The Workfare State

The story of the shift from welfare to workfare has often been told as part of an ideological shift from liberalism to neoliberalism. Historians have written about the struggle of poor women to hold on to welfare benefits; the ideological campaigns against “big” government; and economists' efforts to persuade an insecure public that the market, including the labor market, could best set the parameters within which individuals lived out their destinies. Eva C. Bertram tells the breathtaking story from a political perspective. A political scientist, she adopts the strategies of the new field of American political development best exemplified by Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself (2013), which this book in some ways echoes. Lucidly and persuasively she recounts how southern Democrat “boll weevils” joined with Republicans to undermine the efforts of “liberal welfarists” to maintain New Deal principles (p. 40). In this riveting account, she focuses on how a group of southern democrats, in the name of states' rights, came to fear that without stringent work requirements the temptation of public assistance would remove the South's low-wage labor advantage (pp. 74–76). Spearheaded by Louisiana senator Russell Long, southern Democrats joined with Republicans in Congress to question the federal government's role in providing a safety net for the poor. Government policies, they argued, hindered economic development in the South, sustaining the capacity of poor (and especially poor black) people to resist exploitative working conditions and wages. Arguing that there should be no benefits without work, southern Democrats joined with Republicans to promote policies that demanded an end to welfare, even for single mothers with small children. Believing that workers' lack of skills rather than the changing structure of the labor market produced unemployment, they denigrated Keynesian solutions of greater government investment. Falling wages, rather than unemployment, they argued, produced poverty. Free-market solutions, this coalition argued, could return prosperity to the economy

Government (linguistics · Ideology · New Deal · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Welfare · Welfare state · Workfare · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism · Public Administration

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