Essay On Workfare

“Simply put, welfare reform worked because we all worked together”, President Bill Clinton beamed, after signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. After the passing of the PRWORA, dependence on welfare had been nearly cut in half, and unemployment rates were down. But, was workfare really all it was made out to be? Not exactly. Although the aid of workfare sounds effective in theory, it has proven to be unsuccessful and often subjects its recipients to unjust circumstance. In almost all cases, the program of workfare does not “teach” those who engage in it work skills, as it had intended. Shannon Waits, an anti-poverty worker elaborates on the life of a parent on workfare in a published article. “Welfare parents are expected to do the impossible”, she writes. “They go off to work without backup childcare for below poverty wages. Some are refugees in new foreign land.” And yet, despite the struggles many on workfare face, employees like Wait are not supposed to aid workers in developing job skills, but are rather mandated to “spy on them”. …show more content…
Surveys conducted by various researchers disprove the claim that those who depend on government aid are unintelligent. According to a survey taken by Edin and Lein (1996) on 214 welfare recipients in the Boston, Chicago, Charleston, and San Antonio areas, 83 percent of those on welfare had worked in the formal sector, and 65 percent “...had worked in the formal sector in the last 5 years.” Many times, those who are welfare, but have worked in the past, develop a mindset where they “set themselves above” others on social aid because they will “find a job and get off of welfare soon”. More importantly, a whopping 85-percent of those surveyed “...expressed a strong desire to leave welfare for work, but were doubtful they could do