Parental Reauthorization

by Kaponda

Like the proverbial hen, my grandmother would always lay an egg in the refrigerator for each of my six sisters and brothers and me to fry before we went to school. After we had consumed our egg with a buttered slice of toast and a healthy episode of the animated television cartoon, Mighty Mouse, each of us would then fly upstairs to the bedside of grandmother to beg for a nickel for candy. Her weary eyes hardly ever opened as she groped for the small purse which she would set on the end table after coming from work at the Mariott Bakery at 5:00 o'oclock every morning.

More than three and one-half decades have past since those childhood days in Washington, D.C.. As I reflect back on her dutiful adherence to the welfare of her seven grandchildren, I sometimes wonder how she kept such a large family together on a minimum-wage income and a monthly government check. Clearly, without the support of that low-income job and welfare check the bottom would have come out from under us during those years. We probably would have become another case for the Child Protective Service.

In fact, government assistance has allayed many anxieties of parents since the federal government responded to a national cry of relief in 1932. Although welfare has always been a subject of taboo outside the partitions of official business, it has kept many poor families together. Welfare has been ridiculed by middle- and upper-class America, and those who have been too young to recognize the sighs of relief by the many fragile vessels whose tears have been kept from spilling over into the streets.

However, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program was restructured. Instead of its original mandate of January 17, 1935, which provided for the welfare of poor families, in 1996, Congress enacted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This shrewd initiative placed time limits on entitlements and replaced AFDC with a Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program with a proviso that after five years TANF must be reauthorized.

The reauthorization of TANF had seemed unproblematic until a blustery, biting storm out of Madison, Wisconsin blew into Washington, D.C. on Saturday, January 20, 2001. Now, the severe restrictions which were imposed upon low-income and poverty-stricken families by Congress in 1996, have been threatened further by the past policies of the new Health and Human Services Secretary, the former Governor of the state of Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson. Welfare advocates around the country have begun to mobilize support for not only the reauthorization of TANF, but what they view as necessary improvements in the current version. Furthermore, many welfare advocates see Tommy Thompson as an axman selected by President Bush to slice the current time limits and language of TANF even further.

Usually garbed in a stark, clean blouse with a milky backwrap, grandmother would fasten her hair with a headband as she prepared for another around-the-clock day of work. There were no limitations on her determination to provide for the children of her daughter. A time frame on the entitlement which helped achieve this, however, would probably have amounted to a loss from which she could never recover and certainly would have deprived us of both our bread and butter.

"On Tuesday, August 22, 2000, we launched a program to develop ideas that would jump-start the political campaign to institute necessary changes in the reauthorization of the TANF legislation in September of 2002. A follow-up conference is scheduled for February 18, 2001," stated Martina Gillis of the Coalition for Ethical Welfare Reform (CEWR).

A former recipient of welfare and now the director of CEWR, Gillis views welfare as critical aid which "sets up a system that supports families through hard times." Since there is currently one in seven children throughout the country who experiences these hard times, Gillis is especially wary of the sophisticated welfare policy of the Health and Human Services Secretary. It is a policy characterized by complex and highly complicated reforms that are fraught with stringent criteria for eligibility.

A native of Elroy, Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson was elected Governor of Wisconsin in 1986 on a strict reform platform. He has claimed victory over dependence by reducing the rolls of welfare by 74 percent across the state, which includes 73 counties. His policies will not come as a surprise in the city by the Potomac, where the cherries blossom. In fact, his welfare policy guidelines between 1986 and 1996 influenced much of the TANF legislation of 1996. If it is true that form follows function, then privatized welfare delivery, after the form of the Wisconsin welfare reform, will become the federal status quo under the new Health and Human Services Secretary. The nation will see a competitive bidding process whose chief criterion will be to drastically reduce caseloads in a short period of time. Thompson will bring to the seat of government the basic assumption that the size of the caseload of welfare recipients is the principal measure of success.

"The reduction of welfare rolls is not the measure of success," stated Gillis, "Rather, it should be reducing and eliminating poverty."

How has this policy propelled Thompson to his current status if, as many advocates believe, a policy implemented to encourage the wholesale reduction in caseloads is insensitive and expedient? In fact, according to a report by Workfare Watch , there were "numerous complaints" about the performance of for-profit welfare delivery companies. Some of the complaints included cases of recipients being closed without any contact with the families, cases where group rather than individual assessments were conducted, and cases where a failure to respond to telephone calls of recipients created further problems.

The complexities of the Wisconsin reforms were the central reason for their success and the success of Tommy Thompson. Complexities which included the denial of education and training to welfare recipients, while utilizing the "dissuasion" effect of work requirements. By operating their reform initiatives and requiring most new applicants to find private-sector, low-wage jobs, or perform community-service work shortly after enrolling in welfare, Wisconsin drastically reduced the number of recipients on the rolls of welfare.

There never seemed to be a "family hour" in our household because grandmother was either at work or exhausted from her household duties.

A recent study, according to Ruth Todasco, an older mother and new grandmother, was done in Los Angeles county with poor working mothers. The study discovered that poor working mothers only get to spend 30 minutes a day with their children...."

"Welfare reform is insulting...." continued the Texas-born Todasco, in an interview with my editor, Lisa Gray-Garcia. "It is saying that the 24-hour job mothers do of raising all the people of the world is 'nothing.' Government policy says the years of raising children are the zero years." Ruth Todasco is a member of Every Mother is a Working Mother Network, which is coordinated by International Wages for Housework Campaign, organizing and advocacy groups for mothers. "Furthermore," Tadasco continued, "We oppose welfare reform because it denies that every mother is a working mother." Todasco, along with 250 other mothers, presented six demands to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles during the summer of 2000, to be carried to Tommy Thompson and Congress during the upcoming reauthorization hearings in September of 2002.

My grandmother needed no other reward for her parental excellence except that her grandchildren were properly fed, clothed and educated. But the history of the voracious appetite of the incoming Health and Human Services Secretary of devouring the welfare entitlements of the neediest families in America through reform is an unconscionable punishment.