Well, I don't know anyone who has the conversation on tape, but historically, I
think it is pretty clear that social welfare policy has been used to channel
women's labor into the home or into the labor market depending upon labor market's
needs. For 60 years, the primary significance of AFDC was that the state would
help poor women raise children in their own home. Implicitly, this policy assumed
that the children merited caretaking, because they were going to grow up and
become part of a future American workforce. Now that workforce can come from
anywhere, it is far more important to extract cheap labor from the mothers in
poorly paid service jobs than it is for them to stay home and take care of
children who may well be economically superfluous.
Put another way, AFDC was the social welfare system for an industrial economy and
the family arrangements that accompanied it: mother stays home, father works, and
father earns a "family wage."--a wage sufficient to support a family. By
contrast, TANF is the social welfare system for a service economy in which the
social wage has been contracted and everyone works or risks severe hardship. One
can debate precisely how the message of this changing labor market needs got
communicated, but there is no doubt that it was heard and responded to.
Joel Blau
Carrol Cox wrote:
> Margaret Coleman wrote:
>
> > It is this same reasoning which answers my question of
> > why welfare reform now -- We were running out of women to put into low wage
> > work, and we needed to 'free' them from the bonds of welfare.... cheers,
>
> This makes sense, but it raises a question -- which perhaps the
> old base/superstructure metaphor may help phrase. On the one
> hand we have a capitalist need -- roughly, a need felt in
> the relations of production crudely conceived. On the other
> hand we have Clinton (with Gore's urging) and Congress
> passing legislation (superstructure crudely conceived) that
> indirectly fills that need. Can the various mediations connecting
> the two be described?
>
> I doubt that the CEO of Kentucky Fried Chicken or of some
> mail processing plant in Iowa called up their Senator and said,
> Hey, push some more workers our way. Or did Clinton and
> various thinktanks somehow intuit the need coming up?
>
> Carrol
