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Robert D. Meckel
On Campus staff
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Study by UT Austin and Rutgers researchers finds that inadequate wages offered to welfare mothers prevent them from becoming self-sufficient
Mothers and their children can pay a heavy price for trying to get off the welfare rolls by taking jobs offered by America's low-wage labor market, according to a new book co-written by Dr. Laura Lein of The University of Texas at Austin.
Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work takes a realistic look at the lives of welfare and low-wage mothers and finds dramatic evidence that, in the present labor market, unskilled single mothers who hold jobs are frequently worse off than those on welfare. It determines that neither welfare nor low-wage employment alone will support a family at subsistence levels. Many welfare mothers find it necessary to work covertly to avoid losing benefits while still trying to meet their family's needs. Mothers in low-wage jobs also must use other strategies to support their families.
Lein, a senior lecturer and research scientist at UT Austin's School of Social Work and department of anthropology, co-authored the book with Kathryn Edin, assistant professor in the department of sociology and Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University.
Their study found that welfare and low-wage mothers have powerful forces working against them and that the greatest of these forces is explained by simple math - the cost of even substandard living exceeds the wages businesses are willing to pay mothers for unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Leaving welfare for work offers little hope for improvement and, in many cases, threatens even greater hardship. To take a job, mothers enter a realm of irregular or uncertain hours, frequent layoffs and no promise of advancement. Mothers who work assume not only extra child care, medical and transportation expenses, but also are deprived of many of the housing and educational subsidies available to those on welfare.
In their interviews of about 400 welfare and low-income single mothers from cities in four states over a three-year period, Lein and Edin found that many were justifiably afraid of the consequences of giving up their welfare status and that low-wage working mothers faced at least as many difficulties as welfare mothers in making ends meet. The researchers' careful budgetary analyses revealed that even a full range of welfare benefits - Aid for Families with Dependent Children payments, food stamps, Medicaid and housing subsidies - typically meet only three-fifths of a family's needs, and that funds for adequate food, clothing and other necessities often are lacking.
"If this country's efforts to improve the self-sufficiency of female-headed families are to succeed, reformers will need to move beyond the myths of welfare dependency and deal with the hard realities of the low-wage labor market, the lack of affordable health insurance and child care for single mothers who work, and the true cost of subsistence living," said Lein.
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