Sharon Hays' Essay on Welfare Reform, a reaction

Hays's essay begins with the charting of the Welfare Reform Law of 1996 that flooded states with federal funds to fit their individual needs in the welfare area. She sets up a comparison between two "state" policies (Arbordale and Sunbelt), and how their approaches differed and remained neither too generous or extremem.
Her main argument: the logic of the welfare recipient as being trained to become a respectable mainstream worker, thereby turning independence into a simple notion of paid work, is fundamentally flawed....1) the assumption that most recipients previously lacked motivation to work. 2) the work typically available to welfare recipients does not offer the support necessary for that type of independence.

She argues that for some, welfare has provided just the financial boost that a family has needed in order to gain stablity, but for many, the welfare reforms required the opposite of what desperate families/mothers needed at the time. It was telling to hear how many of the recipients had a positive outlook on their situation, regardless of how much it was improving--the vast majority of them were grateful and optimistic.

An interesting quote: "At a practical as well as moral level, the services and income supports offered by the PRA have clearly been positive. Yet in the long run and in the aggregate, poor mothers and children are worse off now than they were prior to reform." The question of "is work better than welfare" seems to be one that Hays is putting forth to be debated.

She covers many of the issues, but oddly seems to focus only upon recipients who are mothers? She believes that welfare does work in many senses and provide worthwhile aid, but that it is merely a chip in the efforts needed to respond to the social changes and problems interspersed throughout the lower tiers of the social hierarchy.