The Dialectics of Privatization and Advocacy in New York City's Workfare State

Introduction WITH THE RECENT PASSAGE OF WELFARE REFORMS IN 2006 AS A LITTLE-DISCUSSED element of a federal budget bill, welfare policy in the United States has moved ever closer to universal workfare. (1) Even before the more sweeping reforms of 1996, Bob Jessop described an emerging "workfare regime" that was replacing the welfare state in the industrialized democracies. The latter's logic of protecting citizens from the fortunes of the market was being supplanted by its opposite. This new regime emphasizes: (1) flexibility for enterprise; (2) geographic re-scaling of economic and social intervention; (3) replacement of entitlements with obligations on the part of citizens; and (4) coalitional power-holding spanning governmental, civil-society, and profit-motivated actors (Jessop, 1994; see also Jessop, 2003; Peck, 2002). In this article, I explore the expansion of workfare programs in New York City and concentrate on the relationship of coalitional power to the form and content of opposition to workfare. From 1995 to 1998, New York City's program requiring welfare recipients to work as a condition of receiving benefits began a fourfold expansion (New York City Office of the Mayor, 1997, 1998, 1999), while welfare rolls contracted by nearly half. Workfare assignments in the city's Work Experience Program (WEP) created enormous disincentives to remain on welfare, and created more opportunities for the state to sanction-- or cut off--welfare recipients' grants. Stricter eligibility procedures and "hassle" (Mead, 2004) designed to get applicants to give up their efforts to sign up for relief also contributed to a sharp decline in the rolls. I attend most carefully to the dynamics by which the changes in welfare were put into play; the creation of an organized opposition to workfare; and the creation of a discourse among the opposition that highlighted WEP's shortcomings. In the wake of its fiscal crisis in the 1970s, New York City developed what Jessop calls a "neocorporatist" rather than a fully "neoliberal" politics, i.e., one based, at least for social provision, on partnerships between the state and nonprofit social service providers. Many of these service providers had roots in urban movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, as DeFilippis (2003) suggests, many of these groups, which devoted their energies to housing rehabilitation and tenant organizing, became co-opted as specialized conduits for housing redevelopment and low-income housing management. As a result, many abandoned their roles as agitators for broader change. By the early 1990s, however, at the peak of a second fiscal crisis under the mayoral administration of David N. Dinkins (1990-1993), several of these organizations were actively exploring ways of re-infusing organizing into their development work (Krinsky and Hovde, 1996). When Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (1994-2001) aggressively reneged on the neocorporatist recognition of community-based organizations in providing social services, some of the more progressive housing groups worked to oppose workfare with organizations that had recently faced similar dilemmas in service politics with respect to the city's homelessness crisis. In spite of its apparent global hegemony, neoliberalism is not the same everywhere; wherever neoliberal governance is tried, its "roll-back" moment--i.e., the point at which it uproots the existing social policy infrastructure--generates specific sorts of opposition depending upon the existing configuration of, and division of labor in, the state and civil society groups. Specifically, this helps to highlight the dialectics of privatization and advocacy in New York. In New York City, the initial imposition of neoliberalism ended in at least a partial neocorporatist bargain. Yet the coalitional pressures created by New York's neocorporatism failed to contain politically the push for greater flexibility by the city's financial elite, and this, in turn, created a progressive-corporatist reaction in the 1990s. …