AND CONTENTION IN NEW YORK CITY: THE POTENTIAL OF FLEXIBLE IDENTITIES IN ORGANIZING OPPOSITION TO WORKFARE*

WORK, WORKFARE,

JOHN Department

of

KRINSKY Columbia

Sociology,

University

Abstract In the past two years, workfare has expanded and changed in New York City. From a program requiring 10,000 welfare recipients to work, look for work, or enter education or training programs, it has mushroomed into a program requiring nearly 40,000 recipients at any one time to work for City agencies or contracted nonprofits. The program is set to expand further. Workfare workers represent a new, flexible public workforce whose presence undermines pay and labor standards throughout the municipal employment sector. Workfare workers enjoy little protection, and do not have the right to collectively bargain. This paper examines recent efforts by unions and community organizations to organize workfare workers. Situating the discussion in recent developments in economic sociology, class analysis, and social movement research, it draws on interviews with activists to ask how the uncertainty of flexibility can become an asset to organizing, rather than just an obstacle to it.

Introduction

community organizer in New York City spoke organize workfare workers in the city’s &dquo;Work Experience Program&dquo; (WEP): In a recent interview, of his group’s efforts to

a

All of us came to the conclusion that WEP organizing was very difficult, that it was substantially harder than we’d originally expected-for a lot of reasons: primarily that WEP workers aren’t really workers, and they know it, and they don’t want to put energy into improving their conditions on the job, because it ain’t a job. They don’t want to be there ... It’s important to organize them as workers, that’s the strength, but, basically, the problem is that the lowest-paid service worker wants to organize to get better conditions and get better pay. The WEP worker doesn’t want to organize around job issues because they want a real job, and that’s the fundamental thing; they want a real job and they know that WEP is not a job. So the key political strength of WEP organizing is as workers, but at the same time it’s a strength, it’s a drawback, because WEP workers don’t identify themselves-they don’t have firm identity of themselves as

278 workers. And so it’s a very long process, to get them to identify themselves as workers, and then to organize them as workers. It adds a couple more steps to the organizing.

If we examine this statement carefully, we may tease out several strands of inquiry into organizing workfare workers. We may see that what &dquo;worker&dquo; means is at stake in the organizing, as is the issue of what constitutes a &dquo;job.&dquo; We may also see that an organizer unschooled in contemporary debates in cultural sociology understands identity to be both performed and contested. Finally, we may note the appearance of contradiction in attempts to organize workfare workers as workers when they &dquo;aren’t really workers&dquo; and their ‘ jobs ain’t jobs.&dquo; These issues will guide the agenda of this paper. After a brief outline of workfare’s recent expansion in New York City, we will turn our attention to several questions that derive from these issues, namely: How has workfare challenged the distinctions between work and welfare? How have advocates for the poor and welfare and labor activists negotiated these newly muddied definitional waters? What opportunities and drawbacks are created by the new strategies of representing workfare workers that have emerged in the last several years? What can we learn about identity formation in the context of popular contention from the struggle against workfare in New York City? Drawing on a range of literatures from the study of political unrest and class-formation to the study of the institutional consequences of economic transitions, I will argue that workfare’s expansion in New York City has created a super-flexible labor force with little power and to which all, if not more, of the stigma attached to non-working welfare recipients accrues. Yet, in the face of challenges to this subordinate position, both the City government and anti-workfare activists match the flexibility in workfare workers’ deployment with flexibility in defining workfare’s outlines, purposes, and personnel. Such flexibility in characterizing and accounting for workfare allows both sides to maintain definitional contradictions, which, if resolved in favor of one or another &dquo;pole&dquo; of work or welfare, probably entail as many costs as benefits. I argue further that identities-in-contention are shaped powerfully by institutional and politicaleconomic pressures, and that when these are characterized by flexibility, the most likely counter-hegemonic strategies involve flexibility, too. in New York

City Workfare is the practice of requiring recipients of public aid to work for their benefits. Though this has long been an established practice of Workfare

279

(Rose 1995; Piven and Cloward 1993), current workfare differ from the workhouse and other methods of compelling programs work along several axes. In the first place, current workfare programs do not involve physical constraint: the walls of the workhouse no longer confine, and the corresponding level of behavioral policing is considerably reduced. This must be paid for, as it were, by the more &dquo;voluntary&dquo; overtones of current welfare provisions, which, lacking confinement mechanisms to reduce public vagrancy, must be actively applied for by prospective recipients, who must, in turn, submit to means-testing and often humiliating scrutiny (Piven and Cloward 1993; Sexton 1997). Another difference between current workfare programs and previous work-relief schemes-whether the confining and stigmatizing workhouse, or the voluntary and relatively unstigmatized New Deal work relief programs-is that it compels mothers to work outside of the home. As the gendered divisions and exclusions in the non-domestic workforce have reduced over the past century, and as public perceptions of welfare that have emphasized its prevalence in urban communities of color has grown, programs requiring poor women to work in jobs outside of the home in return for monthly cash and non-cash assistance have begun to appear in conjunction with appeals to &dquo;break the cycle of dependency&dquo; on welfare that has, according to some observers, characterized the lives and life-chances of the &dquo;new urban poor&dquo; or the &dquo;urban underclass.&dquo;’ The calls for welfare reform and workfare have also emphasized the role of welfare mothers as victimizers of the taxpayers, as opposed either to that of women being denied the dignity of having their work as mothers supported and recognized as valuable (see, e.g. Mink 1998), or that of women disproportionately disadvantaged in a rapidly casualizing labor market (see Dietrich, et al. 1998). Such emphases encourage the view of workfare workers as compensating the public for benefits received, rather than as being entitled to fair payment for a day’s work. Yet, beyond these differences, workfare in New York City today is also significantly different from workfare in New York just several years ago. While workfare programs that have been called &dquo;workfare&dquo; have been part of federal and local welfare programs since the Nixon administration, they have, until recently, emphasized the value of training and education, and &dquo;job-readiness,&dquo; rather than the large-scale performance of work itself (Rose 1995). While by no means benign-they have often, and still do, add hardship to the lives of welfare recipients by curtailing unofficial opportunities for extra earnings, and by creating new sets of administrative obstacles and sanctions that have made them an effective tool for cutting the relief rolls-workfare programs until recently have not welfare

states

280 threatened to upset seriously labor markets in cities as large as New York. This changed in late 1995, with the Giuliani administration’s expansion of the Work Experience Program (WEP). The expansion took WEP from being a program requiring under 10,000 welfare recipients to work, actively look for work, or to be enrolled in education and training programs, to being one requiring nearly 40,000 welfare recipients to perform work for City agencies and contracted nonprofit agencies. At first, only recipients of New York’s program for single adults2 were required to work in exchange for their benefits. Since 1996, mothers of children have been compelled into workfare assignments as well, causing serious obstacles for them in a city with acutely inadequate childcare provision (see Swarns 1998). Over the past several years, too, the City has reduced its payroll considerably, with staff reductions (none technically lay-offs) in the last three years totaling nearly 20,000. While the administration rejects suggestions that workfare workers are doing the &dquo;same jobs&dquo; as are regular municipal employees-an admission that would require the City to hire workfare workers into regular, unionized jobs-several officials have suggested that the labor provided by workfare workers have &dquo;saved&dquo; agencies hurt by cuts, and have actually increased services in some, in spite of large reductions in regularly employed, full-time staff (Tilly 1996; Ulterino 1997; Uchitelle 1997; Mayor’s Management Report 1998; Steier 1999). WEP does not, in itself, entail a change in the benefits package available to welfare recipients. They remain at levels far below the poverty line (Krueger, et al. 1997). But workfare assignments take time that could otherwise be spent in informal work, education, or training (Edin and Lein 1997). Since WEP’s expansion, over 10,000 welfare-receiving students in the City University system have dropped their studies (Kornbluh 1997). Workfare hours are calculated by dividing the total grant levels, including food stamps, and excluding Medicaid and federal housing subsidies by the minimum wage.’ Average requirements for work are roughly 20 hours per week, though in some cases, workfare workers are required to work nearly full time. Workfare workers are compensated below the minimum wage, because they cannot claim Earned Income Tax Credit benefits, and they cannot receive food stamps beyond the value figured into their work requirements (Krueger, et al. 1997; National Employment Law Project 1999). WEP workers are also not entitled to vacations, sick days, or holidays. They are often exposed to hazardous conditions without training and to degrading working circumstances (see testimony in Brukhman v. Giuliani,

281

Capers v. Giuliani). They may be moved from one w~orksite to another without their consent, they have no established right to collective bargaining, and they do not have a grievance procedure. Though there is an administrative fair hearings process to which they may appeal in case they are cut off from benefits due to conflicts with supervisors, or to rules infractions, the process may take months to activate, during which they are not due any assistance. At any given time over the past two years, nearly 40 percent of the workfare caseload was &dquo;sanctioned,&dquo; or had temporarily lost their benefits (Krueger, et al. 1997; Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies 1997). Over the same period, workfare workers won nearly 90 percent of fair hearings, though far fewer than the total number of sanctioned workers actually applied for the proceedings or showed up to them once granted. Since the expansion of WEP, well over 100,000 welfare recipients have cycled through between 21,000 and 38,000 WEP assignments, and the total welfare rolls in New York City have declined by over 400,000 even as unemployment has stayed close to ten percent (DeParle 1998). Flexible Work Contracts and Worker

Identity

With the displacement effects of workfare on the municipal workwith the impression of ever-greater numbers and categories of welfare recipients into workfare, we can reasonably well speak of a large-scale transition in welfare practices as being underway. Transitions, almost by definition, involve the redefinition of boundaries. Rarely are these processes of redefinition neat. Such is the case with workfare, in which the more general transition to more casualized labor contracts in the economy as a whole is compounded with transitions in welfare provision. Both, as it turns out, involve struggles to classify workers. Both, moreover, use the model of the &dquo;worker&dquo; as a well-compensated, full-time, male-breadwinner (see Mink 1998; Dietrich, et al. 1998). Yet the struggle over new classifications of workers, and over the rights they enjoy and the obligations they require of employers, has led to a great deal of uncertainty, uncertainty, which, moreover, accrues primarily to the benefit of employers. Nevertheless, the blurring of boundaries around what a &dquo;worker&dquo; is and what a &dquo;welfare recipient&dquo; is under workfare has resulted in some interesting challenges to the emerging workfare

force, and

regime. Both macro-economic changes that have effected New York and other large, industrial cities over the past several decades, and recent welfare reform efforts have created a climate of uncertainty, to be sure. In the

282 first case, the decline of blue-collar employment and the rise of a new service economy catering to an increasingly aggressive finance, insurance, and real-estate sector has led to chronic fiscal crisis and structurally imbalanced municipal budgets since the mid-1970s. This has led, in turn, to an uneven, but steady decline in many municipal services, and in times of particularly acute crisis, to policies of &dquo;planned shrinkage&dquo; in which whole areas of the city have been nearly written off with respect to housing preservation, education, and basic city services (see e.g., Mollenkopf 1992). In the second case, recent efforts at reforming the welfare system by reducing caseloads and benefit levels have cast into doubt many issues, including the survivability of highly welfaredependent neighborhoods, the availability of adequate childcare, the stability of wages, and the role of government in providing a safety net in the first place. Taken together, these changes have promoted what some observers have called the transition from the &dquo;Keynesian Welfare State&dquo; (KWS) to a &dquo;Schumpeterian Workfare State&dquo; (SWS). In the latter arrangement, local, rather than national, administration of welfare programs, combined with increasing privatization, will &dquo;hollow out&dquo; the national state for many of its former purposes, and at the same time, make localities compete for business in the global marketplace (Jessop 1994; Peck 1996; Peck forthcoming; see also Sassen 1991; Knox 1995). Correspondingly, the justificatory principles of the KWS, based on full employment and supported consumption, give way to more &dquo;flexible&dquo; principles of welfare provision, emphasizing non-specific job skills, neo-entrepreneurialism, and value extraction from the provision of benefits (Jessop 1994; Peck 1996; Jenkins and Leicht 1997).’ In this context, the boundaries between work and welfare are blurred. Public statements by the City, as well as by workfare worker advocates and by journalists hedge about whether workfare is a job or not, and whether workfare workers are workers or not. In addition to the statement by the organizer with which this paper began, we may point to several other examples. The City does not consider WEP assignments to be jobs, as indicated by the testimony of one administrator in a recent court challenge to the program: purpose of this program is to provide a supportive environin which adults can gain work experience and immediately apply the skills they need to become job ready, look for and find work, and keep a job ... Accordingly, all WEP assignments are designed to enable an increasingly large population of participants to achieve economic inde-

The

ment

primary

283

pendence through permanent full-time employment. In order to accomplish this goal with a limited amount of resources, City defendants determined that several general skills are most important for prospective full-time employers. Therefore, rather than focusing on specialized job skills and/ or training, assignments for participants are designed to foster those work habits necessary to get, and keep, a full-time job (Diamond Affidavit, Brukhman v. Giuliani, at para. 2). In this account, WEP is a training program for welfare recipients that counters the depletion of cultural and social capital available to them in the workplace due to long-term unemployment (see e.g., Wilson 1996). Like the organizer’s account of WEP, WEP is not in itself a job. Unlike the organizer’s account, the City’s statement emphasizes the therapeutic intent of WEP,5 while one of the bases of opposition to WEP is that it does not deliver on the promised increase in employability, and does nothing to create opportunities in which such increases would be salient. In another example of the blurring of boundaries, a New York Times editorial in the wake of the 1997 AFL-CIO convention, urged against the unionization of workfare workers on the grounds that workfare placements were not really jobs. While they acknowledged that community groups and unions had correctly pointed out inhumane work conditions for workfare workers, they objected that it would be a mistake to organize welfare workers into a union, because what they are doing does not amount to a job. Instead, in return for receiving welfare, they must show up at a worksite, follow instructions and carry out tasks that the city might not even be subsidizing if it did not have to put welfare recipients to work (February 21, 1997: A34).

Here, the distinction between

what is and is not a job apparently whether workfare workers are carrying out necessary tasks hinges for the City, for the description of what happens at the worksite does not differ substantially from any commonsense description of what happens in a job. Yet, as noted above, it is clear that workfare workers are performing tasks that would otherwise be performed by regular municipal employees. Moreover, welfare law actually mandates workfare assignments to be useful work, while at the same time, discouraging the replacement of full-time employees with such labor. Organizationally, too, the lines between what is and is not a job under workfare become blurred as well. If we look at the work contractwhat is required of workfare workers in return for their payment-we may see a flexible combination of aspects of several types of work: prison labor, informal day-labor market labor, slave labor, sweatshop labor, on

284

on-the-job training, poorhouse labor, and more protected municipal employment. If we consider the organizational outlines of each type of labor, the presence, absence, and depth of internal labor markets, the level of managerial control over the labor process, and the potential for short- and long-term monetization of labor outputs, we may recognize many elements that combine to make the workfare contract distinct from each of the others, while preserving enough of each of the others to make comparisons made with them in competing actors’ accounts plausible.’ Indeed, workfare jobs have been compared to all of these by proponents and opponents of the program. What is notable, however, is the general agreement that workfare assignments are not &dquo;real jobs.&dquo; But the accounts of why they are not real jobs differs. For the City, they are not real jobs because they do not provide some idealized economic independence, and because if they were real jobs, they would have to be compensated as such. For advocates, they are not real jobs because they are not compensated as such; they do not provide economic independence from the state; there is no room for growth; the supervision is often arbitrary and strict, allowing little or no autonomy to workers; and because there are no effective

grievance procedures. On the other hand, the determination of whether workfare workers workers or not does not strictly depend on their work contract being classified as a &dquo;job.&dquo; Indeed, workfare worker activists insist that part of the problem with workfare is that it is work without real jobs, sub-ejecting workers to super-exploitative relations of production (see Diller 1998; Dietrich, et al. 1998). The same organizer quoted above, in the same interview (!), emphasized this point: are

the strength of WEP is that it takes welfare recipients and turns them into workers. And that can’t be forgotten. Suddenly, we’ve got people with the same interests, that could potentially we could ally with labor. Everything that we do, has to be focused on helping to forward that potential alliance.

Absolutely everything.’7 The apparent contradiction between the organizer’s statements that WEP &dquo;turns welfare recipients into workers&dquo; and that &dquo;WEP workers aren’t really workers&dquo; turns into a recognition of ambiguity if we take a &dquo;worker&dquo; identity to be a rhetorical device rather than a description of an ontological reality. Following Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of class, we may note that &dquo;Class&dquo; is not, after all, an inalienable description of a human reality. Class consciousness on the descriptive level is itself a strategic and artificial

285 awareness which, on the transfonnative level, seeks to destroy the mechanics which come to construct the outlines of the very class of which a collective consciousness has been situationally developed (1987: 205).

rallying

Hence, the organizer’s

tify&dquo;

as

concern

with

getting workfare

workers

to

&dquo;iden-

workers.

In two recent articles on economic changes in Eastern Europe, David Stark suggests that we consider the transitions not as typical ones, in which those economies are moving from pure socialism to pure capitalism, but as &dquo;recombinant&dquo; ones (1996a, 1996b). Stark describes &dquo;recombinant property&dquo; in East European capitalist expansion, as new property forms that &dquo;blur 1) the boundaries of public and private, 2) the organizational boundaries of enterprises, and 3) the boundedness of justificatory principles.&dquo; He goes on: &dquo;Recombinant property is a form of organizational hedging, or portfolio management, in which actors respond to uncertainty in the organizational environment by diversifying their assets, redefining and recombining resources. It is an attempt to hold resources that can be justified or assessed by more than one standard of evaluation&dquo; (1996a:7). We may draw on this schema to consider the &dquo;recombinant properties&dquo; of workfare in New York. Yet, as I indicate below, the opposition to workfare in New York, while relying primarily on a discursive strategy of establishing the &dquo;workerness&dquo; of workfare workers, also relies on the flexibility provided by the recombinant properties of the transition to a workfare state, by drawing on multiple accounts to justify opposition to workfare, and to give definition to work in the context of this transition. In order to get a better picture of how the opposition to workfare has drawn on the recombinant properties of workfare work, and how it has been shaped by them, we must account for how this opposition is taking shape organizationally, and for the sources upon which it draws for its organizational and discursive actions. Only then can we get an understanding of how meanings of work and worker identities are reshaped and renegotiated in the course of contention over workfare. As David Stark wrote in an early paper: A relational analysis which focuses on the interaction of organizations (rather than on the attributes of individuals or the global properties of modes of production) is not incompatible with a class analysis, but, in fact, is inseparable from it. Once the problematic of class-in-itself and foritself is set aside, it becomes apparent that a class never exists as a single collectivity-in-struggle but as a multiplicity of collectivities-in-strugg1e. The

286 of the forms and dynamics of these groups is the task of class analyThe activities of any participating group cannot be understood in isolation, but only in their relation to the total field of competing and

study sis

...

coexisting organizations (1980: 98). The

Emerging

Field

of Workfare

Contention and Narrative

Identity

From the beginning, workfare and welfare reform were challenged by an extensive network of advocacy groups and service providers that come together in various overlapping coalitions in New York. These groups are diverse, with some being &dquo;white shoe&dquo; charities with histories extending back to the nineteenth century, and endowments in the millions of dollars. Others are &dquo;shoe-string&dquo; operations that formed in the 1980s in response to the homelessness crisis. Still others formed out of feminist social workers’ concern with family violence and with the economic dependence on men that kept many women in abusive situations. Some provide food to the hungry; others, provide health care to the sick; others maintain a policy research capacity. All of these groups opposed welfare cuts, and, in their capacities as contracted providers of welfare state services, argued that welfare cuts and workfare would be disruptive to the lives of their clients and to their organizations as well.8 Many senior staff members of these organizations were involved in some way with welfare rights struggles in the past.’ The first challenges to workfare made on the basis of the &dquo;workness&dquo; of workfare were made by three organizations that pooled resources to form a loose coalition called WEP Workers Together! (WWT!). The three organizations, the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC), the Urban Justice Center (UJC), and Community Voices Heard (CVH), all had different backgrounds and histories, but were brought together in the context of the greater field of charitable organizations in the city. These organizations all had one thing in common: organizing their client-constituents into their organizations. FAC is a Brooklyn-based community development corporation with roots in tenant organizing and neighborhood redevelopment in response to landlord disinvestment from, and abandonment of, low-income housing in the 1970s. UJC was founded in 1983 as the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, and reorganized in 1996 to address a range of poverty-related issues. In its reorganization, it included an organizing project, which, following the advice of graduates from a organizer’s training program it ran for poor people, concentrated its efforts in organizing against workfare. CVH spun itself off of an existing statewide welfare rights advocacy organization in 1996,

287 in order to concentrate on building a membership organization of poor people and welfare recipients. In mid-1996, organizers from the three organizations began WWT!’s drive to organize workfare workers. The original idea was to organize worksite committees which could be mobilized to demonstrate together for improvements at the worksites. The hope then was that these worksite committees’ visibility would prompt a union to begin to organize workfare workers into their unions. Soon, however, it became clear that worksite organizing was extremely difflcult-both for the reasons that the organizer quoted above-and because of the flexibility and uncertainty that attend the workfare workforce. A worksite committee could be organized one month, and the workfare workers could turnover completely the next, due to transfers, sanctions, and to the regular turnover in the rolls. By the middle of 1997, WWT!’s constituent groups were pursuing three different kinds of organizing. FAC was still building worksite committees, CVH was building its own membership and joining in

WWT! actions through community-based meetings, and UJC had largely abandoned workfare worker organizing in favor of building an alliance of nonprofit and religious opposition to the expansion of workfare through a public refusal to become WEP worksites. WWT!’s organizing catalyzed a broader field of groups to organize workfare workers. By late 1997, two other groups had begun to organize at worksites. These were Workfairness, an organization of workfare workers and former workfare workers who came together under the auspices of the International Action Center, a leftist group that has organized several large demonstrations since the Gulf War, and ACORN. ACORN was formed in 1970 as part of the welfare rights organizing campaign in Little Rock, Arkansas. Conceived as an organization that could build community support for welfare rights, it adopted a neoAlinskyist strategy for organizing that emphasized confrontational, directaction tactics, and the winning of short-term victories in carefully planned campaigns that could both increase the organization’s membership and visibility, and result in tangible improvements for the community (see Delgado 1986; Stein 1986; Fisher 1987). ACORN experienced a spurt of growth in the 1980s, as it organized around low-income housing through highly visible squatting campaigns in abandoned neighborhoods. ACORN came to New York in the mid-1980s with such a campaign (see Borgos 1986; Delgado 1986 Shoshkes 1994). Since then, ACORN has built community campaigns for fair lending and educational reform, and has, elsewhere, worked closely with service employees’ unions (especially the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU); see Voss and

288 Sherman 1997). Like the I%T