The Workfare State

The Workfare State provides a thoughtful and cogent analysis, and an incisive and sobering reminder that a two-tiered system of social provision is a core legacy of the Democratic Party. -Perspectives on Politics How did the United States end up with a safety net that no longer protects its people? Eva Bertram's superb analysis explains precisely how the United States reconstructed (and restricted) its welfare state. The Workfare State provides a fresh look at the Democrats, the South, inequality, social justice, and more. Broad ranging, urgent, thoughtful, elegant, meticulously researched, and highly recommended. -James A. Morone, Director, Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University Bertram has given us a major work that presents a compelling reinterpretation of the history of public assistance policies in the US. All scholars who are interested in policy, politics, and poverty should read this book carefully; it is an essential guide to our present moment. -Economic History Review Bertram offers a compelling account of the politics surrounding the transformation of the welfare state into a 'workfare state' or one that links public assistance to work activity among the poor . . . [A] richly detailed analysis of formative moments in welfare policy-making. -Journal of Children and Poverty The Workfare State is a fascinating and essential new account of the rise of work as a condition for social assistance in the United States. Work became a requirement for social assistance, reinforcing the low-wage economy of the South and in turn the political bases of the lawmakers responsible for the change. That the same forces that shaped welfare legislation in the 1930s continued to do so decades later, and for similar economic and racial reasons, is disturbing. That welfare recipients were thrust into work just as deindustrialization and globalization undermined the low-wage sector is heartbreaking. A new must-read in the development of American social policy. -Andrea Louise Campbell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology In this compelling new interpretation, Eva Bertram shows how the emergence of the new South-with its low-wage racialized economy-brought with it pressures to redraw the social contract between poor families and the state well before Republicans came to political power in the 1980s. Rather than mitigate new labor market insecurities, politicians compounded them by linking assistance to employment. The Workfare State is essential reading for understanding the politics and policies that now confront poor Americans. -Margaret M. Weir, University of California, Berkeley