Should Welfare Recipients Sweep Our Sidewalks?

On Saturday morning, my boyfriend's grandmother, a sharp critic of social support programs, launched into yet another tirade about how the poor don't earn their handouts. "Why not," she suggested, "have welfare recipients spend a few hours a week cleaning sidewalks or scrubbing public pools? Let's put them to work for that money!"

Luckily, I wasn't there to witness this stroke of brilliance, but I was surprised to hear my boyfriend not only relay the idea but, tentatively, agree with it. "After all," he offered, "we might as well get something in return for the assistance, right?"

Dismissing the rapidly developing sour taste in my mouth, I took a minute to compose my thoughts. Why was the idea of asking people to contribute a few hours of their time in exchange for monetary or in-kind support so unappealing to me? Was I really turning into a bleeding heart liberal, an unabashed champion of redistribution, a — god forbid —socialist?

And then it hit me, the logic behind my automatic aversion to Grandma's thought process. Being on welfare doesn't mean you're lazy. It's a well-documented fact that millions of America's poor are active members of the workforce. They're called the "working poor" — laborers who live below the official poverty line, a mere $10,830 a year for a single individual.

According to the Department of Labor's latest statistics (pdf), in 2008, 13.7 percent of part-time workers lived at or below the poverty line, along with 3.9 percent of full-time workers. And of those 4.1 million full-timers, 85 percent suffered from low wages, periods of unemployment, involuntary part-time employment or some combination thereof.

Want a real-life example of a full-time worker on welfare? Fellow blogger Josie Raymond's recent piece, "Welfare is Not a Four Letter Word," profiles Quianna Davis, "a single mother of a three-year-old. Yes, she receives food benefits, day care assistance and Medicaid. But she's also working fulltime and attending college, in the hopes that she won't need assistance for the rest of her life and that her child won't be a victim of generational poverty's pull." A 40 hour-a-week job, plus college? This woman doesn't have three hours to spend on public service.

Contrary to popular belief, the problem isn't that America's poor are failing to contribute to the economy and should therefore donate some labor in exchange for their food stamps or housing vouchers. Quite the opposite: if low wages and sky-high unemployment rates are any indicator, the economy isn't contributing enough to the poor. Too bad we can't task the economy with sweeping our sidewalks.

Photo credit: DanBrady