Welfare ‘reform’ equals war on the poor

The anti-welfare program known as “Wisconsin Works,” or W-2, has been a complete failure.

After consistently gloating about the overturning of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), former Gov. Tommy Thompson and his ruling-class bosses were nowhere to be seen or heard when the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau issued its 272-page evaluation of “Wisconsin Works” on April 7—the most comprehensive study to date. The report calls for a virtually complete overhaul of this failed social policy.

Many politicians—Democrats and Repub licans alike—who clamored to dismantle welfare programs like AFDC and usher in W-2 are now doing an about-face. They are either distancing themselves from the report’s conclusions or are lying to the public by saying they actually care for W-2 recipients and support the report’s conclusions.

After the massive human misery and suffering caused by W-2 that is detailed in the report, Thompson and his accomplices should be tried for crimes against humanity by a people’s commission led by current and former W-2 recipients.

Those fighting the attempted privatization of Social Security might want to study this report closely.

The bureau’s findings include:

* W-2 recipients who left the program in late 1999 earned an average of just $8,300 in their first year out of the program and less than $12,000 by the fourth year. Working for a temporary-help service was the most common job for former recipients, followed closely by nursing homes and health-care service providers, retail services and eating and drinking establishments. Almost all of these are non-union, low-paying, high-turnover jobs with virtually no legal worker protections.

* Only 19.2 percent of W-2 recipients who left the program in late 1999 earned incomes above the federal poverty level a year later.

* W-2 clients got disparate treatment, including evidence that Blacks were “sanctioned” at a higher rate than whites for “rules infractions.”

W-2 is “a Frankenstein of a social program” and is “the $1.5-billion mistake of a welfare program unleashed on thousands of poor people in Milwaukee and Wiscon sin that drove single women with children off the rolls to fend for themselves in a declining economy,” wrote Eugene Kane, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s only African American columnist, on May 1. (http://www.jsonline.com) The $1.5-billion figure is the amount spent on W-2 from its implementation on Sept. 1, 1997, until early 2005.

“Those who chose to remain in the program were subjected to an overly punitive, racially discriminatory system that made their lives more difficult and never delivered on its promise of economic salvation,” added Kane.

Bipartisan attack on welfare

Under the national Welfare Reform Bill signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton in August 1996, AFDC—a lifetime guaranteed federal entitlement program won through the battles of the working class and oppressed in the 1930s—was dismantled. AFDC was replaced by a time-limited, work-based act called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).

TANF lifted most federal mandates on all 50 states, thereby allowing them to develop their own workfare programs, as they came to be known. Currently, the maximum lifetime limit for TANF benefits is five years, with some exemptions granted in various states. If recipients use up this time, they are on their own to survive. States are allowed to choose their own time limits below the five-year TANF maximum. Wisconsin’s is just two years.

With the implementation of W-2, services to recipients were dispensed from five private contractors in various geographic zones in Milwaukee County instead of from county social service agencies under AFDC.

Since 1997 two of the contractors have had their state contracts rescinded due to graft, kickbacks, profiting from purposely providing minimal levels of service, or none at all, and other illegal activities.

Numbers dropped from 35,000 families statewide near the end of AFDC to 23,000 at W-2’s start on Sept. 1, 1997, and then to 11,000 in April 2000. Eighty percent of W-2 recipients reside in Milwaukee County. Thompson and his Heritage Foundation and Bradley Foundation backers who created W-2 glibly refer to this as “success.”

And it was, for them: they succeeded in dismantling one of the greatest and most successful federal entitlement programs largely through a multi-faceted, multi-year racist ideological campaign.

The bureau’s report confirms what the Milwaukee-based A Job is a Right Cam paign claimed in publications like “The Feeding Trough”: that W-2’s implementation would result in an ever-wider reserve pool of super-exploited, low-wage labor, mostly women of color, increasingly at the mercy of an unstable capitalist economy with vastly decreasing safety nets such as subsidized public housing and childcare assistance.

Major corporations, temporary service agencies such as Manpower Inc. and non-profit service agencies are now benefiting the most from W-2.

Furthermore, W-2 has also been used to batter down other long-held publicly controlled institutions like public education.

The evisceration of Social Security could be next, unless an independent class-wide mass movement rises to the occasion and defeats this sure-to-be catastrophic privatization plan.

To view the bureau’s report, visit http://www.legis.state.wi.us/lab.

Pfeifer was an organizer with A Job is A Right Campaign from 1997 to 2002.