Women's Literacy Power: Collaborative Approaches to Developing and Distributing Women's Literacy Resources

Appendix Welfare

Educating a Workforce through Workfare:
Feminist/Materialist Considerations

(1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.

(2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children

Is this the right-wing position on re-establishing family values? Actually, this quote forms the opening statement of Title I: Sec. 101. Findings of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRA) of 1996&endash;the current anti-welfare legislation signed by President Clinton which effectively ‘ends welfare as we know it.’ The act further asserts it will "end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage." The PRA works in concert with the Workforce Investment Act of 1998.

The purpose of this [WIA] subtitle is to provide workforce investment activities, through statewide and local workforce investment systems, that increase the employment, retention, and earnings of participants, and increase occupational skill attainment by participants, and, as a result, improve the quality of the workforce, reduce welfare dependency, and enhance the productivity and competitiveness of the Nation.

This paper asserts that current workfare policy in the U.S. reinforces traditional patriarchal assumptions that women should rely on men for economic support &endash;especially if they have children&endash;while capitalist interests would continue to keep women underemployed, underskilled, and exploited in low-paying, dead end jobs. The intricate systems of patriarchy and capitalism maintain divisions of class and gender which are buttressed by an educational system based on traditional curricula. Additionally, for women on welfare who have been unable to achieve functional literacy, these divisions are exacerbated by inadequate and limited educational opportunities. Under the requirements and restrictions of the current workfare system, access to educational opportunities that would move women into substantial and life-supporting work becomes more difficult to achieve. Hegemonic assumptions about women on welfare reinforce a system that keeps women in poverty and exploits their labor. Looking beyond the functional requirements of education as demanded by employers and capitalist goals, a literacy curriculum based in transformational feminist and critical pedagogies can begin to address these concerns.

The current purpose of the transition from welfare (Family Support Act, 1988) to workfare (Personal Responsibility Act, 1996) in the U.S. depends on the hegemonic assumptions that people (mostly women) on welfare have failed. "It is apparent from the language of the bill that one of the main purposes of welfare reform is to eliminate perceived personal weaknesses that hinder individuals from supporting themselves and their families" (Miranne, 1998, 156). Poverty, therefore, is pathological rather than based in serious systemic economic problems.

Current U.S. workfare policy and system depends on a more heteropatriarchal viewpoint &endash;"Marriage is the foundation of a successful society". Women remain caught in the argument of whether the state or the father/husband are responsible for women’s welfare (Mink, 1994) without considering how patriarchal-based gender oppression keeps women from being independent/or interdependent and capable of making her own reasonable life choices. Welfare-to-workfare policy&endash;though it insists on gender conformity and systemically punishes poor mothers&endash;does NOT address the still existent oppression of women in the wage-labor workforce. Women’s lack access to livable wages, health insurance, accessible childcare combined with sexual harassment, racial and class-based differences and so on continue to worsen in late capitalism. On-going issues of women’s poverty continue to be ignored.

There are additional observations that need to be made about this system to bring women off public assistance. First of all&endash;though there is merit to the liberal feminist position seeking equal opportunities for work, autonomy, and equal wages&endash;women of color and poor white women have not discovered equality in the requirements for labor.

If racism has permitted policymakers to negate poor single mothers as citizens and mothers, white middle-class feminism has provided those policymakers with an excuse….emphasis on women’s right to work outside the home&endash;accompanied by women’s increased presence in the labor force&endash;gave cover to conservatives eager to require wage work of single mothers even as they championed the traditional family. (Mink, 1998, 23-24)

As a result, poor women in the current workfare system are required to work. There exists a double-standard on issues of job (labor-for-pay-outside/public) vs. family (work-unpaid-inside the home/private) exacerbated by class and race. That is, while bourgeois women have choices to work or not, generally working-class and poor women do not.

Secondly, capitalism benefits from the current workfare system which involves a five-year lifetime cap for receiving benefits (some states have lowered this to two-years). Women are funneled into low-wage paying jobs options (some which include training, most which do not). This current system perpetuates and deepens an institutionalized slavery class. Capitalism, which understands that high profits can be made by paying lower wages and no benefits, have exploited this ‘free’ labor by displacing low-wage workers who have lost their jobs to workfare recipients (Mink, 1998). Women become placed in any job in order to get off workfare&endash;not necessarily a good job, a satisfying job, or potential career job, or even a full-time, potentially permanent job. In many cases, women and their children continue to live in poverty level. A woman who cannot find permanent work is labeled a failure&endash;thus protecting the capitalist system that increasingly makes fewer jobs available that pay adequate living wage or has any benefits. (Miranne, 166)

Finally, the current workfare system in late-U.S. capitalism points to an interesting problem.

In recent years, however, this alliance of capitalism and patriarchy has shown increasing signs of strain. As more women choose to or have to work to support themselves and their families, capitalism gains. Employers are less pressed to pay men a ‘family wage’ in order to support a wife and children. At the same time patriarchy loses, since independent access to an income gives women greater independence in her relationships to men. (Kornbluh, 1991, 24)

It could be that the tensions between capitalism and patriarchy may provide the leverage organized transformational feminists could use to mobilize women to alleviate both exploitative systems (Kornbluh, 1991).

Beyond curriculum…

Through the rhetoric to end ‘welfare as we know it’ and to secure the moral behavior of mothers, the PRA provides an ongoing available labor pool for exploitative capitalism while emphasizing the traditional patriarchal gender-roles of women. The educational system in the U.S. supports both patriarchal and capitalist needs. Traditional schooling helps "to reinforce the logic of the sexual division of labour, and to equip young women to take their ‘rightful’ and ‘natural’ place in the sexual hierarchy" (Thompson, 1983, 37).

Centering on the values of the bourgeoisie, education prepares girls for domesticity and passivity. While girls from upper and middle class backgrounds may more easily have access to higher levels of education, girls of all classes are subject to a curriculum&endash;both hegemonic and hidden&endash;that assures that they know their place in society&endash;preferably as mothers and wives or as inconsequential workers subject to lesser paying jobs (Arnot, 1994). "Along with other mechanisms for cultural preservation and distribution, schools contribute to what has elsewhere been called the cultural reproduction of class relations in advanced industrial societies (Apple, 1990, 64). Women who ‘fail’ to stay married&endash;regardless of circumstance&endash;and then need to rely on public assistance are often the same women who were so severely failed by traditional schooling. Often they do not have minimal functional employment skills, which frustrates them from the possibilities of achieving self-sufficiency.

The major problem for literacy workers hoping to address these educational problems becomes the limits of time and accessibility.

It is hard to see how the PRA’s work requirement’s promote economic self-sufficiency, the putative alternative to welfare dependency. In addition to neglecting basic earnings guarantees for recipients, the law does not invest in services that improve income opportunities. It limits vocational education to one year; limits the number of adult recipients who may be enrolled in vocational education; withdraws the Family Support Act’s encouragement of higher education; does not provide basic education for adults…unless that education is specifically related to employment; and does not adequately fund job training. (Mink, 1998, 111)

Workfare related curriculum, then, reinforces capitalist need for certain types of workers and narrows what workers themselves need to know. The linkages between legitimate knowledge and economic and political power (Apple, 1990) becomes transparent. Though employers see some advantage to having workers who have basic functional skills (especially, for example to maintain safety and reduce on-the-job injuries), business has limited incentive to encourage women beyond their current educational or economic status. Lower skills means that businesses feel justified in paying lower wages&endash;which in turn, improves their profit margin.

Workfare curriculum becomes employer-centered. An ‘educated’ workforce requires minimal literacy skills&endash;reading, writing, computation&endash;with perhaps some more advanced math-related skills&endash;keyboarding, fractions, decimals, read charts/graphs, averaging. Time restrictions&endash;the time-cap on workfare programs and the amount of hours in which a woman has to fulfill all her responsibilities&endash;seriously limits the desire and ability of women to improve their educational needs. Education as a form of social control which prevents women from self-sufficiency further supports the socio-political needs of capitalism and patriarchy. Literacy, then, does not support enjoyment or broadening life experiences or suggesting life-long learning, but rather remains functionalized for the workplace. "There is an ever-widening gulf between recognition of the importance of critical literacy in transforming one’s world and the task-oriented welfare regulations which focus directly on moving individuals off the welfare rolls and into the labor market" (Miranne, 1998, 160).

To create a critical literacy curriculum based in transformational feminism and liberational goals becomes filled with tension and conflict. Critical and liberational literacy&endash;the process which enables individuals to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills&endash;in the welfare-to-work situation remains complex and frustrating as the situation only allows room for minimal, job-related, functional literacy. What does it mean to ‘educate’ women for a system that marginalizes them, devalues their work, does not offer competitive chances or choices? On the one hand, the work of critical literacy should not perpetuate an educational system which is not at all learner-centered, or even in the best interests of the learners. It’s reprehensible to ONLY make women functionally literate for work that will keep them economically enslaved. The realties of the system, though, make it exceedingly difficult to do otherwise and ethically irresponsible to at least not provide some opportunity of literacy&endash;functional though it may be. In this way, dominant patriarchal and capitalist culture and economy continues to be maintained&endash;in fact, has ‘won’&endash;by intensifying the sense of futility that transformative feminist literacy workers feel as we recognize the hegemonic uses of power and knowledge (Apple, 1990).

The challenge then, is to create opportunity for critical literacy in seriously narrow circumstances. This demands a clear understanding of transformational feminism, creativity, and learner-centered involvement.

104th Congress, (1996). Personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act of 1996: PL 104-193. http://www.nga.org/Welfare/WelfareDocs/WelfareEB-HR3734-FI.htm

105th Congress, (1998). Workforce Investment act of 1998: Public law 105-220. http://usworkforce.org/wialaw.txt

Apple, M. (1990). Ideology and curriculum. New York: Routledge.

Arnot, M. (1994). Male hegemony, social class, and women’s education. In Stone, L.,(Ed.) The education feminism reader (pp. 84-104). New York: Routledge.

Barrett, M. (1997). Capitalism and women’s liberation. In Nicholson, L., (Ed.) The second wave: A reader in feminist theory (pp. 123-130). New York: Routledge.

Ebert, T. (1996). Ludic feminism and after: Postmodernism, desire, and labor in late capitalism. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michgan Press.

Greene, M. (1993). Diversity and inclusion: Toward a curriculum for human beings. Teachers College Record, Vol. 95, 211-221.

Hartmann, H. (1982). Capitalism, patriarchy, and job segregation by sex. In Giddens, A. & Held, D., (eds.). Classes, power, and conflict: Classical and contemporary debates (pp. 446-469). Berkeley: Univ. of California.

Hartmann, H. (1997). The unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a more progressive union. In Nicholson, L. , (Ed.) The second wave: A reader in feminist theory (pp. 97-121). New York: Routledge.

Kornbluh, F. (1991). Subversive potential, coercive intent: Women, work and welfare in the 90s. Social Policy, Spring, 23-39.

Matthaei, J. (1997). The sexual division of labor, sexuality, and lesbian/gay liberation: Toward a Marxist-Feminist analysis of sexuality in U.S. capitalism. In Gluckman, A. & Reed, B., (eds.). Homo economics: Capitalism, community, and lesbian and gay life (pp. 135-164). New York: Routledge.

Mink, G. (1994). Welfare reform in historical perspective. In Social Justice, 21, 114-131.

Mink, G. (1998). Welfare’s end. Ithica, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.

Miranne, K.B. & Young, A.H. (1998). Women "reading the world:" Challenging welfare reform in Wisconsin. In Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 25, 155-176.

Schiele, J.H. (1997). An afrocentric perspective on social welfare philosophy and policy. In Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 24, (2), 21-39.

Social Justice. (1994). Women and welfare: Issue theme. Vol. 21 #1.

Stuart, L. (1999). 21st century skills for 21st century jobs: A report from the vice president skills summit. [On-line.] http://www.vpskillssummit.org

Thompson, J. (1983). Learning liberation: Women’s response to men’s education. Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm, Ltd.

Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.