Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work
By Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein
Unskilled single mothers and their children have traditionally had America's highest poverty rate. With new welfare rules and limits in effect, more single mothers are taking jobs, raising both their income and their expenses. These include transportation, clothes, child care and medical care. From interviews with nearly 400 welfare and low-income single mothers in four states over six years, the authors concluded that official poverty rates may decline over the next few years, but real hardship and poverty will rise.
- Almost all poor single mothers supplement their income with some combination of off-the-books employment and money from relatives, lovers and the fathers of their children. Few report any of this income to the welfare department or the IRS.
- This distorts reported income and spending, leaving the impression among politicians and the public that families can actually live on welfare or salaries of $5,000 a year (plus food stamps and Medicaid).
- Official poverty thresholds underestimate poor families' needs by about 25 percent, in part because they take no account of the new expenses of working or reductions in food stamp, housing and medical benefits that accompany higher income.
- Jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled women provide meager salaries, irregular hours, frequent layoffs and no promise of advancement.
The authors found that single mothers could only afford to choose welfare over work if they enjoyed special advantages that artificially lower the cost of working, such as free housing or childcare. Jobs still left unskilled workers with larger budget deficits than their welfare counterparts. To make ends meet, they had to have unusually generous support from family members, absent fathers or boyfriends. As new welfare cutoffs arrive over the next few years, mothers without these supports will have to take low-wage jobs, so they are likely to suffer more material hardship than the subjects of this book.
Any long-term
solution must create a system that allows low-skilled single mothers
to care for their children and pay their bills. Options include raising
the minimum wage, subsidizing child care and/or housing and health insurance,
and enforcing child-support laws.
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Kathryn
Edin (kedin@pop.upenn.edu)
is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Faculty Fellow
at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.
Laura Lein is Professor in the School of Social Work and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
