Welfare: the 18th Brumaire of Iain Duncan Smith
"In copying the failed US 90s model for getting people off welfare into work, IDS is playing out his own farcical repetition of tragedy.
It is the 18th Brumaire. On 9 November, 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the French Directorate, replacing it with the French Consulate, signalling the end of the French revolution and the beginnings of French imperialism. Karl Marx, writing of the coup engineered by Napoleon's nephew, Louis Bonaparte, 52 years later, was full of scorn: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Marx then writes about the conditions that enabled the coup: a series of compromises that weakened political parties and progressively marginalised the working class and its interests, and subordinated them to the craven, but divided, bourgeois and petty bourgeois of France.
On this 18th Brumaire, a different kind of farcical repetition of tragedy is playing itself out in Britain. I know the tragedy because it unfolded in the United States 15 years ago: it went by the name of "welfare reform". The raft of proposals put on the table by the government for reforming welfare in the United Kingdom is so close to those that unfolded in New York City in the mid-1990s that reading about them feels like the repetition of a bad meal. The lack of energetic opposition from the Labour party compounds the feeling of gastric reflux.
Shortly after taking back Congress in the mid-term elections of 1994, the Republicans moved to cut funding to the Legal Services Corporation whose offices often represented poor people in legal proceedings against the government. Legal Services lawyers had been crucial, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in establishing basic rights of benefit recipients against loss of benefits without cause, and against intrusions on their privacy by fraud-suspicious government agents. As a condition of keeping some funding, Congress barred Legal Services from taking on class-action lawsuits against the government. Similarly, the Labour government cut funding for law centres, and more cuts are threatened.
New York City – a centre of welfare reform under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani even before the federal welfare reform law passed with Bill Clinton's signature in 1996 – bears all of the hallmarks of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms. In New York City's "Work Experience Program" or "WEP", welfare recipients were compelled to work for their benefits with their hours set by dividing the total value of their cash and housing allowances by the minimum wage. Because financial strain had earlier forced New York City to reduce its staff by more than 16,000 positions (many in lower-skilled clerical and maintenance work), the new WEP workforce – 38,000 strong at its height in 1999 – supplanted the work of relatively well-paid public employees. They would not be hired back. And, indeed, there were quite a few cases of former public employees compelled to "work off" their benefits in the same work they had done earlier.
Giuliani was also aggressive about being sure that anyone who could work, did work. New York hired Health Solutions Services, a private firm like Atos in Britain, whose doctors' judgments about the fitness of many benefits recipients to work were at odds with those of other medical professionals, and whose judgments were often successfully challenged. In other words, the medical screening process was baldly a way to harass people off the dole, rather than to meet their actual needs.
The Giuliani administration, with the help of a new welfare commissioner, Jason Turner, who had, like Duncan Smith, thought long and hard about how to help the poor break the cycle of dependency, also curtailed access to benefits. By making the application process more onerous, cuts were made at the front end as well. A successful lawsuit changed some of these practices because they illegally denied applicants access to benefits that were not governed by state and local government.
Once on the job, however, workfare workers rarely got training and rarely got access to available jobs. In a sleight of hand, the Giuliani administration claimed that anyone who had got off the benefits rolls (kicked off or otherwise) had presumably found work. So they claimed enormous success for their workfare program, as the rolls fell to half their levels before the reforms began. Even at worksites, there were problems. Regular public-sector workers resented WEP workers' presence and sometimes mistreated them, while public-sector managers found it difficult to assign, supervise and keep track of WEP workers' schedules.
It is, perhaps, instructive, that WEP no longer exists in the ways that it did under Giuliani. And it isn't because his successor, Michael Bloomberg, is a leftwing bleeding heart. Rather, WEP created all manner of administrative burdens; increased the city's exposure to lawsuits for sexual and racial harassment, illegal displacement of public workers, and a host of other violations; and did nothing to alleviate poverty. To the extent that people who had been on benefit found work in this period, they did so because the local job market was expanding (albeit with worse jobs than before) relative to its pre-reform recessionary lows. No longstanding study of intergenerational cycles of poverty by Duncan Smith will create jobs. No parenting classes will, either.
The failures of welfare reform – still viewed as a great success by some – are increasingly well known, even if public discussion of these flaws is muted. The only way a hard workfare program like the one in New York "worked" was through public relations and half-truths (and not-even-half truths!). It reduced benefit levels. But it did little else. Its proponents, however, fled its consequences into thinktanks and consultancies. This group have apparently convinced the British counterparts of the Republican class of 1994 that American-style welfare reform is a good idea. As with welfare reform in the US, we may not see the worst predictions of the left come to pass. But we will see a deterioration in the conditions of work for "regular" workers as workfare becomes generalised and part of the everyday political fabric; and we will see private trusts and charities drawn into support programs they find repellent because they want to be charitable. We will see a weakening of a well-meaning opposition, and a sea-change in the politics of welfare, even with no improvement in joblessness and poverty. If it weren't so tragic, it might be farce."
