www.newsandletters.org

NEWS & LETTERS, June 2002 

Bush's welfare bill disaster for women

by Terry Moon

Bush's retrogressive, punitive welfare legislation reveals what it means to have the Christian reactionary Right in the White House. Bush is attacking not only poor women, but the very idea that women and workers have a right to self-determination and freedom.

It is the revolt of women and workers that Bush is trying to crush with his ideologically driven welfare bill that has no basis in science or facts. It also has transformed the whole welfare debate. Work—and here we are talking of the most alienating, low-wage, no-status, drudge work available in the U.S.—is so much a given that even the Left calls only for a decent job, while the Democrats—thinking only of the next election—dicker over 30 hours per week vs. 40, and more, but not enough, money for childcare.

What you won't hear from the pusillanimous Democrats is that everything Bush, et al, say is a lie, especially the insistent Republican chant that the Democrats were wrong then in their predictions that the 1996 law would be a disaster to women and children. And they're wrong now.

REALITY OF WOMEN'S LIVES

There is plenty of science on the effects of Clinton's 1996 bill that gutted welfare that show that it was "a disaster":

• Those who first left welfare after the 1996 bill took effect were not, as is widely believed, only the most able, but also those with the most problems—health, mental illness, and so on. They are neither working nor on welfare; lost to the system, many may have died or become homeless.

• Most who left welfare for work cycled in and out of low-wage jobs, leaving families below the federal poverty level. Half the former recipients in some states said they were unable to buy food, pay rent or utility bills.

• One in ten former recipients had been evicted or become homeless.

• A three-state study, focusing on mothers with young children, found that parenting skills did not improve; that mothers were just as likely to be depressed as they were before being pushed into jobs; that they spent less time with their children.

Given this reality, Bush's assertion that his plan is "a pathway to independence," and that "too many Americans still have not found work and the purpose it brings," reeks of mendacity. Bush's plan—as are all his plans—is to attack the working class as a whole, and help his capitalist and right-wing religious fundamentalist friends. Women forced off welfare are required to take jobs that capitalists cannot farm out to super-exploited workers in Third World countries.

Typical is a county in Greenwood, Miss., where the unemployment rate is 10%. To fulfill requirements, some welfare moms take vans at 3 a.m. to jobs in chicken processing plants three or four hours away, where they earn about $6 an hour. The pay is so low that they still get welfare. But the real welfare is going to the poultry plants. Bush's policy has supplied them with women to whom they pay starvation wages, while the state pays for the van, a $5-a-day lunch, and a $3,000 bonus for two years slave labor.

MONEY FOR THE FANATICS

 Bush's religious fanatics get $300 million to push marriage on welfare women, and a raise of federal spending on "abstinence only" education by $33 million. Even U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher argued that "the only proven method for reducing pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease is to combine the abstinence message with one that teaches young people how to protect themselves."

Two-parent families look good for children because two incomes mean less poverty. Raising the minimum wage to a livable wage would do more than any of Bush's gifts to his capitalist friends to raise women and their children out of poverty. What Bush and his marriage-happy (except if that marriage is between those of the same sex) extremist friends ignore is the growing body of science that shows that poor women, and women on welfare, suffer much more abuse than wealthier women, with a rate of violence 3.5 times higher than those with incomes above $40,000. For many women, leaving an abusive relationship was the true "pathway to independence." Bush, with his Promise Keepers mentality, would like to bar this escape route for the country's poorest women.

A measure of how far back Clinton's, and now Bush's, welfare bills have taken us is seen when we look at the highpoint of the movement for welfare rights as revealed in the demands of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in the early 1970s. These Black and white women on welfare demanded a living wage for all Americans and they established that taking care of children was an honorable profession, one that should be respected and supported by the state.

Return to top

Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search

Subscribe to News & Letters

Published by News and Letters Committees
Designed and maintained by  Internet Horizons