Welfare to work requirements are racist and inhumane – further centuries of racial misdiagnosis

But history demonstrates that work requirements are inherently “racially tinged.” To this day we see that when work requirements are enacted, they are designed to harm Black people most. In the spring of 2018, Michigan’s state legislature unveiled a Medicaid work requirement plan that seemed calculated to harm Black people.141 Under the plan, whether people were subject to the strict work requirement depended on the county in which they lived. People living in counties with high unemployment were exempt from the work requirement—an acknowledgement that work in such areas is likely to be genuinely hard to find. But in practice, this would have meant that people living in largely-White rural counties would be exempt, while people living in diverse urban counties, where low overall unemployment is driven by skilled and salaried workers who are overwhelmingly White, would be subject to the full work requirement. Under the plan, majority African American cities like Detroit and Flint would not have been exempt from the policy despite their high unemployment because they sit in counties where the unemployment is relatively low. Michigan’s work requirement legislation was eventually revised to avoid the appearance of racism, by replacing the county exemption with an individual “grace period” that allows people to not meet the work requirement for up to three months a year and maintain their health coverage.142 Ultimately, however, no work requirement can expunge the reality of racism. This racism has hurt all families by fueling policies that fail them and inhibiting the development of policies that make sense for their lives.143 Most families who can work in formal employment do, but they face a deeply inequitable labor market. Wages at the bottom end of the income distribution have stagnated for decades.144 Eleven years into an economic expansion, wages are finally growing for many low-paid workers, but wage growth for Black workers has lagged behind White and Hispanic workers, and federal inaction in raising the minimum wage has meant that wage growth is geographically uneven, as wages have grown more for workers in states and localities that have raised their minimum wages.145 Low-paid workers are also less likely to have access to paid sick leave or other forms of paid leave, despite being least likely to be able to afford taking unpaid leave, and they experience significant employment volatility, unable to predict the number of hours they will work from day to day and week to week, or whether they will have a job at all.146 As a result, balancing formal employment and caregiving responsibilities is difficult to impossible. Even in a strong economy, moreover, many people have difficulty getting and keeping jobs.147 Persistent and well-documented employment discrimination means that people of color are less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired.148 Limited private and public investment in education and training denies many people the opportunity to develop skills that can lead to higher pay and more stable employment. To the extent that cash assistance, food assistance, and free or low-cost health insurance is available to families today, these programs often work to subsidize the wages and benefits of working families, and substitute for the unemployment insurance, workers compensation, and paid sick and parental leave that their jobs fail to offer.149 Meanwhile, national policy does little to support families in their caregiving work. The United States is the only high-income country that does not have a national policy of paid parental or family leave.150 The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) protects some workers’ right to jobprotected unpaid leave to care for themselves or a loved one who is ill, or bond with new child, but only if they have worked a minimum number of hours for a covered employer for a year or more.151 National surveys find that many parents do not take unpaid leave, even if they are covered by the FMLA, because they cannot afford it—indeed some researchers have concluded that “unpaid maternity leave may actually increase disparities because it only benefits those mothers who can afford to take it.”152