Life Just Got Harder for Welfare Moms

By Juliette Terzieff, Women's eNews. Posted December 16, 2006.

Stiffer work and reporting requirements for the federal welfare program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, fail to recognize mothers' needs for training, education and child care to make their families self sufficient, women's advocacy groups say.

"The new regulations are a continuation of the misguided 'work first' approach that has been the hallmark of welfare reform," says Erin Mohan, public policy director for Washington-based advocacy organization, Women Work! "This strategy forces women into low-wage, low-skilled, dead-end jobs; jobs that don't pay the bills and can't support families."

In order to qualify for TANF, an adult head of household with children must prove she has insufficient means to pay for rent, food and utilities.

Before the latest regulations announced in June, states had leeway in deciding what constituted the 30 hours of work-related activities required of recipients by welfare legislation enacted in 1996. (Twenty of those hours had to qualify as "core" and 10 as "indirect.")

Some states, for instance, allowed career training and university-degree programs to qualify as employment-related activity.

The new regulations, which took effect Oct. 1, either restrict those activities, put new time limits on them or require new levels of monitoring.

"Many of the states who defined work activities more broadly in the past were taking reasonable and responsible steps to address the substantial barriers to employment that women on welfare face," says Mohan.

New Monitoring Required

Women's advocacy groups point to lack of education, job training and access to health and child care as the most common barriers to financial independence. Domestic violence, lack of suitable living conditions and language limitations can also hinder efforts at self-sufficiency.

"These people are literally fighting for their lives, for their children's futures," says Avis Jones-DeWeever, study director at the Washington-based Institute for Women's Policy Research. "Access to higher education is absolutely critical for women who seek to escape poverty. Changes that support this have not materialized because of an over-riding assumption that welfare participants don't have what it takes to make it in college."

The 1996 law ended a federal welfare system that required the federal and state government to pay, in essence, unpaid child support on behalf of absentee parents. Instead, the new law emphasized that single parents were not entitled to this government aid, and must work outside the home to support their families.

The 1996 landmark welfare legislation shifted away from assistance programs and began requiring single heads of households to fulfill 20 hours of "core" work-related activity and 10 hours of "indirect activity."

For households headed by two people, work requirements varied from 35 to 55 hours per week, depending on how many benefits the household received. Work requirements have been in place since the Ford administration, but gradually became more intensive and peaked with the October regulations.

The decade-old law placed a premium on states moving recipients onto payrolls and off government assistance.

Core Hours Go on the Clock

Now vocational education can be counted as a core activity for up to 12 months but must be monitored on a daily basis. Previously, states were not required to monitor compliance and had leeway in determining what activities qualified.

Participating in community service programs and providing child care for another TANF recipient to participate in community service also qualify, but must be supervised by a case worker on a daily basis.

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Juliette Terzieff is a freelance journalist currently based in Buffalo, New York who has worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, CNN International, and the London Sunday Times during time spent in the Balkans, the Middle East, and South Asia.