People will do what the surrounding culture tells them is right. Though it suggests that the culture is changing, a change in social policy isn't by itself cultural change. Nor does making people work necessarily inculcate them with a work ethic. The great Victorian evangelists of the work ethic praised work for its effect on the inner being. To them, work was the great instrument of self-development, the medium through which individuals learn who they are and become everything it is in their power to be.
Work develops a host of accompanying virtues, like steadfastness and self-respect.
What our stories both report is that many welfare recipients lack those personal qualities. They need to develop several more primitive virtues, including punctuality and a willingness to oblige, before they can participate in work and reap its psychic as well as its material benefits. For them, having to go to work is only part of the cultural change they need, and not the part they need most right now. Fortunately, as both stories report, efforts to change the cultural messages welfare clients receive are under way, and they point the direction that the next round of welfare reform will have to go. It is an existence in which the work ethic is the only ethic, and Foreman found it proved too thin to be sustaining.