Workfare or Fair Work: Women, Welfare, and Government Work Programs
by By Rose, Nancy Ellen
Category: Social Science , Womens Studies

Can the welfare system  in the United States accord  people dignity? That question is often left out of the current debates  over welfare and workfare. In this provocative book, Nancy Rose argues  that the United States has been successful in the past––notably during  the New Deal and in the 1970s––at shaping programs that gave people  “fair work.”            However, as Rose documents, those innovative  job creation programs were voluntary and were mainly directed at  putting men back to work. Women on welfare, and especially women of  color,  continue to be forced into a very different kind of program:  mandatory, punitive, and demeaning. Such workfare programs are set up  for failure. They rarely train women for jobs with futures, they ignore  the needs of the women’s families, and they do not pay an honest wage.  They perpetuate poverty rather than prevent it.           Rose  uses the history of U.S. job creation programs to show alternatives to  mandatory workfare. Any effort to redesign welfare in America needs to  pay close attention to the lessons drawn from this perceptive analysis  of the history of women, welfare, and work. This is an indispensable  book for students, scholars, policymakers, politicians, and  activists––for everyone who knows the system is broken and wants to fix  it.