Chapter 2: The compliance machine

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Today we are ending welfare as we know it, but I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began. A new day that offers hope, honors responsibility, rewards work. On that day, halfway across the country in Chicago, a young woman named Darnetta Harris had no idea how tangled up she was eventually going to get in the new welfare to work system that President Clinton and Congress had just created. It was just me and my daughter, but I was a one to say I'm going to rely on the systems to take care of me. Darnetta had just turned 20. And as a young single mom, she knew about the old version of welfare before this law had passed. Her family had been on it for a while when Darnetta was a kid. It had helped Darnetta out when she'd had her baby, but she had a lot of ambition. I'm saying the programs are not helpful, but I don't want to be another statistic. I wanted better for me and her, so I did what I had to do. She was doing a lot, going to community college, working, caring for her child. In the back of her mind, she had one big dream. I've always had a passion for helping people, or I had this mindset that I wanted to help people, knowing that I grew up in the projects of Chicago. I watched the crack hits in the alcoholic's dad and I had to grow up around it. It's like the people was then, they was becoming the addicts becoming younger and younger. How can I help my people, or just help people, I wanted to help people, period? She decided she wanted to become an addiction counselor. Darnetta chipped away at this goal. She did an internship at a drug treatment clinic, another at a residential rehab facility. To pay the bills, she had various jobs like being a teacher's assistant and a daycare. To board her dreams of helping people, something happened to Darnetta that left her in a situation where she needed help. The trouble started when she was in her late 20s and found herself pregnant with a second child. The father got abusive. My whole assigned pregnancy, he beat me up. The whole nine months, I was pregnant with his child, he beat me up. We wasn't together after I had the baby, but he used to manipulate me with the sun. I wanted to come and see my son, or I can't get in my mom's house. Could I stay here, you could sleep with your son, or I'm going to face sleeping with me. But I bought it all came to a head one day when he asked Darnetta to pick him up from work. Yeah, I could do that for you. So I guess I didn't get downtown fast enough for Michigan. So he ended up making it back to my house. He come to my house, he said, what happened to you? Start arguing with me. He didn't like my response. I turned around, he hit me in my eye. He broke a bone in my eye. My son was three years old. My son can tell you this story as if happy yesterday. So he took me to the hospital, made me be afraid, didn't say anything. Police came and asked me, I had to get stitches, I had to have two or three reconstructive surgeries. If I look down to my left and my right, the vision at the bottom is gone. She tried to cut off contact with her ex, but one day, after she'd come home from work and was making her kids dinner. He broke into her house. After that, I was like, I got to go. She felt like there was nowhere safe to be. She scrounged enough money to rent a U-Haul, packed up her two kids, and fled. She didn't tell anyone in Chicago she was leaving until she was already gone. She drove 90 miles up the shore of Lake Michigan to Milwaukee. She used the little savings she had to put down rent on a new place. She knew just one friend in the city, had no close family, no job, no personal safety net. I had nobody, right? I had to start over and do so I tried to. I needed a steady flow of some type of income. I can't just sit here and expect for somebody to take care of me, I need a job. The welfare law that Congress created and Bill Clinton signed when Darneto was 20, that he said was all about helping people get jobs. A system of incentives which reinforce work and family and independence. Those were all the things that Darneto was looking for. Work and independence and the ability to protect her family. She just needed some temporary help to get herself and her two kids back on their feet. She wanted a job. But there was the politician rhetoric about honoring personal responsibility and rewarding work. And then there were the actual details of what this welfare reform law was going to require people to do and how it was going to be enforced. And as Darneto would soon discover, those details didn't seem to have much to do with her ideas about work and independence and family at all. Pfft. Welcome to the uncertain hour. I'm Chrissy Clark. This season, the welfare to work in industrial complex. Who it profits, like really profits, and who pays the price. The goals of the welfare to work system, they're written right into the welfare reform law. One of its main purposes is to quote end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation and work. But further down in the text is where the rubber meets the road. The welfare law doesn't just promote work as an avenue toward economic independence. It requires it. And as soon as you make something mandatory, for it to mean anything, you've got to define what it is. Create a system to track and measure and verify whether it's happening and a system of enforcement and consequences if it doesn't happen. Those are the details that the welfare reform law spells out. What kind of work actually counts? How the government's going to hold individual people on welfare accountable for doing it. And how state and local governments and the private companies they contract with will be held accountable for enforcing those rules. And when all the details of that law converge on an actual human life, things can start to go really sideways. On this episode, I want to tell you the story of Darnetta and some of the things that happened to her when she walked through the door of the privatized welfare to work system in her most vulnerable moment. I want to tell you about some of the people who've worked inside that system and how they feel about it. And I want to tell you about some of these small, bureaucratic details written into the welfare reform law that spell out how its goals are going to be measured and enforced. And the impact those details have had on many of the people who turned to welfare in ways that sometimes seem to just amplify their problems. Chapter two, the compliance machine. When Darnetta fled Chicago and landed in Milwaukee to escape the violence of her ex, she had to start her life over. She needed a job. But first, she needed toilet paper, dish soap, bus fare to be able to get to a job interview, which is what brought her to apply for cash welfare or what's officially called temporary assistance for needy families. It goes by different names in different states in Wisconsin. It's known as Wisconsin works. The goal is similar to the goals of most state welfare programs to help get people into work so they can provide for their families and become self-sufficient. And when Darnetta heard about what Wisconsin works was supposed to do, it sounded like exactly what she needed. The money part would be helpful, yes, $600 or so dollars each month to help her get back on her feet. But also that part about work that was right in the name Wisconsin works. Even the programs and nicknames sounded working. W2, like the IIRS employment form. With W2, I knew that it's about job search and that was one of the places that gave you job leads. Only thing I needed was a push in the right direction. A lead, give me a lead. If you can get me a lead, somewhere, then I can try to make it work the best for me. And in the middle of all the trauma she was trying to escape in Chicago and the money stresses she was living with in Milwaukee. She was hopeful about what kind of job she could get where her future could take her. She was ready for a new start. I was nervous but excited to say a time because I felt I was doing what was best for my children and me to be safe, be content, at peace. I needed peace. She went to the welfare office. She was assigned to, based on where she lived in Milwaukee. Like all the welfare offices in the city, this office was outsourced to a private company. First, a nonprofit. Eventually, while she was there, a for-profit took over the contract. When Darnetta first enrolled, the intake workers asked her questions about her family, her income, her assets, and a bunch of stuff about work. What you hope to accomplish, what's your goals? How do you play a new one, achieving those goals? What steps are you going to take, stuff like that? I got to know my employment background. I also had a pre-resonant already done that. So it wasn't like I was coming in and like, I don't know what I want to do with my life. I had two goals, say. I had two options on the plate. One option, that dream she'd been working toward through her 20s, becoming an addiction counselor. She told them about the certifications she'd already gotten in addiction studies. I have a basic certificate and a vest certificate. But did Wisconsin accept Illinois credentials? She wasn't sure. She was trying to figure out all the logistics now that she'd moved to a new state. You know, how can I tell you my audacious study certification here? Would I have to start over? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she wanted to stay flexible, so she'd been thinking about another path too. So having me my own restaurant, I was the one always in the kitchen helping my mama. Why you're eating you end up letting off some of that singing, you end up feeling good for what a laughter, a kind gesture or anything. She wanted to share that healing power of food with others. She told the people at the welfare office she'd even been thinking about a name. So I remember something my mom was going to be Jackie's place. Darnetto was excited about either of these paths, opening a restaurant or addiction counseling. Paths she could envision supporting her family on, doing something she was passionate about. Darnetto says the case worker nodded and listened and heard some stuff on a computer screen. And then she said something that did not seem to connect to anything Darnetto had just said. She told Darnetto she was placing her at a local food bank to do what. So she gave me the description of the job and stock boxes and is that just stacking box it like you would have just been doing kind of manual labor basically right. Oh, and also her case manager explained this wouldn't be an actual paying job because they call a revolver consider as volunteers. It's free labor pretty much. Darnetto looked at her case worker. Did you not read my resume? I'm very skillful. This is not what I do. This did not sound to Darnetto like the kind of work that was going to get her closer to either of her goals. It sounded like a step backward. And in this moment, Darnetto was coming up against the first of one of those little details about how the federal welfare reform law works that would come to confound her. Because the law wasn't particularly interested in whether Darnetto was eagerly trying to pursue her dreams of becoming an addiction counselor or opening a restaurant. What the law was concerned about was that if she was going to get welfare, she needed to immediately start doing a certain number of hours of work activities to meet the law's work requirement. Having a paying job could count, but since she didn't have one of those yet, she was going to have to do some other kind of work activity instead. The federal welfare law has a list of 12 activities that qualify things like job search, short-term vocational classes, community service, or unpaid work experience. Darnetto's case manager was saying that one of the main things she'd lined up for Darnetto was this unpaid work experience in a food bank warehouse, packing and stacking boxes of food for several hours a day. I'm like, no, no. I can't do that. That I actually just thought, like, I can't do that. I can't do that. I'm not going to do that. How did they react when you said that? She was like, well, you won't be in no check. As in, no welfare check. The case manager was telling her if she didn't do this assigned work activity, you're not being compliant. They said you're not being compliant. They said I was a compliant. Darnetto held her ground. I'm going to speak up for me. I sent them to me to the supervisor. I mean, sweet to the supervisor. I leaned here. So I spoke to the supervisor. She said, what's the problem? I thought it was a problem. She was like, you got your resume. I said, I gave it to her. Eventually, Darnetto convinced the supervisor to reconsider. The supervisor said she'd assigned Darnetto to do work experience in a different nonprofit instead. I said, do what? She said, you're being assistant down there. I said, what kind of assistant? You'll be a program assistant, a supervisor said, helping file paperwork, working in the office. So I said, okay, I'll be there. She tried to find the bright side of this. At least it was in an office. But it still was unpaid labor and not felt unfair to Darnetto. That was not the only work activity Darnetto was required to do. There were the soft skills classes that at one point she was required to spend 11 hours a week in. I had to learn computer skills, although I had computer skills. But she figured maybe they can help me learn a new software that I'm not so good at. Okay, I'll take this because I'm like, good at Excel. You can teach me how to do PowerPoints. And now, today, I can work a PowerPoint. You're giving them say, even though it was the meaning, sometimes it felt the meaning to me. I had to end up making things work for me. I got it certificate for it somewhere around me. But some of what she was required to sit through, it was harder to find a bright side to it. Just telling you how you post a dress, the proper language etiquette, resume writing, and they told me that even though I produced the resume, they sent me through the whole motion. They did the little mock interviews. Although I showed them my job skills, I've had interviews. But I had to go through all that tedious thing. It was tedious to me. I'm 30-something years old, I'm serious. During most weeks, there was one more required work activity she had to do to fulfill all her hours, actually searching for jobs. This, remember, was part of why she'd been excited about welfare in the first place. She'd heard it could help her get job leads. And it's true, at the welfare office, they'd given her a big stack of job listings. But the kinds of jobs that were listed. Factory work, a lot of a factory work. Stuff that, at the time, paid barely over minimum wage, eight or nine dollars an hour. She knew that wasn't going to be enough to support her family of three-on. So that ruled out a lot of the job leads she was getting at the welfare office. And then others were in places she just couldn't realistically get to. You can only go so far, you don't have transportation besides the bus. Some jobs were young, you need cars. And you didn't have a car? I didn't have a car at the time. Still, she had to submit job search logs each week, showing she'd looked for jobs for the assigned number of hours, listing each job she had applied for, how long she'd spend applying for it, and the contact info for the company, so her case worker could call and verify. If she was applying for a job in person, she had to mark down what time she left the house, how long it took her to get to the place she was applying for a job, how long it took her to fill out the application, what time she turned it in there, what time she left to go to the next potential job, over and over. This was back in 2010, 2011. The economy was still climbing out of the great recession. Darnetta says, sometimes it was hard to find enough suitable jobs to spend 10 or 15, or sometimes 20 and 30 hours a week applying for. At that time, everybody was a hybrid or didn't need the help that they need now. So it was like, it was becoming repetitive. You know, you just start putting down anything, just so you can get the check. Darnetta was finding that welfare was a lot of hassle. So many forms, so many hoops to jump through. She says they made her feel like a dog. I used to have a dog. And sometimes if you water that little ball or treats them to make them do a trick because they want their treat, they're going to do whatever you say. That's what I felt like. You're going to do whatever we say and you're going to do it in order to get this little money. That's a problem for me. That's how I felt. That's how I felt. And did you tell them about your, the domestic violence situation that you had had to flee in Chicago? Like did they understand that you were just coming out of a very traumatic situation? I saw them there. You know how you opened up your story? You had to tell it all over again. I had to do that several times. That's heart aching when you're trying to move past it. And did they give you any resources or help in that? Nope. In Wisconsin, case managers can reduce or wave work activities in cases where domestic violence is an issue or offer other supports. But it's not a given. And then not long after Darnetta enrolled in welfare, there was another family crisis. They took my son for me. I'm not going to get into the details to protect her son's privacy. This situation was complicated, like life often is. But the outline is, Darnetta says one day soon after they'd fled Chicago from Milwaukee, her son was acting out. I was so fed up and I went to discipline. No girl. I just like every day. I just, I worked in like old school with it. And the child protective services got involved. Of my man, they had to do what they had to do. Darnetta temporarily lost custody of her son. He was put in foster care. And the process of trying to win custody of him back, it was a lot. Child Protective Services got these demands on you. They didn't give me as a bad parent, but they felt like I needed to do other things in order to get my son back. I had to go to parenting class. I have to go to this. I have to go to court. I have to take my son to this therapy. He comes for a visit on his day. I have to go to a family therapy. So this is why I'm still trying to find a job, trying to do W2. The requirements of W2. And this is one of those moments when you see how the details of welfare work requirements can sometimes interfere with the life of someone who's already struggling in ways that only amplify the struggle. Because all those court appearances and therapy visits, those very important things that Darnetta was doing to try to get her son back, to try to heal her family, they started getting in the way of her required work activities. When she met with her case manager again, Darnetta says she told them about the situation with her son and that it was making it hard for her to keep to a regular schedule. I explain these things. I explain my barriers to the work at the time. This is what I got to do. But Darnetta says her case manager kind of blew it off. Now listen to my barriers. One day you have to go to court. I don't know. When they tell me I have to be there. She wrote it all down. She said, okay, well, you have an appointment this day. I can't come this day. I got to be at court. What time you get out of court? Who's to know that? I don't know. I don't know. Then I have to, you know, well, here court is far. So I had to take I'm on the bus. So that's three full buses. So a lot of times I could meet. I cannot, I cannot, I cannot always meet their appointment days. And on the days that she didn't make it to one of her work activities, there could be consequences. It's our sanction to me. According to the federal welfare law, when you miss even one hour of its required activities, you can get sanctioned. Unless you can convince your case manager that you had a good cause for missing the hours. In Wisconsin, if you don't have a good cause and you don't make up the hours right away, your check gets reduced by $5 for every hour you've missed. Which I want to point out is more per hour than most people are effectively earning for those work activities. A required court appearance can qualify as a good cause for missing hours. But there are gray areas. Like what if you miss your bus after the court appointment and miss even more hours? It's up to the case manager. And if they think it fits a pattern of absences and they don't think your explanation is quote reasonable, they can require a lot of documentation and paperwork to back up your reason. Darnetta says she started getting an arguments with her case manager about what was a good cause and what wasn't. Like I ain't trying to hear it. You post a being here at the time. I tried to call your phone you didn't return the call to me. I came down here. You wasn't here that day. It's still with what it was. And her checks kept getting reduced. It'd be like $20, $25 of missing. Like one time I got a check for $400. Like what the fuck? Uh-huh. Darnetta felt stuck. If she didn't want her check to get reduced, she had to make sure she did all her required hours of work activities. But her required work activities were hard to complete with all the things she had to do to get back her son. And my point is I got to get my son back. Regardless of what you're doing to me, I'm not afraid that you all stop me from doing what I have to do to get him back into my care. After more than a year, Darnetta did eventually get her son back, which was of course the most important thing. She was relieved and grateful. But when he came back, she was in a worse shape financially to care for him after all the sanctions she'd gotten. Which caused less income coming in. It was a scramble. Either my phone got caught off my home phone got caught off or my light bill was getting palin' up. That would fall behind. I had to try to catch it up to, because I don't want no notice in the mail. I tried to make it, put something on it. $20, $30 here. Which would have started affecting my credit because they felt like I'm my penny all time. I was stressed out because I'm trying to deal with this W2 stuff. I'm trying to provide food. I'm trying to be a mom. I should say we reached out to the private company that oversaw the office that Darnetta went to for much of her time on welfare and Milwaukee. The company didn't respond to our requests for comment. We also reached out to the state agency that runs welfare and Wisconsin to ask about Darnetta's experience. They declined an interview, but said in a written comment that if someone's been repeatedly sanctioned each month, contractors are expected to review the work activities they've been assigned, work to identify any barriers and offer accommodations to support, quote, successful activity completion. They also said state policy requires private welfare agencies to work with participants to assign work activities that are specific to that individual's needs and goals. And that the use of unpaid work experience like that box packing in the food warehouse or the office work that Darnetta was assigned to has declined in the past few years. But that for some participants who've never had a job before, it can be a useful way to build the skills that are required to retain employment. But for Darnetta, that was not her experience on W2. For her, the sanctions, the busy work, the menial labor packing and stacking boxes that she was first assigned to do, the general feeling of counter-productiveness of it all, it made Darnetta wonder, why was the system like this? What was going on in the minds of the people in the W2 office? Is this just a job for you or do you really care about the people in this community that come here for help? Like, did they see how unhelpful this work requirement system seemed to be? Turns out, some of them did. That's after a break. Oh! We're gonna get back to Darnetta's story in a moment. But I want to turn to someone who shared many of Darnetta's frustrations with the welfare-to-work system, the work activities, the sanctions, all the hoops and forms and general sludge-aw-cracy. But this person was experiencing it all from a really different vantage point. My name is Deborah Gary. I work as a case manager for, I would say, close to 12 years. Deborah and Darnetta didn't know each other at the time, but Deborah was working in that same private welfare office that Darnetta was going to a decade ago. When Deborah first became a welfare case manager, she had big dreams for how she was going to use the system to help women who were struggling. My goal as a child always been, I'm gonna save the world. I'm gonna make a difference. And she saw working in a welfare office as a pretty good way to do that. My idea was like, oh, I get to work close in the community. I get to help people along the way and you know, get a job. So I have faith. Oh, I can make this work for people. And she says, at first glance, the way welfare operates today, the whole work requirement model, it made some sense to her. My answer was just like, okay, this is the time to work. If you're coming to W2, when you rather get a job, then come to W2. So why not give folks some structure, a to-do list of work related activities to help them get a job? And Deborah says, there were some people who seemed to get genuine use out of the things they were required to do. All clones when they come in, they be like, I found a job, I'm at the $15 an hour, I'll be graduating in the next four months. I'll gonna invite you. I put a down payment down on me a car. And to the lose, I'll need your number. Bye. And that would happen occasionally. Marry few in the team. I was saying, she'll have to three out of ten. Deborah says it was usually when someone was already in a pretty stable position, maybe living with another adult who could help with childcare and rent, not already behind on their bills, not experiencing some kind of trauma. So those folks that already have a support system in place are reliable support system in place or the ones that tend to do good and to thrive more, they fit the cookie to the script. But what would happen more often, Deborah told me, was that people did not fit the cookie cutter script for all sorts of reasons. Take what happened to Darnetta, coming to W2, while she was still dealing with the trauma of domestic violence and her own struggles parenting her son. Deborah says, Pylene required work activities and sanctions on top of someone in the middle of all that was just too much. And she says, that happened a lot. Domestic violence was a problem in many cases she saw. We would literally have women come in, you know, with black eyes, broken bones, hair pulled out, whatever happened to them, you know, you're not the way to see it all. According to a number of studies, 50 to 60% of women participating in cash welfare have experienced domestic violence at some point in their lives. A rate almost twice as high as the rate for all women in the US. And like I mentioned before, there are state welfare policies meant to direct people who were actively experiencing domestic violence towards resources for support and give them more latitude with work requirements in the short term. But how exactly that was handled could be up to an individual case workers discretion. It depended on who was managing a case and how much empathy, patience, or attention they could give it while they were juggling the day-to-day tasks of assigning work activities and monitoring compliance. And sometimes, Deborah says case managers would just flat out miss something big and hard that was going on in someone's life. Yeah, those were a lot of people that slipped through the cracks whether it was simply because they didn't want to, you know, disclose that or they didn't know how to speak to someone about it. Then sometimes there were no bruises where, okay, on the outside, they appear to be able to job ready so to speak. But when you really start dissecting things, then it's a lot. I mean, they're not job ready. They don't need to sit in this class. They do not need these skills. And they need to go on another route. They need to be in some sort of counseling. You know, it's going to take a lot before they are able to get a job and maintain it. Health issues, mental health issues, loss of a loved one, so many reasons people didn't always fit the cookie cutter script. Another reason? Deborah says there were a lot of people who clearly lacked just basic education. There was the woman Deborah met whose case manager had assigned her a bunch of hours doing job search. The woman had turned in pages and pages of logs documenting all the jobs she'd searched for. But she like, Mr. have been nobody ever called me back. Nobody called me back. She was like, even pop up and call me back. She was like, I want all the rest of us. She was like, I even went to a ranch. They didn't even call me back. Deborah had a pretty good guess about why this woman wasn't getting any callbacks once she looked through the job search logs that she'd turned in. Based on how she'd filled them out, it seemed she was barely literate. And Deborah says, that was common. When you look at their hair right in which you look at the way they're spelling things and and I don't even know how they felt about the application. You know, like they put the end for our end. It's heart wrenching. Nobody's gonna call them back. So it was just empty work. As she looking at me for the answer and I don't have it. So I was like, they're missing out. You know, I just told her they missed that on a really good work herself. Because I didn't know what else to say. What she did not say, but what was going through Deborah's brain, was like, why in God's name were some of these people getting assigned to search for jobs when they can barely spell or write a sentence? They needed a whole other level of help. Deborah says she wanted to be able to just let these participants focus on learning to read and write, send them to a high school equivalency program full time. Because people are not done. They just disenfranchised. And see what she can do. You know, she has a catapillar. Let her be talking about butterflies. But helping catapillars turn into butterflies was a tall order given the way welfare works today. For most participants, going to school to get a GED must be combined with at least 20 hours a week of other work activities. So it's hard to juggle. Deborah was frustrated by the moments when people who seemed to need basic education or trauma counseling or treatment were instead being asked to comply with a bunch of work activities that seemed like they were just not focused on what they really needed. And then there were the times when people were ready and willing to start focusing on work. But the work activities they were getting assigned just weren't helping them get to a family supporting job. This was true for Darnetta too. Remember, she already had some college credits and certificates behind her, a clear idea of what she wanted to do for work and a solid resume. And yet, she was assigned to do things that felt like busy work, taking resume writing classes and packing boxes of food in a warehouse for less than the equivalent of minimum wage. Your box of food wears the skill. What do you learn me? They are not that thin just because they came through VW2. They need the money for a solid and anybody. So why not, you know, at least the minimum wage for whatever state they're in, at least that for their activities? Deborah wanted to see more focus on individualized training, getting people set to pursue the careers they had a passion for, like Darnetta's passion for addiction counseling. Let them get certified so that when they do leave the program, they have that skill that they love so much. How about that? How much are there for money in a budget for something like that? But that is not where much of the money went in the budget. In the latest available data from 2021, Wisconsin spent just 0.5% of its welfare dollars on education and training. It spent much more of its welfare dollars on things like program management, administrative costs, and quote, additional work activities. That is, money paid to companies like the one Deborah worked for and the company she subcontracted for America works and other private welfare agencies like it. Money they got to assess welfare recipients to see how job ready they were to provide unpaid work experience and job search assistance and job readiness support to monitor and enforce and verify whether they were actually doing the work requirements. And if they weren't to officially sanction them and reduce their check or require them to go to great lengths to prove they had a very good excuse. Why they should not be sanctioned. Deborah told me about people who'd missed work activities and had to get documentation from the dentist about a toothache or from a doctor about an earache. And then there was the story about this one mother who called her one day. She called and she had an appointment. I'm not going to be able to come in. Okay, fine. What's going on? Are you okay? This, you know, me and her? No, not actually. Well, what's going on? Can I just call you back? She called back. She was like my son was killed last night. She was just devastated. But still thinking ahead, like as a mother, she was like, I'm not going to be able to come into this appointment. But I really, really need my whole check. So can we reschedule? Because I have other kids I need to think about. Now, it wasn't that calm or that simple. It's just, you know, from memory, but you know, she could have been sanctioned for that. Like I said before, case managers do have some leeway about when missing a work activity merits a sanction, depending on whether or not a person has good cause. A death in the immediate family is a good cause and case managers can't excuse someone for a few days. But again, there's judgment involved. If the case manager feels like the absence fits a pattern and doesn't believe the reason, they might give a sanction until the person can give some proof, like a police report or an obituary. Deborah says she did not require this woman to provide any of that. But the idea that she could have disturbed her. It would have been in young. For the most part, folks in that line about their kids been shot down on the street the night before. You know? Yeah. Well, fair to work programs are often described as being training for regular paying jobs. But as I listened to Deborah, I started thinking about how my father-in-law died recently, and I took time off work to attend the funeral. It did not occur to me at the time what a privilege it was that I didn't need to provide a copy of his obituary to my boss in order to get that time off without punishment. Deborah was once really hopeful about the welfare to work system and how she could help families in need. But after working in it for 12 years, assigning and monitoring and verifying people's work activities and penalizing the ones who fell behind, she'd come to this conclusion. The system is just fucked up and broke. We're putting money in the wrong place. It needs to be a direct payment to people. People don't need to be worried about, oh, as I miss a day, I'm not going to be able to make my rent. They have no other options than to try to fit this thing in whatever it may be because we said they have to receive a small amount of money and they're just going to be on a hamster wheel. It's just going to continue and continue because we're not getting to the root of the problem. And there are a lot of people who've come to the conclusion that the problems facing individual folks who turned to welfare can be exacerbated by a more fundamental problem. The federal law that, quote unquote, reformed welfare back in 1996 and how it was written. This little flourish of policy embedded in the law that would go on to confound so many people, something called... The work participation rate. The work participation rate. Or WPR. This is Jeanette Holdbrook with the Public Policy Research Group Mathematica. She works with state and local welfare offices across the country to study and try to improve their temporary assistance for needy families programs. And even though a lot of the rhetoric around welfare reform is about the power of employment to lift people out of poverty, Jeanette says most of the law isn't actually about employment. One of the only real metrics that states are actually held accountable for around their use of temporary assistance for needy families dollars is this work participation rate. This little mouthful of a term that sounds so wonky and bureaucratic. And as anyone who's ever had a performance review at their job knows what's measured is ultimately what matters. So what is the work participation rate? What it is is a measure of how many people who are receiving cash welfare and are required to do some sort of work activity are actually doing enough hours of that work activity to meet federal guidelines and can prove it. The really important thing to keep in mind is that this doesn't tell you anything about the effectiveness of TANF programs. It doesn't tell you how many people got jobs. It doesn't tell you how many people no longer need to receive TANF benefits. All it tells you is of the families who can be participating in work activities. How many are participating in work activities? Not how many families are participating in actual paying jobs or paying jobs that get them over the poverty line. Just how many are doing some kind of federally approved work activity? So if you do have an actual paying job when you're on welfare, that counts. But if not, the federal government still wants to make sure you're doing the work related and job readiness activities that your case manager has assigned you to do to meet your work requirement. So take Darnada. When she missed some hours of that unpaid work experience, she was assigned to do filing paperwork at the community center or some hours she was supposed to dedicate to job search each week. All the stuff she found hard to juggle while she was trying to get back custody of her son. That could have dragged down the state's work participation rate. And there are thousands of Darnedas each year, who for one reason or another, also don't do the amount of work activities they're supposed to do. If a state doesn't meet the target work participation rate, there can be serious consequences. The federal government can actually cut the amount of funding states receive from the temporary assistance for needy families block grant. I'm going to take a minute to say for all the policy wanks out there that yes, there are ways states can meet this rate more easily. If they can show they've reduced the number of people getting welfare by a certain amount each year, which can lead to its own perverse incentives. But Jeanette and many other welfare experts say the bottom line is the mere presence of the work participation rate looms large. States still have to measure it and report it each year. The people who administer state welfare programs take it very seriously. The sounds dramatic, but they still kind of live in fear of these potential penalties from the federal government. And so this drives in many places, this drives this focus on compliance and on documenting what Tana for Scipients spend their time doing. So this is why case managers are chasing down pay stubs. This is why case managers are making people fill out logs of every job application that they've submitted in the past two weeks so that they can document this person is participating in work activities so that my program can make WPR. This single measure that is not an outcomes measure drives so much of service delivery and causes programs to be these kind of compliance paperwork chasing machines. Just compliance monitoring machines. This is also why case managers sometimes ask a person to provide documentation to explain why they didn't participate in work activities, like because they had to be in court or their childhood just died or they'd been beat up by their partner. And this is why sometimes people get penalized for missing their work activities and get their cash assistance reduced. You can draw a line from all that back to this drive states have toward this one goal. At one welfare program Jeanette was consulting for, she did a survey of how staff were spending their time during their work day. And I mean we found that they spent more than 60% of their time doing paperwork and data entry. And for people who get into human services, get into programs to help people, can be a little soul crushing to then spend so much of your time chasing down documentation so that you can say this person participated for this many hours in this activity. You can imagine a different system. Work requirements are based on the assumption that people on welfare will only work if they're forced to. But what if rather than requiring people to do work activities and monitoring whether they're doing them, what if you just gave them money and then help them find jobs with family sustaining wages or quality job training. Poof, this compliance machine would go away. But for now we have it. And there's a whole private industry that's been built around operating this compliance machine for states. I mean I've seen programs where supervisors are every week spending time, I mean hours looking at work participation who doesn't have documentation that they need. And then you know, chastising case managers because they haven't gotten this documentation. So this really drives so much of how staff operate because it's always what they're talking about. Let's look at who has work activities. Let's look at who doesn't have work activities. And so you have no time left to actually have conversations with people or help people build skills or help get them connected to, you know, mental health supports housing, counseling if they have experienced trauma. So getting people into a place where they are ready to get a job and can you know get their family in a better position. And about those work activities that the work participation rate is measuring. Are they actually getting families into a better position? Well, it's hard to track that. Many states barely try. But there have been some rigorous studies that do. And Jeanette says when you gather all their findings looking at the effects of all these work activities. And just the overall focus on documentation and compliance and sanctions that exists in most welfare to work programs. There just wasn't a lot to show over the past 20 years. There's been this focus on work first and compliance in TANF programs. And broadly, we haven't seen a lot from that. And hasn't been an approach that has gotten people into family sustaining wage jobs. Darnetta Harris, the welfare recipient and Milwaukee who'd fled domestic violence. She didn't know about any of these studies. But she did know in her bones that the welfare to work system she was in wasn't working for her. And one day she tried to send that message to the powers that be. She took all her frustrations about getting sanctioned while she was trying to gain back custody of her son. About the futile feeling of work experience she was told to do. And turned it all into egg rolls. Corn beef egg rolls. Corn beef egg rolls? Yes, before they became popular because that is a popular thing. One day, Darnetta had a meeting with her welfare case manager. And before she went, she was thinking about how blown off she felt by the welfare office. When she explained the bind she was in with her custody battle over her child. And all the court hearings she had to make. She was thinking about how unseriously the welfare office seemed to be taking her resume or her skills or her career goals of being an addiction counselor or opening her own restaurant. And she had an idea about a way to send a message directly to her case worker. Let me tell you what I did. If I can't, I cooked for it so she can know what I'm talking about, my skills. For your case worker? Wow. Just let her know that I know what I'm talking about. So I had an appointment with her. So before I came, I made the egg rolls. After the month had my little different songs for them that I made from scratch. And she was like, what is this? I had a little little Chinese box for everything. What is this? This is your lunch for today. I hope you have an eight hour radio or you can answer what you ate. This is something that I'm adding one is you to taste. And she tasted. She was like, can I order a whole pan of these? I say can my check not be sanctioned? She was like, aw, is that what you're doing? I said no, I just wanted to show you that I am skillful. I am skillful, that's it. And did that help you get onto a path through W2 that was helping you with that? Hell no. Hell no. No. I'm sorry you could edit that part. But no, it didn't. I just did. I just wanted to let her know she was like, you good. And did she order a pan? She ordered a pan of them. So I gave her the varieties that I could make. And she ended up ordering a pan and I hit her pockets. I was like, that's 65 dollars meal. Did she pay? She paid it. And they ate it. Ultimately, Darnetta did get a job about two years into her time on W2. A part-time job at a restaurant. It didn't pay much. She made so little $8 an hour that she still qualified for welfare and still had to do other work activities to earn her check. The other thing worth pointing out about this job, she says she found it herself. Not through any of the job leads that she'd gotten from the private company paid to run the welfare office she was going to. Just a job posting she saw one day on the bus. Since then, over the last 10 years, Darnetta's had lots of other jobs. She hasn't managed to become an addiction counselor or open her own restaurant like she dreamed of yet. For a while, she was a cook in a hospital. Then a case manager at a nonprofit in Milwaukee that helps people train for jobs. But she points out that program did not involve any work requirements, just work opportunities, and she liked it that way. Rather than being mostly a rule enforcer, she says she could focus on helping her clients. And she got a lot of satisfaction assisting people that reminded her of her. One person graduated to six-week culinary program. She graduated number one in her class. She won the chili contest. I got her apron with her name on it. And I put a quote at the bottom of it because you saw this, you achieved it. I said, have you come in with the restaurant name yet? Because you said you wanted to be your owner. It's about a push. Some of us just need a little push. That's what I was just saying. All I needed was a little push. Show me the right direction. Let me point you into the right direction. You go from there. But the last we checked in on Darnetta, she'd recently lost her job. She's looking for a new one, waiting to hear back on some interviews. Meanwhile, she's taking a class trying to complete her associate's degree at 46 years old. Money's running thin. She's getting food stamps. She's hoping unemployment insurance will kick in soon. And to make ends meet, she's selling meals. She cooks out of her kitchen. On a recent weekend, she sold out on two dishes and made almost $300. On the menu, beef short ribs, and catfish spaghetti. Next week, if there's not much good evidence that these welfare work requirement programs help people get out of poverty, and there's lots of evidence they can be really frustrating, why do we have them? That's a story that goes way, way back, and culminates in the 1960s in a small city in New York state with a fraught history. Which challenge the right of free loaders to make more on relief than when working? And which challenge the right of people to quit jobs, and will, and go on relief like spoiled children? That's next week on the uncertain hour. This episode was written and reported by me, Chrissy Clark, Grace Rubin, Peter Ballon on Rosen, and I produced it. Our editor is Michael May. Research and production assistance from Marquet Green, Tiffany Bowie, Muna Danish, and Daniel Martinez. Data wrangling by Elizabeth Gothrop from APM Research Lab. Betsy Towner Levine provided fact check support, scoring and sound design by Chris Julin, Jake Cherry, mixed our episode. Kate Linesh is our senior producer, Bridget Bodner is director of podcasts at Marketplace. Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital. Neil Scarborough is Marketplace's VP and general manager. Special thanks to Catherine Winter and Nancy Fargali for their editorial wisdom, as well as Curtis Gilbert, Donna Tam, and Alice Wilder.