As the pro-corporate, bipartisan consensus pursues policies that increase unemployment and underemployment, more and more American workers will find themselves in need of this safety net. An attack on any piece of that system is an attack on all of it. Thus the Wall Street Journal reports that the Democratic Leadership Council is prepared next to join Republicans in pushing to privatize Social Security. Still, the politicians and pundits claim that people who receive low-income public assistance simply do not want to work or are poor because they are in some way defective or inferior to the rest of us. And they persist with this ugly stereotype even as they support policies that render more and more of us jobless.
Most families receive benefits for no more than two years at a time.
The preponderance of families receiving AFDC are, and always have been, white, and there has been no explosion in adolescent childbearing among black or brown women. The cost of corporate welfare contrasts strikingly with that of low-income public assistance. This is clearly an attempt to restore a version of the forced labor of the workhouse or the convict-lease system that the labor movement fought so hard against in the 19th century. Every U.S. resident must have access to a job that pays above-poverty level wages as a basic human right. A revitalized public sector and a public commitment to insure that labor plays a central role in shaping technological development and implementation.