states to impose. TANF invites states to apply meaner
sanctions, such as terminating cash assistance. Thus does TANF turn
income support into a reward for obeying government's stipulations
defining what a family is.

In addition to its statutory rules governing paternity establishment
and child support, TANF provisions also include incentives to states to
reduce "illegitimacy." The "illegitimacy bonus" provides extra money to
states that achieve the greatest reductions in out of wedlock births
without increasing their abortion rates. The bonus gives states a green
light to interfere in women's intimate family decisions, including
reproductive decisions - such as by offering bonuses to unmarried
pregnant women who agree to relinquish their babies at childbirth; by
pressuring unmarried pregnant recipients to marry; or by encouraging or
rewarding long-term contraception by unmarried women who are poor.

The Clinton Administration, which had responsibility for devising the
first guidelines for TANF implementation, created additional
opportunities for states to get involved in the ways women create and
live in their families. The Clinton Administration's Department of
Health and Human Services propagated guidelines which specifically told
states that, given the purposes of TANF, they could develop
pro-marriage policies with TANF funds. As a result, several states have
used TANF funds to disseminate the pro-marriage message, to provide
marriage classes, or to reward actual marriage in the structure of TANF
benefits. In addition, the Clinton Administration included marriage as
one of the indices of high performance, so that states with the
greatest increases in the numbers of children living in married-parent
families will qualify for a "high performance bonus." Thus, we have
implanted the idea that federal social policy about income should
simultaneously be about family.

Privacy Rights Abused
TANF thrives on a number of fundamental rights abuses and, therefore,
is really an offense to Constitutional liberty and equality for people
who find themselves in dire economic circumstances. The rights that are
jeopardized, compromised, or taken away include reproductive and sexual
privacy rights. Reproductive privacy rights are severely injured when
TANF explicitly and directly discourages childbearing among poor women
except under heterosexual, marital circumstances. Sexual privacy rights
are undermined by the child support enforcement and paternity
establishment requirements which compel a woman to divulge the intimate
details of her life to the government in exchange for benefits.

TANF also impairs marital and intimate decisional rights when it
dictates that the biological father of a poor woman's child must be
recognized as that child's parent. Only in TANF families must a mother
accept a man's genetic connection to her child as proof of his social
relationship with - and potential parental rights to - the child. It
is well-established Constitutional law that an unmarried biological
father cannot simply walk into a family and declare himself to be a
parent in any socially meaningful sense. Yet, TANF declares that
biological paternity establishes social paternity in poor families. It
does this both to coerce financial fatherhood - which yields child
support payments that the government gets to keep; and to coerce
father-mother family formation - which ends poor mothers' so-called
dependency on government by transferring it to men.

Proposed Next Steps
Block grants for the welfare system expire in 2002. Reauthorization of
TANF funding presents an opportunity to reconsider the TANF framework
in light of its injuries to poor mothers' rights, opportunities and
independence, as well as to the well being of their children.

Across the political spectrum, policymakers and advocates have been
crafting their agendas for the "next steps" in welfare reform. The
primary interest of many of the folks who brought us TANF is to
strengthen and expand the family formation side of welfare policy
through more explicit and more expansive fatherhood and marriage
initiatives. Since 1998, Congress has entertained a series of
fatherhood bills aimed at improving the ability of biological fathers
of TANF children to fulfill their financial role, at encouraging
residential fatherhood, and at promoting marital fatherhood. Fatherhood
bills have been quite popular, passing the House of Representatives by
thundering bipartisan majorities.

In the Bush Administration, Wade Horn, the Assistant Secretary of
Health and Human Services for welfare, is the point person for
fatherhood. Horn, one of the founders of the National Fatherhood
Initiative, is most famous for advocating affirmative action for
married people in the allocation of social benefits, whereby single
parent families either would be prohibited from receiving benefits or
would be shunted to the end of the line. Although he retracted this
extreme marriage preference during his confirmation hearings, Horn
remains a staunch proponent of marriage who supports such proposals as
rewarding women "at risk of bearing a child out of wedlock" with annual
payments of $1000 for five years if they bear their first child within
marriage and stay married.

Policymakers and policy experts who travel in more liberal circles also
endorse the use of social policy to teach, encourage, cajole, and
reward marriage. Wendell Primus, of the Center for Budget and Policy
Priorities, for example, has argued the importance of marriage for
poverty reduction, and Jesse Jackson, Jr. introduced a fatherhood bill
in the last Congress. Bipartisan interest in ending single mothers'
poverty by bringing or forcing biological fathers into their families
creates a very strong likelihood that TANF reauthorization will
centrally feature efforts to marry poor single mothers off of welfare.

Among fundamentalist patriarchalists, the argument for marriage
promotion through welfare policy is largely ideological, and turns on
"family values." Among moderates and liberals, the argument often is
linked to the observation that families with residential, marital
fathers tend to be better off than families without them.This is not
surprising, since married-parent families often have two incomes and
since a father's incomegenerally is larger than a mother's.

If policymakers proceed from the statistical correlation between family
structure and income to impose a family structure on poor single
mothers, they will commit grave harms against women. Some of the harms
have been discussed above, in the context of TANF's injuries to poor
mothers' intimate rights. A critical, additional harm will follow
from the failure to examine how injuries to women's economic rights
enforce single mothers' poverty. The failure to remunerate care giving
work in families - work historically performed by women - is one
injury to women's economic rights that impedes a mother's ability to
maintain an autonomous household when she is parenting alone. In the
labor market, meanwhile, the failure to pay women a just wage saps a
mother's ability to secure an income that will sustain her family and
purchase surrogates for her care when she is working outside the home.
These injuries are especially daunting for mothers of color, for
inequality in the labor market is not only gendered, it simultaneously
is raced. African American women who are employed full time earn only
64 cents to every dollar earned by white men and only 84 cents to every
dollar earned by white women. The wage gap for Latinas is even larger:
they earn 55 cents to the white man's dollar and 72 cents to the white
woman's. Given the economic inequalities that attend and shape women's
participation in the labor market, it is no wonder that so many TANF
single mothers, disproportionately of color, remain poor.

TANF reauthorization may provide family engineers an occasion to
promote fatherhood and marriage, but it also presents progressives an
opportunity to try to attenuate some of the worst consequences of the
new law.Indeed, given the rights abuses, inequalities, double
standards, and immiseration visited by TANF on poor single mothers,
progressives have an obligation to undo the damage of the 1996
anti-welfare "reform."

Many progressives have been preparing for this moment for several
years. The challenge has been how to keep poor mothers' equality rights
in the foreground of discussions and proposals to repair the economic
safety net. The challenge has been how to fix TANF to support poor
single mothers in the choices they make and in the work that they do -
whether in the family or in the labor market; and to support caregivers
- married or single, female or male, gay or straight, of color or white
- when the labor market makes them poor.

In October, Congressmember Patsy T. Mink (D-Hawaii) introduced a TANF
reauthorization bill (H.R. 3113) that confronts these challenges. This
legislation is the fruit of exchanges among activists, advocates,
recipients, researchers, and scholars. It also is the fruit of
painstaking legislative drafting by attorneys at NOW-LDEF and me.

Social justice ultimately will require repealing TANF and replacing it
with a comprehensive income security system that supports both care
giving and labor market work and that redresses inequalities rather
than fomenting them. In the meantime, H.R. 3113 would rid TANF of some
of its worst abuses while also stretching its framework to provide more
accessible, fair, flexible and reliable income support. For example,
H.R. 3113:

1. redefines the statutory purposes of TANF to be [a] the
provision of assistance to families in need so that children can be
raised in their own homes and [b] the reduction of poverty, including
by supporting care giving as well as by strengthening and expanding
labor market work supports. This redefinition of TANF's mission would
halt the family engineering currently provoked by TANF's statutory
goals.

2. expands the concept of "work activity" to include [a] education
and job training at all levels and of any duration; [b] a parent's
full-time at-home care giving for a child under age six or for a sick
or disabled child of any age; [c] part-time care giving for children
over age six who lack adequate after-school care or supervision.

3. attenuates time limits by stopping the clock for TANF families
that are in compliance with program rules, including work requirements
based on expanded definitions of allowable "work activities."

4. ends draconian punishments that enforce TANF's rights abuses by
prohibiting full family sanctions and by repealing sanctions against
non-cooperation in paternity establishment and child support
enforcement.

5. restores the Constitutionally guaranteed privacy and intimate
associational rights of poor mothers by making paternity establishment
and child support enforcement voluntary for mothers. As an incentive
to voluntary participation in these programs, H.R. 3113 designates
mothers, not government, the recipient of all child support payments.

6. assures the safety interests of families enrolled in TANF by
making various requirements more flexible for families dealing with
domestic or intimate violence and by requiring states not only to honor
this flexibility but also to count treatment for domestic or sexual
violence, as well as for substance abuse or mental health problems, as
"work activities."

7. protects all children in poor families by prohibiting the
"family cap" which withholds benefits to a child born to a mother
enrolled in TANF.

8. ends the "illegitimacy bonus" and replaces it with a poverty
reduction bonus to reward states that lower poverty rates the most.

9. assures children that their care needs will be met when parents
enter the labor market by restoring the child care entitlement for TANF
families.

10. guarantees enforcement of anti-discrimination and labor standards
laws and due process guarantees within the TANF regime and guarantees
equal access to TANF regardless of marital or citizen status.

11. stops the clock for all TANF families in recessionary times and
temporarily restores TANF eligibility for former TANF families for the
duration of the recession.

12. provides incentives to states to mount programs to reduce barriers
to employment, to offer job training and encourage education, to ensure
delivery of work supports to recipients as well as to former recipients
who remain eligible for such supports as Medicaid and Food Stamps.

These reforms will not end TANF; they will only attenuate the terms of
participating in it. Still, changing the terms of TANF will open
opportunities (e.g., education and training); reward all forms of work
(including at-home care giving); return fundamental rights
(reproductive, parental, associational, vocational); and assure equal
protection in its broadest sense, by guarding the safety of families
and meeting the care needs of children in poverty. So reformed, TANF
will provide basic economic security for poor families as we pursue an
agenda to end poverty altogether while guaranteeing equality to all.

# # #


©2003 Americans For