Session: Social Equity in California's Welfare-to-Work Program: State, County, Frontline-Workers and Client's Perspectives (Society for Social Work and Research 25th Annual Conference - Social Work Science for Social Change)

The U.S welfare reform of 1996 introduced a punitive and devolved welfare-to-work (WTW) system. Previous research on decentralized TANF programming has shed light on racial disparities within sanctioning practices and service delivery systems at the state and county levels and has explained state/county variation. However, there is a dearth of research focused on understanding the process, pathways and at what policy level (state, county or frontline level) equity/equality discourse and practices in welfare-to-work (WTW) play out and how they affect disparities based on client demographics such as e.g. race or immigration-status. This in-depth knowledge is important to generate specific recommendations on how and at what policy-level equity within WTW can be strengthened. This symposium comprises of four papers that will shed light on these questions and discuss policy recommendations.

Californias WTW program CalWORKs (California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids) has been chosen, as compared to other TANF programs it is more generous, inclusive, racially diverse and highly devolved. Moreover, all the papers are based on a comparison of two county sites; Bay-county (urban, tech-industry) and Central-county (rural, agricultural -industry), that were chosen using a cluster analysis of 58 Californian county characteristics. While both counties share a high percentage of people of color, Bay-county has lower WTW sanction, poverty and unemployment rates compared to Central-county. All papers triangulate different policy-level data, including statistics, interviews, observations and documents at the state-, county- frontline level and of clients. The first paper utilizing critical discourse analysis, displays different embedded understandings of equity and equality and their corresponding practices within the decentralized CalWORKs framework. In light of the recent anti-immigrant public welfare charge and despite CalWORKs being an inclusive program, the second paper, based on a mixed method study on multiple policy levels, highlights the disadvantages in treatment experienced by immigrant clients. The third paper focuses on place-based differences in how single-earner households experience their pathway to self-sufficiency and how different local agencies and programs (e.g. subsidized employment) are limited in their support for the clients across the two economically highly diverse labor markets contexts. The final paper, presents an engagement-typology, developed based on a content analysis of frontline-workers interviews and observations. It displays how frontline-workers discretion in interaction with specific assumptions potentially lead to unequitable treatment of clients.

Overall, all the papers contribute to the welfare literature by shedding light on the nuances of how social equity within WTW can be achieved and how the reproduction of race and other inequities can be reduced. In the symposium, we will discuss practice and policy recommendations at different levels ranging from introducing an explicit equity framework at the state level, to implementing specific local practices while treating immigrant clients, reducing regional inequities by adjusting the benefit levels of CalWORKs and of frontline-workers and improving their training on equity.