Welcome to the world of American Indians and the reservations from 1860 to the present.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of D & N Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:49 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] US welfare 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-dome stic/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-dome stic/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-dome stic/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-dome stic/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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