Learning to Labor and Love: State Work and Marriage Programs' Neoliberal Assumptions of Cultural Deficiency

• In Event: 025 - Regular Session. Culture and Inequality

Abstract

When Congress overhauled welfare policy in 1996 through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, policymakers included provisions encouraging work and marriage as poverty-prevention strategies. Drawing on our respective California-based ethnographic studies of work and marriage programs that were created as an outgrowth of welfare reform, we argue that the use of a skills discourse in both cases highlights welfare reform’s emphasis on the cultural deficiency of poor parents. Both programs focused on teaching participants four sets of skills or areas of topical knowledge: relationship skills, life skills, job-related skills, and social services/legal knowledge. Reflecting the neoliberal emphasis of welfare reform, the skills discourse presents economic mobility as a result of learned capacities for self-regulation, moderation, and proper planning in the realms of work and family. It doing so, it masks the racialized and gendered inequities of the labor market by framing unemployment and family instability as a result of welfare recipients’ presumed economic, social, cultural, and emotional deficiencies. We conclude with recommendations for how welfare programs can avoid the skills discourse and adopt a more empowering approach to supporting families in poverty that highlights their strengths rather that their assumed deficits.

Authors

• Jennifer Randles, California State University-Fresno

• Kerry Woodward, California State University-Long Beach