Poor Mothers Redesign Work

DRAFT

FORTHCOMING IN JOURNAL SOCIAL POLITICS 2007

Wage-poor mothers and moral economy

Lisa Dodson

Boston College

Abstract: This paper explores the subaltern work and family care practices of 300 low-wage women. While US welfare reform enforced the labor market as the sole route for family support many (often single) mother families remain wage-impoverished. Their work habits orbit around keeping children safe and defy market norms. Furthermore, in wage-poor America and beyond, this defiance is understood as morally legitimate, representing a hidden challenge to an economic ideology that subordinates humanity to the market.

Keywords: Work and family conflict, welfare policy, motherwork, low-wage workers, moral economy.

Acknowledgement: I sincerely thank Helen Neuborne of the Ford Foundation; Michael Laracy of the Annie E. Casey Foundation; and the Cities of Boston and Cambridge for sponsoring various parts of the research that went into this paper. I am also very grateful to Ellen Bravo and 9to5 National Association for Working Women and all the people of the former Radcliffe Public Policy Center for support and encouragement over the years. Additionally, I want to thank Tiffany Manuel, Lucie White, Deborah Stone, Mona Harrington, Wendy Luttrell, Marjorie DeVault, and Catherine Riessman who have spent time talking with me about these ideas and Odessa Cole for her research assistance.

Direct all correspondence to Lisa Dodson, Department of Sociology, Boston College, McGuinn 408, Chestnut Hill, MA 0267 (email:).

DODSON

Wage-poor mothers and moral economy

“You have to choose… and what mother’s choosing this job over her child?”

“They pushed and pushed (me) to get a job. Yeah, like all of us here. But I don’t see how it’s going to work. I have this job, OK, but at the end of the month, there’s no way I can do it (cover all bills) it doesn’t go that far.”

“That’s not their problem, that there is your problem.”

“Ya, well I got a big problem because this don’t work out and I can’t feed my kids on this.”

(From a transcript of a discussion with employed mothers who had previously relied on public assistance, 1998, in Boston.)

In the US, following welfare reform, there has been considerable study of the economic and employment status of families that were formally welfare reliant (Moffit and Winder 2004; Hamilton 2002; Corcoran et al 2000). Concurrently, there has also been various investigation of the service sector job market, poverty wages, rigid work schedules, and the lack of employment benefits that currently circumscribe the lives of low-wage workers and their families (Lambert et al 2003; Bromer and Henly 2004; Dodson and Bravo 2005; Munger 2002). With variation in foci and findings, much of this research points out that most of the employment available to millions of parents – particularly women – does not support a family, far be it provide a way out of poverty (Mishel, Bernstein & Allegretto 2005). However, there has been much less exploration about how parents actually manage this fundamental dilemma in their everyday lives.

For decades low-income families in the US used public assistance programs as an economic fallback to attend to family needs because they did not have access to the resources that higher-income families use, such as savings from previous employment, spousal income adequate to support a family or access to family wealth. After welfare reform, low-wage mothers lost the choice to withdraw from the labor market regardless of the needs of their children and family; welfare reform was a “revoking parental discretion in matters of care…” (page 176, Oliker 2000). Even a lack of childcare no longer justified absence from work, despite the fact that publicly funded childcare served only a fraction of all eligible families (Mezey et al 2002).

This article argues that wage-poor mothers are guided by a version of “moral economy” (see a full discussion in Thompson 1971: Oliker 2000) the idea that their jobs should provide a livelihood that, above all, allows them to take care of the people they love. When work does not meet this lowest bar, mothers choose children over jobs and by doing so they challenge contemporary US economic norms of proper work behavior.

The article shares the critique of social and work policy that insists women will adhere to the “rational economic man” model, if only pushed or punished sufficiently, and demonstrate a proper cost-benefit analysis that treats children as employment constraints (see a full discussion of “gendered moral rationalities” in Duncan and Edwards 1997; and a related discussion of the “ideal worker” Williams 2000).

In this research however, across low-wage job types, geography and demographic diversity, similar problems and some common strategies emerged that reflect a critical view of society driven by “rational” economic customs. Working in retail, fast foods, hospitality, cleaning, office, and carework services, mothers described ongoing conflicts between children’s care and safety and jobs that “don’t give rat’s butt about family” as Anne a home health aide in Denver put it. I argue that in wage-poor America many parents reject a dominant ideology that demands primary devotion to work but they do so quietly, developing alternative work norms that reflect the imperative of motherwork (Collins 1994), or valuing care and protection of children above all else.

Livelihood strategies under welfare

Over the decades mothers raising families relying on welfare were constantly seeking ways to supplement an income that did not cover basic bills, even when combined with other public programs such as food stamps, housing subsidies and Medicaid. Given the nationally varied but consistently low monthly payment that welfare provided, the majority of parents had to rely on supplemental resources from partners, kith and kin and from informal work, trading goods and services and maximizing public benefits, in some cases bending rules of eligibility to do so (Edin and Lein 1997).

Survival strategies that rely on kin support or reciprocity were generally treated as a socially acceptable way for poor mothers to supplement welfare or wages (Stack 1974; Burton and Stack 1993; Dodson and Dickert 2004). These kin practices conform to a dominant ideology that calls for private solutions (often in the form of women’s “free” care) for the problems associated with insufficient income and divests the public of responsibility for human damage associated with family poverty. In fact, low-income parents always worked hard to build safe social environments for their children often in economically and socially pressed neighborhoods (Stack 1974; Rosier and Corsaro 1993; Jarrett and Jefferson 2003). But kin or social networks as solutions to welfare poverty were just one part of the constellation of survival strategies; other approaches were more likely to bend or break welfare regulations.

Many mothers increased their insufficient welfare income through combining it with wages or working “off the books” to avoid the loss of benefits that came with working in the formal labor market (Edin and Lein 1997). Cash gifts from family members, former partners and children’s fathers were also used as income supplementation (Edin and Lein 1997; Dodson 1998). In some cases shared resources came in the form of access to public benefits are shared with kith and kin support. For example, in ethnographic research in a Latino neighborhood in Boston, several mothers spoke of using their family Medicaid cards for sick children in undocumented families who, as “illegals,” had no access to health care (Dodson 2000). In the same research two other women spoke of distributing food from food pantries to which they gained access to through a school-based program. The program coordinated large deliveries to a local grammar school but the two women would stop on the way to the school to “share the harvest” with hungry but ineligible families (Dodson 2000). In what could be viewed as “cheating” or from another angle, an entrepreneurial spirit to build family security, millions of parents patched, squeezed and bartered for economic survival.

Beyond various ruses and hidden habits to make ends meet, an outstanding resource that these families did have was parental presence. Welfare allowed mothers and other mothers to be there to coordinate resource-creating activities and most important to monitor, interact with and care for children (Troester 1984; Naples 1992). While largely ignored in policy debates, losing daily motherwork was the overwhelming loss with welfare reform (Oliker 2000; Roberts 1999).

A mandate to choose the market over children

Qualitative researchers have found that parents, trying to manage the loss of welfare support, dwell on children’s safety and daily care (Hayes 2003; Dodson and Bravo 2005; White 1999; Scott, et al 2001). Many women regarded motherhood and efforts to raise children as their mission and the mainstay of their identity. “My kids are my life” (page 207: Hayes 2003) is a common expression among poor mothers and “my children come first” (Scott et al 2001). But by the mid 1990s, hundreds of thousands of parents realized that they were going to have to give up their role as daily caregiver to their children and join the millions of other working poor parents facing the complicated juggle to provide safe care for children without the resources to buy it. At a time when social conservatives criticized the fulltime employment of middle-class mothers, welfare reform represented a “ban on poor motherhood” and was enjoying bipartisan support (Roberts 1999).

Mothers using welfare faced a complicated set of tasks to meet the new social mandate and go “from welfare to work” or from performing daily motherwork to performing in the low-wage labor market. Beyond changing most of the activities of daily life and trying to find care for children, this transition demanded an adherence to policy that was tantamount to “forswearing caregiving practices” (page 177: Oliker 2000). Economically cornered, mothers were supposed to leave their children even in a context of inadequate and low quality childcare or with other hard-pressed kin (Boushey 2003; Dodson 1999; Mezey et al 2002; Bromer and Henly 2005). Obedience to the terms of welfare reform demanded the repudiation of the motherwork that has upheld low-income communities for centuries, particularly communities of color (Jones 1995; Collins 2000). But, as this paper reveals, many parents refuse to collude with a market-driven society that does not ensure the safety of their children.

Research Methods and Respondents

The qualitative data used in this paper come from research undertaken between 1998 and 2003 and included three studies called the Welfare in Transition study, the Across the Boundaries study and the Lower-Income Work and Family Initiative. All three of these studies focused on the daily lives of low-wage parents and used mixed (quantitative and qualitative) methods. While the studies varied in other ways (and included other groups of informants) each included open-ended interviews with more than three hundred low-wage mothers (pooling the three samples). In this article I confine my discussion to the qualitative findings from individual interviews and interpretive focus groups with low-wage mothers. I note that the methodological approach that I use is collaborative and participatory and thus seeks “narrative authority” from those who were speaking from life experience (Beverly 2005; Bishop 2005)

Recruitment

Respondents in all three studies were enlisted to participate in the study through contacting local networks in low-income communities in Boston and surrounding towns and in the cities of Milwaukee, and Denver. The recruitment methods included posting signs and making fliers available, word of mouth, and through announcements made by numerous staff people, teachers, childcare workers, etc. in community-based organizations. Access to community networks was derived largely from investigators’ volunteer activities in local agencies, welfare-to-work programs, schools, churches and other social networks. The interviewees were paid for their time ($20 - $40) and when possible, meals and childcare were provided for focus group gatherings.

Composition of respondent samples

Respondents included mothers who were making less than 200 percent of the national poverty threshold (but most were making less than 150%) and were currently working. The large majority had used various kinds of public assistance over the previous five years. The combined sample was composed of African American 48%, white 24%, and Latino 21% respondents with 7% who identified themselves as Asian, African, Caribbean, Native American and biracial/cultural. Respondents ranged in age from 18 to 48 years; most mothers reported having two or three children in their care.

Fieldwork: Interviews and focus groups

Interviews and focus groups took place in community locations such as schools, community centers, workplaces, labor organizations, and in respondents’ homes, largely based on respondent preference. In each case, questionnaires were developed and testing and then revised. The interview and focus group questions included specific queries and then an invitation for open-ended responses, discussions and reflections. Overall the approach to the qualitative data gathering was a constructivist, cooperative inquiry, seeking respondent collaboration in the fieldwork and refining the inquiry through continuously seeking respondents’ meanings, and posing new questions, through insight gained (Charmaz, 2000; Heron & Reason, 1997). The studies included observation, the gathering of descriptive statistics, interviews that included gathering life histories (Tierny, 1998).

Data management and interpretive strategies

Methods used to manage qualitative data were largely similar across these three studies, with some variations. Interviews and focus groups (approximately two hours in length) were tape-recorded, transcribed using an inductive thematic in vivo coding approach and refining the coding through repeated analysis (Charmaz 2000). One study also included the use of qualitative computer software (ATLAS.ti).

An analytical strategy was used at the interpretive stage of two of the three studies toward cooperative knowledge building with low-income women (Madriz, 2000). Called interpretive focus groups, this is an analytic approach that brings together groups of people whose daily lives are similar to those of the study respondents – in this case low-wage mothers -- to co-interpret the data already gathered, with researchers (Dodson and Schmalzbauer, 2005).