From:
http://prorevnews.blogspot.ca/2012/08/federal-work-program-is-actually-form.html
*Natalia*
August 29, 2012
Federal work program is actually a form of unconstitutional
indentured servitude
<http://www.adaction.org/pages/issues/all-policy-resolutions/social-amp-domestic/issues-brief-no.-13-welfare-reform.php>
/From a presentation by Dr. Gwendolyn Mink to Americans for Democratic
Action/
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 program. TANF changed welfare in
two fundamental ways. First, it severely constricted poor families'
access
<http://www.adaction.org/pages/issues/all-policy-resolutions/social-amp-domestic/issues-brief-no.-13-welfare-reform.php#>
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.
*
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
<http://www.adaction.org/pages/issues/all-policy-resolutions/social-amp-domestic/issues-brief-no.-13-welfare-reform.php#>
to form heterosexual, marital, two-parent families.
TANF forwards its labor market goals by requiring recipients to be
engaged in one of certain specified "work activities" in order to
continue
<http://www.adaction.org/pages/issues/all-policy-resolutions/social-amp-domestic/issues-brief-no.-13-welfare-reform.php#>
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 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.
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. , , ,
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.
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