Caseworker Views of the Second Decade of Welfare Policy Reforms: Cynics, Realists, Ideologues

Background and Purpose: In 2006, Michigan reformed its TANF program in four pilot sites. The Jobs, Education, and Training (JET) program required new screening of applicants, increased emphasis on education/training and vocational rehabilitation, harsher sanctions, extended post-employment services, diversion, time limits and new federal Deficit Reduction Act restrictions. This study draws from qualitative implementation evaluation data of the JET program in its first year.

Research has underscored the need to understand policy in practice, or how front-line staff make sense of and implement policy changes (Lipsky, 1980; Hasenfeld, 2005; Watkins-Hayes, 2009). We examine how front line welfare workers, who are often strapped for time and have large caseloads, implement complex policies in the case of those mandated by JET, and especially why they choose to implement certain components of the policies over other aspects.

This paper builds on work done by Watkins-Hayes (2009) who found that front-line welfare workers in Massachusetts identified their guiding organizing frameworks for how they conducted their work as more similar to “Efficiency Engineers” or “Social Workers.” We predict that these professional identities will differentiate how front-line workers in our data selectively implemented new complex and conflicting welfare policies. Methods: The data includes 110 semi-structured interviews of caseworkers in small groups collected over two rounds of site visits to each of four local sites. We met with staff of welfare offices and from collaborating agencies such as the work training and rehabilitation services programs to better understand how program components were assessed and being implemented at the local level. The data focused on how (a) the agencies served deferred and long-term cases as well as the “work ready” active cases; (b) how the programs individualized education/training services; (c) how rehabilitation services worked; and (d) uses of new forms and procedures. Results. We find that workers differed in the policies they choose to focus on in their work versus those they paid less attention to (for example, whether they chose to offer clients the diversion policy). We also found variation in how they practiced or implemented policies and regulations (for example, whether they used one-on-one meetings with clients for assessing compliance and instituting sanctions versus whether they primarily saw these as problem solving opportunities. These decisions were rationalized in terms of the individual caseworker's ideologies and evaluations of the different JET components. We noted that across all sites, the increased demand and overload of caseworker demand encouraged variation in how workers interpreted the new requirements and added to the wide discretion practiced to manage frontline work.

Conclusions and Implications. This paper helps to shine light on why policies, and specifically welfare policies, may be implemented in an uneven way. We argue that the worker's professional identity plays a significant role in both what aspects of policies workers choose to implement and how they implement them. We draw lessons for designing future welfare reforms at the state and federal role that could potentially improve TANF's role in promoting a recovering economy.