In Their Own Words: Implications of the National Welfare Rights Organization’s Struggle for Justice, Dignity, and Democracy in Historical and Contemporary Welfare Discourse

Background and Purpose: Debates around welfare provisions and deservingness have been pervasive in the United States for decades. The 1962 shift to one of the nation’s largest welfare programs, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) situated welfare practices in ideas of family preservation, gender and sexuality norms, and morality. AFDC positioned the federal government as the primary provisionary of welfare and embedded the field of social work in translating and enacting the federal government’s social welfare provisions. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, AFDC increasingly came under attack for failing to reduce poverty, while groups such as the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO)—led by and comprised of welfare recipients--refuted negative stereotypes of welfare recipients and advocated for increased welfare benefits. Welfare discourse culminated in the 1996 legislation to “reform” welfare, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). PRWORA, embedded in neoliberal ideologies and practices, transformed both social welfare policies in the United States as well as the role of social work in providing social welfare.

Methods: Utilizing critical discourse analysis, this paper illustrates the ways in which welfare discourse has been framed since the welfare rights movements of the 1960s and how this discourse was impacted by neoliberalism as evidenced by PWRORA. This analysis examines multimedia data from the National Welfare Rights Organization, United States political actors, and welfare legislation to examine how the respective groups discuss welfare provisions and providers. In efforts to center the analysis on the demands of the NWRO, the analysis utilizes the NWRO’s principles of liberation, equity, and freedom to critically analyze welfare discourse.

Findings:Under AFDC, hegemonic cultural and political ideologies were saturated with explicitly racist and gendered rhetoric, describing welfare recipients as lazy, entitled, and criminal. In contrast, the NWRO was able to subvert dominant power structures, and leverage this to highlight how they were systematically oppressed by these very structures. In addition to reappropriating dominant welfare discourse, NWRO members strategically used physical occupation to symbolize their struggles and goals.

PWRORA reflects neoliberalist ideologies of social control, privatization, and institutionalized surveillance, effectively invisibilizing the flaws and failures of the welfare state by centering self-sufficiency and accountability of the welfare recipient. Within PROWRA are gendered and racist logics similar to those evoked under AFDC; however, language in PROWRA is less explicit on issues of morality, instead mimicking neoliberal logics of surveillance, punishment, and divestment, streamlines these ideologies in social service provision. Ultimately, PROWRA extends the proximity of social welfare providers to both the carceral state and their clients.

Implications: This paper aims to contribute to growing literature about the impacts of power, language, and carceral realities of social work as a field. Findings are important for social work educators, researchers, and practitioners in considering how the history of social work has perpetuated or challenged hegemonic notions of welfare throughout history. Reconciling these histories and current realities allows social work to imagine new futures of social work policy and practice.