South By North Strategies, Ltd.

In a guest post at Felix Salmon’s blog, Barbara Kiviat explains that work-based social welfare programs don’t work well when jobs are scarce.

…The point is to illustrate that we can’t really have a conversation about whether or not linking cash assistance to market-based employment is problematic in a time of high unemployment, because program structure itself is distorting the behavior of would-be cash assistance recipients.
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Although, in a way, maybe that is an answer to the question. As sociologist Kathryn Edin and social anthropologist Laura Lein illustrated in their 1997 book Making Ends Meet …, the problem never really was that cash assistance recipients didn’t want to work. Indeed, interviews with hundreds of women showed that, depending on the city, between a third and half were working, just not in the formal economy….
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So maybe what we’re learning—should we be able to put aside the overly simplified view of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor—is that it’s time for another round of welfare reform. But this time what needs to be reformed is how the system goes about understanding the needs and limitations of single working mothers. As Edin and Lein documented, barriers to formal employment include not just balancing work schedules with lone parenting and the added costs of having a job outside of the home (such as day care), but also the realities of low-wage work…..