Ethos Issue 3, Oct 2007

Making Workfare Work: The US Experience
Interview with Lawrence M. Mead

In the US, people stay on welfare mainly because they are not even looking for work, not because jobs are unavailable. To be unemployed, you have to be available for work—that is, you have to have entered the labour force—but have not yet accepted a job. Most people who enter the labour force find jobs so quickly that they are never recorded as unemployed at all. Similarly, those who leave jobs are seldom left jobless—they also leave the labour force and so again are not classified as unemployed. Most welfare recipients are not in the labour force and are not even looking for work. That is a much bigger problem than unemployment.

Unemployment as a problem is enshrined in our collective memory in the US because of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when jobs clearly were lacking and a quarter of the labour force was unemployed. Joblessness has been far less of a problem since then. It is a problem mostly for the higher reaches of the income hierarchy. They tend to have expectations of getting certain kinds of jobs, with conditions they think are optimal. So they do not accept just any job and unemployment for this group tends to be longer-lasting. In contrast, among the poor, the overwhelming problem is not employment or even unemployment but just getting into the workforce and staying there.

Is there a proper time to implement welfare reform? Are there certain conditions that should be in place before making workfare a permanent feature of the social safety net?
In the US, welfare reform did not come too early since we had a history of prior experimentation going back as far as the 1960s. In fact, there was already a work dimension in welfare policies as early as 1961. It increased in intensity up until the late 1980s when the Family Support Act was enacted. The enforcement of work in the US did not begin with the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996, although that legislation accelerated the process. The earlier experimentation taught that enforcing work in welfare was possible and how best to do it.

In Singapore, the Government is not acting too soon because the Workfare Income Supplement is not so radical as to change everything. Furthermore, it is designed in such a way that ongoing adjustments are possible. The Workfare Bonus Scheme, which preceded the Supplement, might be an even better idea. These proposals respond to your welfare problem, which is mostly about low-income workers and not, as in the US, getting people to work.

While it is not too soon to act, it is also critical to research the effects of the current bonus system and the Workfare Income Supplement, to see their actual effects and for the purpose of fine-tuning.

Singapore might want to learn from the US model, but bear in mind that every government that reforms welfare has to generate its own consensus about how to do that. In the US, every state made its own decisions about reform, although within federal rules. There was less borrowing from other states than many had expected. Even the more influential states, such as Wisconsin, had little influence on how welfare reform occurred in other states.

Singapore will have to justify what it has done based on its own experience. The example of Wisconsin is worth only so much to you! Only after a series of experiments will you know how best to help your low-wage workers and get support for your policies.

Lawrence M. Mead is Professor of Politics at New York University, where he teaches public policy and American government. Professor Mead is an authority on the problems of poverty and welfare in the US. Among academics, he was the principal exponent of work requirements in welfare—the approach that now dominates US national policy. He is also a leading scholar of the politics and implementation of welfare reform, subjects on which he has written several books and over a hundred publications. These works have helped shape welfare reform in the US and abroad. Professor Mead visited Singapore as a Distinguished Visitor of the Centre for Governance and Leadership (CGL), Civil Service College, where he met with senior policymakers and delivered a New Insights Lecture on "Welfare Reform in America: Successes and Limitations". This article was extracted from an interview conducted by Dr Theresa Devasahayam, CGL Senior Researcher, on 23 June 2007.

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