Will California sidestep ‘work first’ welfare rules?
The first time April Acosta applied for cash assistance 18 years ago, the Baldwin Park mother of a 2-year-old thought it would help pull her out of a cycle of dead-end desk jobs.
She signed up for CalWorks, the state’s cash aid program for low-income adults with children, hoping she could enroll in community college, get a degree and leave the medical referral office where she had developed carpal tunnel syndrome.
Instead of pointing her toward school, a Los Angeles County case worker handed her a list of places to get a new job and said that if she didn’t land one, her CalWorks benefits would be cut.
She continued taking jobs, off and on, that would have met the program’s requirements, but they didn’t help her get ahead. They were a patchwork of “lower-end,” often temporary office jobs, answering phones and filing papers. Now at 51 she says she has rarely made much
above minimum wage.
“It felt like being forced,” she said about that first encounter with CalWorks. “It was like trying to get me to work more than anything else. It wasn’t a career.”
For a quarter of a century, the “work first” welfare model that Acosta and many other people experience has defined California’s cash assistance program. Work requirements were the pillar of the 1996 federal welfare reforms that President Bill Clinton signed into law and that states have been pushed to enforce ever since.
But advocates for the poor and many policy experts have long criticized the federal rules as rigid, punitive and born out of racist tropes about Black single mothers abusing welfare. They say it sometimes hurts those it’s supposed to help.
Some state officials and advocates are trying to change that, but there are challenges.
“The current program is really just focused on: can you get people into jobs as much as possible. Everything else is secondary,” said Esi Hutchful, policy analyst at the California
Budget and Policy Center, which advocates for lowincome Californians.
Nationwide, the number of families receiving cash aid has plunged from a peak of 5 million in 1994 to roughly a fifth of that today. Incentivized by the 1996 federal law, many states enacted policies that slashed enrollment.
California has been more generous than the rest of the country. Today people in the Golden State make up nearly a third of all cash aid recipients nationwide. The federal government gives California $3.7 billion a year for what is called the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which the state operates as CalWorks.
Last year more than 606,000 Californians received cash aid, about 461,000 of them children. For single-parent households, the typical recipient family receives aid for 23 months, state data show.
The state has tried to loosen work restrictions over the years, as similar efforts at the federal level have stalled.