"Don't be shocked when I say I was in prison; you're still in prison. That's what America means -- prison." --Malcolm X

he essence of all policies of the government of the United States of America is to help large American corporations increase their profits, often irrespective of public well-being. As it concerns manpower, government facilitates business by initiating policies which will have either a direct or an indirect bearing on the cost of labor. Therefore, the U.S. government's economic and social policies consistently keep millions of Americans on the borderline between subsistence and starvation, desperately looking for work, any work. When and if they do find some employment, it is usually at wages that are much lower than needed to support their families, provide adequate housing, nutrition, education and health care.

But how does the government keep the unemployment rate down to what it portrays as an acceptable level of about five percent, while still managing to drive down workers' demands for a decent standard of living? Well, the hot answer in today's America is "welfare reform," which will add hundreds of thousands and eventually millions more ready workers whose demands for wages, benefits and working conditions will be at the absolute rock bottom.

By increasing poverty among the American people -- rather than seeking to alleviate it -- the government enables business to find new ways to exploit them. In order to force millions more into jobs at the lowest possible wages that don't even cover the most basic necessities of life, it is necessary to spread fear, insecurity and desperation -- even if it includes spreading hunger among millions of children, disabled and elderly people. Those who manage public policy on behalf of American capitalism have business's interests clearly in mind -- the pursuit of ever-greater profits through the continued and ever-intensified exploitation of people.

Welfare "reform" not only deprives already desperately poor people of any help; it also tightens the income squeeze on the rest of Americans. The aim of big business is to destroy even the minimal social safety net that had existed in America and to create conditions where people have no choice but to take any job available, regardless of pay. This automatically will increase competition even for low-pay, no-benefit jobs.

What welfare reform is about is cheap labor. It's about flooding American labor market with dirt-cheap workers when the goal of big business is to reduce the cost of labor as much as possible. The elimination of welfare assistance for the poor is calculated to create a mass of people who will be desperate to work, no matter how bad the wages and conditions are. It will create a large pool of destitute unemployed people willing to work for very low pay and will consequently drive down the wages of those who still do have jobs. As employers find they can hire workers for much lower pay, the effect will be to drive down wages overall.

With millions more people forced into the labor market, the downward pressure on wages in America will grow tremendously. A study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute projects that if one million former welfare recipients enter the labor market, wages for the bottom thirty million workers, or those making less than seven dollars an hour, will fall dramatically. According to Lawrence Mishel and John Schmitt of the Economic Policy Institute, the wages of low-wage workers would have to fall by 11.9 percent nationally to accommodate a million former welfare clients. Mishel and Schmitt say that the net result would be annual loss of $36 billion in income to low-wage workers throughout the country, or $8.5 billion more than total federal and state spending on AFDC in 1994.

A national study on the impact of welfare reform predicts there will only be one low-skill job for every two welfare recipients targeted to enter the job market. The report, released in 1997 by Washington, D.C.-based Jobs for Justice, said that while for 1997 and 1998 the economy should create 704,100 low-skill jobs, nearly 1.3 million people are projected to leave the welfare rolls and look for work. Six of the largest states, which together carry nearly half the national welfare caseload, will be especially short of jobs, the report said. "Our nation is facing a crisis," said Fred Azcarate, head of this Washington-based national workers' rights group. "We have to point out the fatal flaw of welfare reform as it's being implemented -- that there's only one job out there for every two people who will be looking to work." The study shows that there already is a large surplus of workers in the low-wage labor market, where real average weekly earnings have declined in recent years.

This report by Jobs for Justice not only projects the availability of one job for every two welfare recipients leaving the welfare rolls, but calls attention to the declining pay of unmarried mothers without high school diplomas -- the "key targets of welfare reform." The weekly earnings of these unmarried mothers ages 25 to 34 dropped from $307 to $231 for full-time work from 1979 to 1993. Just like Economic Policy Institute's study, it also projects that former welfare recipients entering the low-wage labor market will push down wages in that category by nearly twelve percent for the bottom thirty percent of workers (approximately 31 million people with wages lower than $7.19 an hour). It will represent a total income loss of about $36 billion a year, according to report. "Throwing more people into the low-wage labor market will further depress wages," said Mark Weisbrot, study author and research director for the Preamble Center for Public Policy, a research and public policy group. The study also cited research from Northern Illinois University's Office of Social Policy Research, which showed large gaps in living-wage jobs -- jobs paying an annual wage of $25,907, enough to support a family of three. There are fifty-five to ninety-seven job seekers for each living-wage job in the Midwest.

The desired effect of all this welfare reform is to increase human misery and to make it less likely that those still currently employed would take any kind of action against their employers. Simply put, the weaker the safety net, the larger the reserve army of the unemployed, the longer capital accumulation can occur without upward pressure on wages. This is exactly what the designers of such a barbaric law -- those who planned to "end welfare as we know it" -- had in mind. Taking the "underclass" down to unprecedented levels of misery will result in a deepened climate of fear and resignation for those trapped in the sorry state of life at the lowest end of the working class.

As the Los Angeles Times tells it, for people like 47 year old Carlos Sabala, a Santa Monica, California, hotel employee who has toiled at low-wage jobs since he was five and who now still earns only $7.18 an hour doing housekeeping, the image of tens of thousands of newcomers elbowing others for jobs portends scary changes in his working life. "It will be harder for us that already have the jobs. We have to be more careful, do more, because we know there's a lot of people out there that are going to come looking for our jobs," said Sabala. "If management doesn't like what you're doing, they'll kick you out." "What you are going to see is a lot of bumping going on at the bottom end of the labor market," said Manuel Pastor, an economist and chairman of Latin American Studies at University of California in Santa Cruz, who has studied poor communities in Los Angeles. The study by the Economic Roundtable, a public policy research group, concluded that the number of aid recipients seeking jobs in Los Angeles in coming years will vastly outnumber the jobs available -- an average of 2.5 job seekers for every new opening. When unemployed job seekers are added to the mix, the ratio increases to 5.4 job seekers for each new opening.

Welfare reform -- despite the platitudes used in selling it to the public -- is little more than a scheme to boost corporate profits even further by forcing wages down. Dumping millions more desperate Americans onto a labor market already saturated with millions of unemployed will no doubt produce a huge economic bonanza to the moneyed elite. At a time of soaring profits for corporations, these drastic cuts in social spending will help to make all those obscenely rich CEOs even richer.

This sequence of events is precisely that for which the welfare "reform" legislation was designed. And it has already begun. The public assistance rolls have been slashed drastically in last few years, enlarging the number of people looking for work and thus increasing the market pressures, which will force job-seekers to accept less desirable terms of employment. Since January 1993, when President Clinton took office, the number of recipients on welfare assistance has dropped by more than forty-one percent, including a decline of more than thirty percent since the enactment of the welfare reform law on August 22, 1996. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, there are 5.7 million fewer recipients on the welfare rolls since President Clinton took office and 3.8 million fewer welfare recipients since the passage of the 1996 law. At least one-third of this decline is attributed to changes in the welfare law. The rate of decline in 1998 was nearly two percent reductions each month, almost double the rate for the same period in 1997.. Welfare assistance is down eighty-four percent in Wyoming since 1993; eighty-two percent in Wisconsin; eighty-one percent in Idaho; seventy-one percent in Mississippi; sixty-nine percent in West Virginia, and so on. "In thirty years of observing welfare policy-making and administration, I have never seen a period of such rapid change," says Richard Nathan, director of the Nelson Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, New York. "The debate is over," declared President Clinton on August 11, 1997. "We know now that welfare reform works."

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New York City has become a huge testing ground for this program. Tens of thousands of poor people in New York must take now menial jobs in which they are denied the protection of labor and minimum wage laws and must accede to every demand of their "employers" (better to say, their Masters) or face the cutoff of subsistence incomes. New York City's workfare program has quickly become the largest of its kind in the country, with about 30,000 people now doing workfare at any given time. As of September 1998, New York City had 32,378 public assistance recipients who are required to participate in the Work Experience Program in exchange for their assistance checks. Legally they are often listed as "trainees" or even "volunteers" -- so their labor is not covered by union contracts or labor laws. Most work for the parks department and in public works. The city has another 713,000 individuals, including children, receiving welfare under either federal or state programs. Giuliani announced that he wants the city to move toward "universal engagement" in work experience.

This involuntary labor force shows up today by the thousands in the Parks Department or as street cleaners or in sanitation or as receptionists -- often handling work that laid-off city workers once did for much higher wages and benefits. They are cleaning parks, streets, offices and hospitals, processing paper work -- doing everything that used to be paid at a rate three to five times the amount received now by workfare slaves. People who are compelled to work have little hope of ever finding a decent job.

New York City's workfare program, which is called Work Experience Program or WEP, provides a case study of how this extremely cruel welfare "reform" drives thousands of poor people into even more desperate situations. In April 1998, a four-part series appeared in the New York Times, exposing how the city's workfare program forces people to work for slave wages under dehumanizing working conditions. Four reporters from the New York Times visited more than fifty work sites for four months and spoke with hundreds of WEP workers and supervisors. They found little evidence that the program helps people get real jobs. In fact, they found that thousands of "work experience" workers are being used to replace regular city workers who have been laid off.

When New York City's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani launched the biggest workfare program in the country in 1995, the first welfare recipients put on workfare were adults without young children. They were required to do workfare jobs twenty-five to thirty-five hours every two weeks until they found full-time jobs. In 1996, workfare was expanded to single women with young children. At the beginning of 1998, there were 17,000 single women with children and 16,000 other adults in the city's workfare program. An additional 130,000 adults have been deemed eligible, but have not yet been assigned workfare jobs. Giuliani announced in 1997 that he wants the city to move toward "universal engagement" in work experience. In what was billed as a major policy statement on welfare reform, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that by the start of the century, everyone receiving any kind of support from the city will have to work for it -- including young mothers and the disabled. "We're going to end welfare by the end of this century completely," he declared.

Even New York City's most vulnerable can now feel the might of the mayor -- those who are disabled must also work, no exceptions. Mayor Giuliani, riding a welfare reform machine that is bulldozing the poor across the United States, has decreed that every New Yorker, regardless of physical and/or mental disability, must work in exchange for city aid. Now, in his effort to increase the number of welfare recipients participating in New York City's workfare program, even physically and mentally disabled mothers are required to work for their welfare checks. All the women who were previously considered unable to work because of severe physical or mental illness may, too, end up in the workforce after all. City officials say this "will give more people a chance at self-sufficiency." Women who cannot walk, for instance, might type or stuff envelopes, they say.

About 12,000 disabled women will have to participate in workfare initially and the remaining 21,000 will follow by the end of this decade. Most of those women will ultimately have to work twenty hours a week for three months, and thirty-five hours a week after that. Under this program, disabled women can't refuse to accept a city-ordered workfare "job" -- even if they believe they are incapable of doing the work or fear it could worsen their health. In one case, even a woman who has to carry a portable oxygen tank because of her severe illness, was ordered to work in a dangerous workfare job. "This is a service program with the death penalty attached to it," commented legal aid lawyer Kathleen Kelleher.

The New York Times series also reveals how women with children assigned to workfare face extremely difficult situations because of the city's shortage of childcare. While thousands of women on welfare are being pushed into workfare, the city isn't providing them with any way for their children to be taken care of. In Queens, a woman on welfare told her caseworker that she called twelve places, but none would watch her baby. Instead of excusing the woman from workfare, the caseworker issues a threat: "They're going to reduce your benefits if you can't find anyone. Can you survive on less money? ... You have ten days. No more excuses."

While city rules say caseworkers are supposed to help women find licensed child care providers who meet city health and safety standards, seventy-five percent of mothers on workfare end up having to leave their children with unlicensed baby sitters. Caseworkers heartlessly ignore problems women have in finding adequate childcare. One woman begged her caseworker to help her find someone else to care for her daughter after the child was beaten by a babysitter. When the caseworker wouldn't help, the woman refused to participate in the workfare program and her assistance was cut. ...

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