Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century

On the High Wire:
How the Working Poor Juggle Job and Family Responsibilities

The Current Policy Environment

The advent of welfare reform clearly has important implications for the working poor, even though they were not the intended target of this policy shift. The shift to TANF has removed an important source of childcare labor - women on welfare - from the equation. They are being pushed into the labor market themselves and are therefore not available to provide the kind of babysitting service - especially in the home as part of a tithe - as they once were. At the same time, the push to enter the labor market has increased the demand for childcare in urban areas that have long experienced shortfalls. In New York City, the official shortfall in city sponsored childcare was 35,000 slots prior to the onset of welfare reform. Some states have taken advantage of sharp declines in welfare expenditures in order to address the childcare problem and now have some cash to do something about it. As it happens, those "windfall" dollars actually amount to relatively little when they are divided by the number of children in need of childcare times the number of years they typically require supervision. Others have not addressed the demand or have done so without as much regard as might be warranted for the quality control issue. Policy makers will want to pay particular attention to what may become a push to weaken licensing requirements to address the demand side. This may be a prudent response to the immediate needs of families, but may have other down side consequences for child safety, development, school-readiness and general well-being.

Ironically, the advent of welfare reform has probably opened up the political possibilities for addressing the nation's child care policy as no other initiative has done in the past. Now that the problem is discussed in the context of working families, the virtues of doing right by their children are clearer in the public mind than they might have been when the subject was the children of the non-working poor. Indeed, were we to take this opportunity to embrace a national goal of high quality, early childhood education - as is routinely available in Italy or France - this might be an historic opportunity to address the school readiness issues that have become such a source of worry among researchers familiar with the link between poverty and test scores. As Jeanne Brooks-Gunn's (Teacher's College, Columbia University) research has shown, impressive gains in infant/early childhood IQ scores can be made when high quality daycare is available to children in at-risk households. It is not clear that we will "seize the day" on this one, but the conversation is more open now than it once was. It is certainly the case that poor families need reliable, safe child care, now more than ever before, and that the manpower needs of the nation in the long run would be well served by such an investment. Children who emerge from good childcare ready to take on formal schooling will enjoy greater educational success over the long run and better workforce preparedness.

Welfare reform has also had an impact on Medicaid enrollment, a problem of no small import for the working poor. The source of the decline is not perfectly understood. In part, Medicaid rolls are dropping because workers new to the labor market are now earning too much to qualify, but are not necessarily covered by their employers, resulting in an increase in some communities in the uninsured population. Child Health Plus, a medical insurance system designed to cover the children of poor workers, has been expected to pick up much of this slack, but thus far, the solution does not seem to be working. Enrollment in this program is woefully below its target, for reasons again that are poorly understood. No doubt some combination of lack of information, paperwork burdens that are too complex, and a general climate of fear among eligibles (particularly those who are new immigrants) explains the shortfall in expected enrollments. In any case, the combination of Medicaid ineligibility and the low numbers of participants in Child Health Plus has meant that many working poor families are vulnerable to health care deficiencies.