Working After Welfare: How Women Balance Jobs and Family in the Wake of Welfare Reform

This book, tapping into the quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered in the Women’s Employment Study (WES), offers insights into the lives of women in an urban Michigan county who left welfare for work and the role their family decisions play in their labor market decisions.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1031/thumbnail.jp

Serving No One Well: TANF Nearly Twenty Years Later

The 1996 welfare reform law transformed the nation’s cash welfare system into a time-limited, work-based program. Welfare caseloads dropped by more than half, but in more recent years and in the wake of the Great Recession, relatively little research has focused on TANF program participation, particularly from the vantage point of clients and potential clients. This paper uses qualitative data from interviews with very low-income single mothers conducted in 2013. Analysis of the interview data yielded three different narratives regarding how TANF did not meet their needs: it did not help them find jobs; it did not assist those with personal and family challenges; and it failed to perform as a safety net

Moving from Welfare to Work

This book, tapping into the quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered in the Women’s Employment Study (WES), offers insights into the lives of women in an urban Michigan county who left welfare for work and the role their family decisions play in their labor market decisions.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1031/thumbnail.jp

Getting Jobs, Keeping Jobs, and Earning a Living Wage: Can Welfare Reform Work?

Most discussions of welfare and work have focused on how demographic characteristics, schooling, training, and work experience limit welfare mothers’ employment and wages, but they have largely ignored factors such as inappropriate workplace behaviors, expectations of discrimination and harassment, depression, alcoholism, and domestic violence, all of which may affect welfare mothers and make employment difficult. In this paper we review the prevalence of these individual-level barriers and argue that they, in combination with an economy which does not pay low-skill workers well, are likely to impede employment and self-sufficiency for a large proportion of welfare mothers. At the end of the review, we summarize the current state of knowledge about barriers to the employment of welfare recipients and suggest several ways in which welfare-to-work programs might address these barriers.

Barriers to the Employment of Welfare Recipients

Dramatic reductions in welfare caseloads since passage of the Personal Responsibility and WorkOpportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 have not allayed policy concerns about the employability of recipients remaining on the rolls. Analysis of potential barriers to employment can address whether current recipients have problems that either singly or in combination make it difficult for them to comply with the new requirements for getting and keeping jobs. In this paper, we explore the prevalence and work effects of 14 potential barriers in a new survey of a representative sample of 753 urban single-mother recipients. We report the prevalence of the barriers and how their number predicts employment rates, controlling for demographic characteristics. We also analyze which individual barriers are associated with employment and how a model inclusive of a comprehensive array of barriers improves upon a traditional human capital model of the work effects of education and work and welfare history. Single mothers who received welfare in 1997 had higher rates of personal health and mental health problems, domestic violence, and children’s health problems than do women in national samples, but they were no more likely than the general population to be drug or alcohol dependent. Only 15 percent of respondents had none of the barriers and almost two-thirds had two or more barriers. The numbers of multiple barriers were strongly and negatively associated with working, and among the individual barriers, low education, lack of access to transportation, poor health, having drug dependence or a major depressive disorder, and several experiences of workplace discrimination reduced employment. Welfare-to-work programs need to be more finely targeted with respect to exemptions and service provision, and states should consider providing longer-term and enhanced supports for those who face low prospects of leaving welfare for employment.

We Know Better Than We Do: A Policy Framework for Child Welfare Reform

The need for comprehensive reform of child welfare policies and systems has long been evident. This Article reports observations from the WK Kellogg Foundation-sponsored Families for Kids Initiative that seeks to expand services and support to families and reduce the time children spend in temporary care. The authors first provide an overview of the need for reforms such as those proposed by this initiative, suggesting that many child welfare studies, critiques, and proposed reforms have had similar objectives. The authors highlight lessons learned from how these reform goals are being developed, implemented, and practiced in ongoing programs across the nation and argue that change at multiple levels must occur for reform of this system to succeed. They identify nine methods being used to varying degrees by some of these initiatives to institutionalize reform goals and improve the quality and outcomes of child welfare legal and social service practice. By highlighting these evolving models of state law, agency administrative procedure and professional practice, the authors identify areas of reform for other jurisdictions. Child welfare reform rests upon new legislation mandates; more specific reasonable efforts requirements, adoption of flexible funding mechanisms, capitated foster care contracts, timely court processes better trained professional or cross-system data capability to monitor children in care. All of these policy and system reforms must be designed and implemented collectively for child welfare ideals to become operational

Saving among Low-Income Women: Motivation and Obstacles

How do low-income households think about saving? What motivations do they identify for saving, and what obstacles to meeting their goals? We use data from qualitative interviews with 51 households in Detroit to shed light on these questions. We find that they wish they could save - primarily for protection against the unexpected or to put children through college - but that most of them cannot. Friends and family surface as a major obstacle to saving, since those who have liquid assets are asked for help. When savings is feasible in this population, it occurs largely through relatively inaccessible vehicles such as pensions and 401Ks.Social Security Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61828/1/wp199.pd

How Do Lower-Income Families Think about Retirement?

How do low-income households think about retirement? Do they think about retirement? If so, when do they think they will retire, and what is it they plan to live on? In this paper, we present evidence on these questions based on 51 qualitative interviews with low-income families in the Detroit area. We find that the great majority of low-income households think about retirement, although this does not necessarily mean they are able to plan and/or save actively for retirement. Most respondents plan to retire as soon as they become eligible for Social Security or, in a few cases, private pensions.Social Security Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61824/1/wp195.pd