In 1834, at the peak of a campaign to replace parish “outdoor” relief to the rural poor with the workhouse, the English Poor Law Commissioners announced the principle that has always guided systems of aid to the poor in market societies:

This principle of “less eligibility” meant simply that no able-bodied person on the dole should be allowed to live as well as the lowest paid worker. In fact, whether understood as principle or simply as labor market imperative, “less eligibility” has shaped western policies of social assistance from the time of their invention in the late Middle Ages up to the present. To be sure, as social insurance programs for categories of people who were deemed no longer to be employable, mainly the aged and the disabled, came to cover more people, the principle of less eligibility was, in effect, softened. “Insurance” meant that many people earned a measure of protection from the market by virtue of their record of regular and long term employment. Still, for the many who could not qualify, there were only the means-tested programs, or the dole.

Less eligibility has never been simply about income. It has also been about dignity. Those on the dole must not only have less of the economic means of subsistence. They must also be stripped of social standing. From the origins of poor relief systems in Europe during the sixteenth century, the giving of assistance to the poor has always been accompanied by the systematic rituals of punishment and degradation. Paupers were displayed in the stocks or paraded behind a cart on market day. Meanwhile, the penalties for beggary or vagrancy were elaborated and harshened. Later, the workhouse was invented. Incarcerating the poor and inventing ways for them to toil for their gruel was almost always more expensive than simply giving them a pittance to live on their own. Then and now, disciplinary regimens cost money, helping to explain why spending on social programs does not fall even when aid to the poor does. But costs notwithstanding, as the Poor Law Commissioners who announced the principle of less eligibility explained, the cruel regimen of the workhouse would teach the principle not only to workhouse inmates, but to all who observed the miserable fate of the pauper.

If the principle of less eligibility still holds, and of course it does, then we should expect that the large changes in the American labor market of the past several decades would have been accompanied by parallel changes in our social assistance programs. The trends associated with globalization and intensified competition have transformed work in the United States and other rich countries.^{Footnote 2} Wages have stagnated or fallen, work contracts have become much more insecure, and women have been drawn into the labor force in massive numbers. Whether we call this new phase hyper-capitalism or neo-liberalism, we should expect commensurately large changes in the policies that provide income for the poor and unemployed.

At first glance, it is not obvious that such changes have occurred. To be sure, the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996, effectively eliminated the entitlement of poor mothers to cash assistance, and the welfare rolls plummeted. Still, other assistance programs to the poor remained and even expanded, including Medicaid, the food stamp program, and the Earned Income Tax Credit Program (EITC), which provided income supplements to working poor families. Meanwhile, despite much Republican bluster, the main social security insurance programs have remained more or less intact.

It is worth pausing a moment over these developments because I think they do in fact indicate the workings of the principle of less eligibility in adapting contemporary American social policy to a changed labor market. Consider PRWORA, or “welfare reform,” which led to the replacement of the earlier grant-in-aid program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a block grant program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). As everyone who pays attention knows, AFDC was a mean-spirited program. Thanks partly to the influence of southern Democrats in the Congress who worried that federal policies could interfere with the caste-like labor system in the South, the administration of the program was largely left to the states and counties. The states in turn ensured that benefit levels always remained lower than the wages of domestic and agricultural workers. Other state and local practices shored up this principle of less eligibility and adapted it to state and local labor needs by, for example, simply denying aid to families when workers were needed in the fields.^{Footnote 3}

Still, that was mainly in the South where it was taken for granted that Black women were workers, whether they were mothers or not. The appropriate role of poor mothers was more ambiguous in the North. The Mother’s Pension program, a precursor to AFDC, was premised on the somewhat wishful view that at least morally upright women who were raising children alone should receive assistance, although the actual giving of such assistance was quite rare. Still, the view that mothers were entitled to some state support did persist and in the 1960s, when the Black Freedom Movement spread to the ghettoes of the northern cities, poor women, many of them migrants from the South where their labor was no longer needed, joined together in a campaign for “welfare rights” that announced their right to assistance because they were mothers. A complete accounting of the impact of these events on social policy has to take account not only of the interplay between the larger Black movement and the rising of poor women, but of the interplay between the movements and electoral politics. For now it suffices to point out that the impact was large. During the 1960s, social assistance programs to the poor exploded. More people received aid, they received more aid, and the discretion of administrators to refuse aid was reduced. Indeed, the liberalization of benefits that resulted was sufficient to unsettle the principle of less eligibility.^{Footnote 4}

Meanwhile, historic changes were also underway in the U.S. labor force. For one, women were becoming wage workers. This development was heralded by the rise of second wave feminist movement with its central demand that women move into public life, which meant participating in politics and in the labor market. For many of the educated activists in the movement during the 1960s, that meant women should leave the confines of domesticity and take their place beside men in the professions and in managerial roles. But even as some women began to enjoy these new opportunities, another change was unfolding, with less happy consequences. As the movements of the 1960s subsided, corporate interests, prodded by international competition and shrinking profits, mobilized to regain the upper hand in domestic politics. The campaign that unfolded essentially targeted what there is of an American welfare state: unions, progressive taxation, government social spending, and the regulation of business. The ultimate result of the decades-long business campaign was stagnant or declining wages and the spread of the irregular and insecure forms of employment that we now call precarious labor.^{Footnote 5} Increasingly, women moved into wage work, not to take advantage of new opportunities, and not because they yearned for emancipation from domestic roles, but rather to shore up declining household incomes.

These labor market developments created a new challenge for the principle of less eligibility and its advocates. If wages were falling, benefit levels had to fall as well. At first this was accomplished largely by freezing state welfare benefit levels so that inflation steadily eroded their real value. Moreover, as more and more women entered the labor market, the partial reprieve from less eligibility allowed mothers during the years of welfare rights was cast aside. A variety of “workfare” programs were initiated by the states, with federal encouragement and funds. And then, after the Republican congressional sweep of 1994, presumably on the basis of their “Contract with America” that called among other things for a crackdown on welfare, the Congress began to consider federal legislation to restore the principle of less eligibility to AFDC, the main cash assistance program to the poor. Bill Clinton vetoed the first two legislative efforts, but he signed the third, and AFDC with its limited entitlement for the poorest families in the U.S. was overturned. The new program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) provided block grants to the states for cash assistance, with provisos that sharply restricted state generosity, at the same time as the block grant formulae created an incentive for states to deny assistance. After all, the states got the federal funds whether they distributed them to poor families or not. Actual spending on cash assistance plummeted.

The effort to restore less eligibility was not all sticks. Logically, the growing disjuncture between wages and benefits could be remedied by government interventions to raise wages and work-related benefits. For example, the real value of the minimum wage, which had been allowed to fall, could be raised. But such interventions would surely arouse fierce opposition from now mobilized business lobbyists. The solution that was developed instead was the Earned Income Tax Credit, a government subsidy of the earnings of low wage workers inaugurated in 1975.^{Footnote 6} However reasonable it may seem to shore up the earnings of lower wage workers, it should be recognized that as the tax system loses its progressivity, it is revenues gleaned from taxes on the earnings of some working people that are being redistributed to other workers.

In fact, PRWORA and EITC notwithstanding, the adaptations in welfare state programs to a low wage and insecure labor system have been accomplished without much drama or public attention, through manifold smaller changes in rules and administrative practices. Andrea Louise Campbell’s book, Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle demonstrates the consequences. Campbell is broadly knowledgeable about the American welfare state, and she shows that our programs are far less generous than those of other rich nations. But instead of mainly examining and comparing program data, Campbell’s account focuses on the experiences of one young family whose lives came crashing down as the result of an automobile accident that left the young mother a quadriplegic. The family is her brother’s, so she learns its difficulties intimately and in detail as they struggle to recover some kind of life. This is an account of a family arduously navigating the multiple programs with different eligibility criteria, funded and authorized by different levels of government. All of the programs presumably provide some kind of limited assistance, but only to those who can make it through the virtually impenetrable bureaucratic hoops and ambushes. And in a way, this family is fortunate. They are educated and have the confidence of the relatively well born, for one thing, and they have the knowledgeable assistance of friends and family, including Campbell herself. Nevertheless, even for this well-positioned family, the story is harrowing, and Campbell moves smoothly back and forth from the story to a description of the programs in which her brother’s family has become entangled.

The important moral I think is that to understand how social policy actually works, we have to pay close attention not only to high minded legislated mandates, but to the administrative arrangements through which these mandates are implemented. These administrative arrangements have always carried much of the burden of ensuring the implementation of the principle of less eligibility, and they carry much of the burden in the United States today. Cash assistance has shrunk not only because of the legislated dictums of the PRWORA but because of the new administrative arrangements that made it harder for people to apply for aid, and created incentives for administrators and staff to deny aid.

A final point. Campbell follows in a long tradition that attributes the meanness of our means-tested policies to American attitudes, especially to popular antipathy toward the poor. This is a familiar view, and it has at least some plausibility. Certainly it is not hard for politicians to stir up popular outrage by ranting about the extravagance of the “welfare queen.”^{Footnote 7} And now with only shrunken welfare rolls to blame, they are moving on to the food stamp program. Mitch McConnell recently told an interviewer that he had learned from business leaders that they have “a hard time finding people to do the work because they’re doing too good with stamps, Social Security, and all the rest.”^{Footnote 8}

But this American antipathy to the poor itself has to be explained, and my one criticism of Campbell’s book is that she does not consider the connection between public attitudes toward the poor and the miseries inflicted by the means-tested system itself. Part of the explanation for American hostility toward the poor is I think the longstanding institutional practices of less eligibility through which we pauperize and degrade the poor. And while popular antipathies toward the poor in the contemporary U.S. did not drive the restoration of the principle of less eligibility, the political theater which accompanied the campaign for restoration surely nourished those antipathies.

Campbell has performed a real service by vividly describing the human costs of the current version of America’s historically inadequate welfare system. Even if her book does not offer a theoretical explanation of this system, it makes clear how important it is for political scientists to develop such accounts. It also drives home a simple lesson that bears constant repetition: government programs that protect people from the exigencies of labor markets, or of old age, or orphanhood, or disability, make people more secure. A sense of security, the reduction of fear, is a good thing in itself. But it also empowers people so that they can live their lives with a sense of control over their individual and collective destinies. For this reason a robust and generous system of social welfare is essential to a more democratic society.