Free The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

sit-on-your-hands-and-twiddle-your-thumbs holding area. It was, said Barbara Zerzan, a woman who had worked on poverty-related themes in the city since the 1970s and who, in 2012, was an employee of a group called the East River Development Alliance, “like the rubber room. People lose it and just stop going. There’s insane fall-off.” People who were clearly poor enough to qualify for cash assistance instead were going without rather than enduring the humiliation of this process. “So most people end up not getting public assistance, even though they’ve applied and are eligible for it. They get Medicaid and food stamps, but not cash assistance. So they do things, commit crimes, fall behind on their rent. It’s a real disaster.”
    If, somehow, they made it through several weeks of sitting on their hands seven hours each weekday, then they were channeled into WEP, New York’s version of workfare. In that capacity, they’d end up doing jobs such as park maintenance and street cleaning that in bygone years would have paid decent salaries to unionized workers.
    For Zerzan, it was one of the most discouraging cycles that she had seen in all her years working on poverty in the Big Apple. “You’reeither at WEP or in the room doing nothing for your entire work week,” she explained of the men and women her organization campaigned on behalf of. “You’re not allowed to look for a job or go to your kid’s school or anything. It’s so insane.” It was, she felt, little more than a shell game: an expensive, bureaucratic system that claimed to encourage poor people to look for employment but that, in reality, made it extremely hard for them to do so, and, in so doing, oftentimes pushed them away from cash aid that they were legally entitled to. “I told my kids recently: ‘My goal is to eliminate poverty and to work on social justice. I’m a complete failure.’ It’s gone from bad to worse. There’s no humanity.”
    A similarly dispiriting situation existed in Michigan, home to some of the country’s most depressed Rust Belt communities. In towns such as Flint, unemployment was rife, drug addiction and involvement with the criminal justice system was commonplace, and undereducation was a daily part of life. Illiteracy rates were stunningly high—in Genessee County, of which Flint was a part, about one in five adults were functionally illiterate, and amongst the welfare population estimates ranged as high as 70 percent. Tied in with that, many workers, left unemployed by the closure of auto factories and other heavy industries from the 1970s onward, didn’t have the skills needed to find new employment. What jobs there were tended to pay in the $8 an hour range, despite the fact that the Michigan League for Human Services estimated that for a family of four both parents would have to be working full time and earning at least $10.71 per hour in order for that family to have a modicum of economic security. Few workers in the area had the skills needed to secure them decently paying jobs.
    And yet, said Alicia Booker, an employee of the Mott Foundation whose mandate was to focus on work issues, the state’s workfare system didn’t allow people to study for a GED or receive other basic education training in lieu of hours worked. Private foundations such as Mott and the Open Society Foundation pumped significant sumsof money into programs such as Earn and Learn, which subsidized the wages of workers hired by local companies in Flint in exchange for those individuals committing themselves to job retraining. But those programs only ever were Band-Aids, providing jobs and training to a few hundred people in a community with thousands of desperate, out of work laborers.
    For those who didn’t get into such programs, prospects were increasingly bleak. In the 2011–12 fiscal year, the state’s Workforce Investment Act funds were cut by 21 percent, or $4 million. One consequence: During the years in which federal