National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #07-98 Poverty and Resistance: Welfare Reform
February 18, 1998

Program description at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/1998/9807.html

Phillip Babich: Welcome to Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information. This week on Making Contact -

Michaelanne Buwsee: Things are going to get a lot worse, before they get better; and right now I think that people - can't even begin to conceive what things are going to be like for people who have the least to lose over the next three or four years.

Francis Fox Piven: The only way we've ever won reform in American history is when people from the bottom have been on the move.

Sue Supriano: The US Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 11 million families will have their welfare benefits reduced as a result of the so-called Welfare Reform Bill. On this program, we explore recent changes to US Public Assistance Programs and what poverty activists around the country are doing to support themselves and their communities. I'm Sue Supriano, your host this week on Making Contact.

Unidentified women #1: I'm an outlaw. My crime: being poor. I, or I should say we, have taken over empty houses to live in, stolen thrown away food and eaten it, gotten used clothing and wore it, and for these simple acts of survival the city of Philadelphia throws us in jail. I can't show you my face or tell you my name, because I got to keep on doing all these things and more. But I can show you me and my friends story. A story of those of us on the edge of survival.

Male police officer: Can you put your hands on the dashboard please.

Unidentified women #1: I never wanted to break the law, to steal, to be an outlaw.

Sue Supriano: That was an excerpt from the documentary, "Poverty Outlaw", produced by Skylight Pictures. The film profiles a Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a Philadelphia based group that organizes poor people. You'll hear more from "Poverty Outlaw" later in this program.

In July, 1997, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, also known as the Welfare Reform Bill took affect. Under the old welfare law, a New Deal Program established in the 1930's, the Federal Government assisted poor children and their families with few limits on the length of time assistance would be granted. Now there are limits and states are primarily responsible for doling out welfare money. This is a fundamental shift in US social policy. Francis Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor explains:

Francis Fox Piven: It basically jettisons federal responsibility for income assistance to poor women and children. It turns that responsibility over to the states. And gives the states lump sum grants, block grants, pretty much leaving the states free to decide how they are going to spend that money, provided that in a broad sense they spend it on poor people. However, the Federal Government does restrict the use of any of this Federal money to give assistance to women and children for more than five years in a lifetime; and it also restricts cash assistance to two years, so that after two years women have to either be dropped from the roles or they have to be put into some kind of work assignment, work off your grant assignment.

Sue Supriano: Meanwhile, says Piven, the mass media has focused its attention on the few success stories. Women who've gotten off welfare and found jobs. In fact, the great majority of families are having a hard time coping with the dramatic adjustment to their incomes and lives, according to Piven.

Francis Fox Piven: So the press is celebrating, and the newspapers have also been featuring a lot of portraits of women who, either because they heard about the new welfare law and they new that there was going to be a crackdown, or because the crackdown had begun in their states. A lot of women who were pushed into work, into taking some kind of job, you know, the name could be Diane or Phylis, or whatever, and we learn about how Diane and her two children are so happy now that mother, finally, has gone out and is working. These stories are very, very misleading, because, I mean, the press hasn't found the women, who in a certain sense has been lost to bureaucratic records, lost to our vision, the women who aren't making it, the women who are now homeless, or the women who are in a terrible depression, because of the downturn in both the deterioration of their economic circumstances and also the deterioration of their standing in American society. Nothing can be more insulting than the way our political leaders have talked about poor women, especially minority poor women, in the last four or five years or so.

But in any case, even if their is a Diane, and a Phylis, and a Sari who get a job and are making it. They’re making you know, $7 an hour, $6.50 an hour. Kids are happy. This focus on this particular women misses the larger picture in two different ways. For one thing, it doesn't look at the aggregate situation of women on welfare, or women who were on welfare, but it is also ignoring the impact of hundreds of thousands, and it will be millions, of women who are very vulnerable. They're worried about their kids. They have to bring home some money. They're in the labor market. They're looking for a job. They'll take any job. I mean they are begging for work. Now all of these women, who are begging for work are concentrated in a portion of the labor market, the unskilled, low-waged portion of the market that is already glutted. The overall unemployment rate is down, but the unemployment rate among people with less than a college education is still in the double digits. And that's where these women necessarily have to look for work. So they are going to make it harder for other people to hold on to their jobs, or for other people who are coming of age to get jobs, because they are willing to work for less. They are willing to work longer. They're more anxious, they are going to work harder.

Sue Supriano: This threat to workers jobs and wages says Piven, begs the question, "Why aren't workers up in arms over the new Welfare Law"?

Francis Fox Piven: It's a very important question , and a very difficult and touchy question, because it partly has to do with American political culture, and it partly has to do with the way the welfare issue has been used by our politicians in the last few years. When I say partly has to do with American political culture I mean that, well American's have had for a very long time we've always had a great deal of hostility toward the poor. That may be our Protestant heritage in a certain sense. People who are poor are unworthy. They haven't made it. It's also true that there's a lot about welfare, the old welfare system, the system that’s been replaced that helped to engrave that dislike, because the welfare system treated poor people badly and as a people who watched that kind of treatment, the home investigations, the midnight raids, the kind of surveillance and scrutiny, the quizzes that people got when the applied for aid: "Where did you get that watch?" "When have you last menstruated," "Did you pay," you know, "Do you have your rent receipts," and so forth. We don't - other people who get government subsidies are not quizzed, or examined, or investigated in this way. And it helps to paint these people, who depend on welfare, as terribly unworthy.

Denise Graab: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you'd like to receive a free copy of a report that specifies changes in Welfare Law published in the "Neighborhood Works" magazine, please give us a call. It's toll-free: 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number to contact any of the organizations you hear about on this program, or if you'd like to order a tape or transcript. That's 800-529-5736.

Peggy Law: There's been much discussion in media and from politicians about so-called welfare reform, with the idea that the public dollar, the tax dollar, should not be supporting people, that people should be working.

Sue Supriano: Making Contact's Peggy Law, speaking with poverty activist Michaelanne Buwsee of ARISE for Social Justice.

Peggy Law: You're an organization that's made up of and supports the interests of low income people. How do you see that affecting your population?

Michaelanne Bewsee: The whole welfare reform is the end result of a massive propaganda war on a national level and welfare reform is the end-result, and it was done very strategically and it was done in a way that I think we didn't see coming in a full scale, we didn't see the motives that were driving welfare reform right away. But definitely it was to keep middle income people and moderate income people from developing their own analysis about why there having such a hard time getting by. And the idea was, let's blame people on welfare. And, now they've done that and kind of the interesting thing is that as people leave welfare and enter the work force, to the degree that we are able to do that, what kind of excuses will they come up with then, when federal dollars are no longer going to Public Assistance Programs, and yet moderate and middle income people are still struggling just as hard. Who gets blamed then.

Peggy Law: You're really describing a war against the poor, but not just the poor, the poor, low-income, and middle-income people, with a very small proportion of people winning. Where do you see this going?

Michaelanne Bewsee: As an organizer, I have to believe, or I choose to believe, that there's a process, and I won't always say a gradual process, because sometimes I think we make big leaps all at once, as well as sometimes having big setbacks all at once, but I have to believe that in the end the power of the people will prevail. And, you know, where is that end? You know, where are we in that process? Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. And right now, I think that people don't - can't even begin to conceive what things are going to be like for people who have the least to loose over the next three or four years. Families in cars, families sleeping in vacant lots. We are already knowing people who have no source of income, no source of heat. As an organizer, again, when things get that bad, they say, "Bad times make for good organizing," you know, and that's true to a degree; and you know, we're going to do the best we can as community organizers to educate moderate and middle income people about what's happening and work to empower ourselves and other low-income people to stand up for our rights.

Sue Supriano: Buwsee adds that she has little faith in the legislative process and instead promotes community organizing at the local level.

Michaelanne Buwsee: I don't think it's particularly worth while to devote an excessive amount of energy in to trying to win legislative change. This legislative change, this tide for welfare reform was the end result of a lot of propaganda, and we need to know what the tactics and strategies of the enemy were if we want to be able to counter them. So, we can't just go straight to our State Legislators and straight to our Federal Legislators and expect them to do a thing for us right now, because they can't and they won't. I mean they can't - they've bought in to this system, this analysis, they can't just turn around now and go back in the other direction. Not without massive public pressure. And of course, they've pressured the public to go along with this idea. So what we have to do is to win the hearts and minds of people, to understanding what's really happening and what people really need. So that's where we have to start. We have to start in our communities, and we have to start in as small an area as we can doing education and doing organizing, and I think putting the demands on our local governments. But to try to get anybody on a state and federal level to listen to us right now, I don't think that's our job. They're not going to listen. They know what they've done. They did it deliberately, and they're not going to listen until we've built a lot more power.

Cheri Honkala: We can't underestimate what our government is willing to do to keep people silent and keep people unorganized and not active in this country. We've only been able to get concessions through organized demonstrations, and we use the slogan, "You only get what you're organized to take."

Sue Supriano: Cheri Honkala, founder of Kensington Welfare Rights Union.

Cheri Honkala: We're talking about real questions of power, right? Not just, like, we're gonna, you know, win over these mean guys in government. I mean these are people that are prepared to hold on to their wealth and their power by any means necessary, and this is not just going to be a process of convincing some people to share their wealth in this country.

Sue Supriano: Instead, says Honkala, poor people will have to come up with creative solutions for survival on their own.

Cheri Honkala: Poor people are having to be incredibly resourceful when they’re resource-less. And they're going to have to try and figure out how to get through each and every day the best way that they can. And to be poor in this country right now, means to be criminal. It's equal with being a criminal, because you have to do things illegally in order to survive, and to provide for your children.

Sue Supriano: To explore further the issue of welfare from the prospective of most affected by the recent changes, we now turn to another excerpt from the documentary, "Poverty Outlaw", produced by Peter Kinoy and Pamela Yates of Skylight Pictures. The film profiles the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philadelphia. The excerpt starts with Kensington Welfare Rights Union founder Cheri Honkala and another KWRU member parked in their care as they prepare to visit welfare offices and enlist four people to join their group and the anti-poverty movement.

Unidentified KWRU member: Good morning Katie!

Katie: Good morning lady.

Unidentified KWRU member: How are you?

Katie: Good. How do you feel?

Unidentified KWRU member: Good. O.K., so what are you about to do this morning?

Katie: We're going to the welfare offices. All different ones I hope, and talk to them and tell them exactly what our union is about, try to help some people out, to give them an idea that they can fight for what they need. And they are able to fight for their rights, because what happens is that the system believes that poor people don't know how to fight. So we're going to show them they do know how to fight.

Unidentified woman #1: In the welfare office, they try to belittle you. A lot of times case workers act as though they take money out of their own pocket. They try to make you feel bad, because you're even there, period. Sometimes, you’ll be in there 5 hours, 6 hours, waiting to find out that your child is going to eat today.

Unidentified woman #2: We know that we can't even survive on the amount of money we're getting right now.

Unidentified woman #1: One day, as I was sittin’ there waiting for my number to be called, this women breezed in and was givin’ out leaflets, and I wanted to know what about. It said they were a group that could help me. And I was thinking, "What was their game?" But the leaflet said they were on welfare too. There was something there. I sort of got curious.

I went to my first meeting of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. It wasn't like it was a big meeting. And I really didn't know what was going on, but I could catch the strongness from some of those women. And as I got to know the other women, I saw that my situation was happening to them too.

Unidentified woman #3: I found some money in one of my pockets of a dress that I had. I found like $6, and so it's March 26 and all I have is $6.

Unidentified woman #4: You have to live day by day. And you can't really make it. You can barely pay your bills. And they wonder why people are beating the system.

Unidentified woman #5: I want to survive, but I don't want to just barely survive. I want to be able to have my own place. I want to be able to give my kids what they need, and they can't do it on public assistance. You just can't do it.

Unidentified woman #6: I woke up in a better mood today, because today I know I'm going to get food stamps and some cash. But I knew from two weeks to two weeks. I said today I paid my rent. Doesn't mean I have money to pay the bills. I probably took my last bath, because I don't know if the water is going to be shut off.

Unidentified woman #1: When I first went out with Cheri and Debbie I was pretty shy, 'cause when you're in poverty you lose a lot of things about yourself. I really didn't want to talk to strangers, but Cheri encouraged me.

Cheri Honkala: I come from the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. Have I met you before?

Unidentified woman #8: No.

Cheri Honkala: No?

Unidentified woman #1: She had already been through living in the streets. She lived in a car at the age of sixteen years old. She was pregnant. No job. Nowhere to turn. That's not something that anybody can teach you.

Cheri Honkala: We're trying to stop the cuts for poor people.

Unidentified women #1: It's hurt that you have inside from the pain that you've been through, you know? And anger that you have inside you. She lived it. She's the one that got us started.

Unidentified male #1: As far as fighting poverty, what are you guys mainly do?

Unidentified woman #1: We went out on the street. We asked, "Are you on welfare?" Automatically, people say, "Yes, I am." So we ask from there. "Would you like to join us in order to fight welfare, so you could get more money, clothing for your children, better health-care, and stuff like that?" We knocked on doors, we went inside stores, we did all kinds of things. I guess what really united us more than anything was that we were all poor.

Sue Supriano: An excerpt from the documentary "Poverty Outlaw." Cheri Honkala describes Kensington Welfare Rights Union's specific strategies and long-term goals.

Cheri Honkala: Daily we're engaged in using what we call our "human rights house" right now to make plans on where the abandoned houses are in the Philadelphia area. We take poor and homeless families through the training on how to do a take-over. We identify abandoned government owned properties that are owned by Housing and Urban Development, and we go out to the properties. We move the families in, and the families usually live there from anywhere from four to six months. There's usually a great deal of police activity during those four to six months, but we know that those properties are under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government, and that they have to send out Federal Marshals in order to evict families from those properties. We do it, because we feel like we're morally justified. That if the City of Philadelphia can't house these families then we intend to house them ourselves.

Sue Supriano: More than quick fixes however, these tactics and their implementations, says Honkala are designed to help bring about a more positive, less competitive future.

Cheri Honkala: What would it be like to live in a cooperative society? And we try to demonstrate that, and live that every day of our lives, through free food distribution. Where food would normally be thrown away, we distributed it. Where empty houses would remain empty, we try and fill those houses. So, we try to live cooperatively and model our everyday lives after a much larger vision of a new kind of world that we'd like to live in.

Sue Supriano: The Welfare Reform Bill was immensely popular passing by a wide margin in Congress. In an effort to shift public opinion, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union is currently engaged in a campaign to document cases of severe hardships as a result of poverty in the new Welfare Law. Honkala says the anti-welfare atmosphere in the United States is in part due to the marginalization of welfare recipients.

Cheri Honkala: One of the real reasons we decided to concentrate on the documentation project isn't just to indict the United States Government for failing to meet the needs of the majority of the people. Our number one concern that we see in this country is a lack of face to face relationship with the folks that are most affected by these issues. It's amazing how I've been traveling around the country attending forums with no poor folks at those forums. Discussions on welfare reform, with no welfare recipients in the room. And so, it was a very conscious effort to begin to put people into a relationship with each other, and then to force people to deal with the real questions of humanity that poor homeless families are having to face on a daily basis.

Francis Fox Piven: We've gone through a two decade period in which wages have been either stagnant or falling while profits have increased, particularly recently.

Sue Supriano: City University of New York professor Francis Fox Piven.

Francis Fox Piven: There's been a kind of redivision of the American economic pie. Profit shares are getting larger and larger, and wage shares are shrinking. The use of welfare recipients as workers and the forcing of more and more welfare recipients into the labor market, whether they become workers or not, you know, into the search for work, will exert more pressure on wages, and particularly on the most low paid workers.

Sue Supriano: Piven adds that she's placing her hope in groups like the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and ARISE for Social Justice, working in alliance with labor unions and low wage workers.

Francis Fox Piven: What we have to hope is low wage workers, together with welfare recipients, other poor people, become a political force in their own right, find their footing, maybe they'll gain courage from the emergence of the labor movement. That would be an important development. That kind of complimentarity. And the truth is the only way we've ever won reform in American history is when people from the bottom have been on the move. That's the only way, throughout American history that we've won the kinds of governmental reforms that have tamed a very predatory American capitalism.

Sue Supriano: That's it for this edition of Making Contact, a look at welfare rights organizing in the United States. Thanks for listening. If you want information on how to get a copy of "Poverty Outlaw" or to get in touch with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union please give us a call. You'll hear our toll-free number in a moment.

This week’s program was a production of the National Radio Project's Women's Desk. Special thanks to Peggy Law, Skylight Pictures, and John Potash for providing recorded portions. For Making Contact, I'm Sue Supriano.

Samantha Haimovitch: If you want more information about the subject of this weeks program call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts, or if you'd like to make a comment about what you’ve just heard. That's 800-529-5736. Making Contact is an independent production funded by individual contributors. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. Our producers our David Barsamian, Phillip Babich, and Denise Graab. Our senior advisor is Norman Solomon. And our executive director is Peggy Law. Our theme music is by the Charley Hunter Trio. For everyone at Making Contact, thanks for listening.