The Welfare Contract and Critical Case Management

ABSTRACT

Drawing on three years of ethnographic research on the decision making processes of welfare case managers in urban Kentucky, we focus here on a group of case managers who subvert the demands placed on them by neoliberal welfare policy. These women refer to their own experiences as low-income, single parents to reconceptualize notions of the “un/deserving” poor, the welfare contract, and what it means to be “self-sufficient.” Case manager resistance and moral constructs are instructional, making explicit the dehumanizing aspects of the system and valuing a rights-based discourse which recognizes the state's obligation to ensure the welfare of all citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Welfare
• case managers
• resistance

The authors thank the other members of the NSF research team: Dr. Judy Goldsmith, Dr. Alex Dekhtyar, Dr. Miroslaw Truszczynski, Dr. Raphael Finkel, Dr. Victor W. Marek, Dr. Joan Mazur, and their graduate students. They would also like to thank Catherine Kingfisher and Sandra Morgen for their comments on an earlier version of this paper and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and critiques.

This research is made possible by a National Science Foundation grant (ITR- 0325063).

Notes

1. Exceptions to these rules vary by state but typically include provisions for unique circumstances.

2. “Countable” activities are those that are consistent with federal and state mandates, including work or work related programs and job training and education programs. They are “countable” because they count toward the case manager, agency, and state quotas - upon which the block grant funding and agency allocations depend.

3. Exceptions to these rules occur depending on the age and health of the client.

4. Here a case manager mocks a policy maker who recently made this statement. We note the irony here since college financial aid is a form of social welfare. Yet because it is directed largely at the middle class it is not considered “welfare” - a stigmatized term due to its association with programs directed at the nation's poor.

5. Case managers are evaluated at the agency level by their immediate supervisors who, in addition to tracking formal compliance, accuracy and processing speed records, also monitor, permit and disapprove exceptions to compliance.

6. The welfare office where our study was located is required to ensure that at least 50% of their clients are participating in “countable activities,” a number deemed “unreasonably high” by the agency coordinator since many of their clients have conditions that prohibit them from participation in work related activities.

7. Our thanks also go to Peg Wimmer who acted as a research assistant in the first year of this project.

8. For additional information about specific methodologies, see Dekhtyar et al. (forthcoming).

9. There are exceptions, for example individuals with parole violations or drug related felonies or those who are unwilling to cooperate with efforts to prosecute absent parents in order to enforce child support rulings.

10. Gender is critical to any analysis of social welfare. We only touch on it briefly in this paper but refer readers to a literature already published on the gendered aspects of the American welfare system. See, for example, Kingfisher 1996, 2001 & 2002, Abromovitz 1996, Mullings 2001, Morgen 2001, Morgen & Weigt 2001, Hirschmann & Lierbert 2001.

11. According to the US Health and Human Services in 2006 cases were down by 58% (http://www.hhs.gov/)

Dekhtyar, A., Goldsmith, J., Goldstein, B., Mathias K., &Isenhour, C. (forthcoming). Planning for success. Journal of Approximate Reasoning. Accepted January, 2007