Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market

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Description

Both Hands Tied studies the working poor in the USA, focusing in particular at the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers. Grounded within the experience of thirty-three women living in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, it tells the story in their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying and incessantly state-funded jobs with inflexible schedules—and the moments when these jobs failed them and so they turned to the state for additional aid.

Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer here examine the situations of these women in light of the 1996 national Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other like-minded reforms—laws that ended the entitlement to welfare for those in need and provided an incentive for them to go back to work. Arguing that this reform came at a time of gendered change within the labor force and profound shifts within the responsibilities of circle of relatives, firms, and the state, Both Hands Tied provides a stark but poignant portrait of how welfare reform afflicted poor, single-parent families, in the end eroding the participants’ economic rights and affecting their ability to deal with themselves and their children.


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