Producing Disunity: The Constraints and Incitements of Welfare Work

Abstract

A 17-month ethnography of a welfare office & two welfare rights groups during 1989/90 in MI explores the blocks to solidarity & alliance between welfare workers & welfare recipients despite common life experiences & similar class positions. For women, both roles are devalued. Bureaucratic control of welfare workers limits their ability to help welfare recipients, & they are forced to use neoliberal ideology in selecting the poor considered worthy of assistance. The poor women who are rejected view the workers as the source of the problem & label them as arbitrary & unfair. The disunity & hostility in worker-recipient relations echoes the current ethos of welfare in the US. L. A. Hoffman