Last summer, welfare activists across the country were gearing up for a tough struggle relating to TANF reauthorization. TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) is the state-administered program, passed under the Clinton Administration, that took the place of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. The centerpiece of the new program was work requirements for every (with a few exceptions) able-bodied adult receiving assistance through the program. Early last year, President Bush put forward proposals, and the House of Representatives passed a bill, which would toughen the work requirements and make other harsh changes in the TANF program. However, other issues, such as tax cuts, and pending Congressional elections, overshadowed the TANF struggle, and the program has functioned since that time under a continuing budget resolution that kept the program running under the then-existing terms.

But the issue hasn't gone away and may heat up again anytime soon. On February 13, the House of Representatives passed a new bill (HR 4) to "reauthorize and improve" the TANF block grant program that is very similar to the 2002 House Bill. That bill was received in the Senate and referred to the Senate Finance Committee for consideration. Furthermore, the House budget plan calls for $165 billion in cuts to key low-income programs including TANF. With the Senate now in Republican hands, the situation for TANF recipients may be more grave than it was last fall when key Senators had managed to get serious consideration for a plan that would make improvements in the TANF program.

During the struggle last fall, Deepak Bhargava, then the Director of the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, spoke at the DSA conference, "Confronting the Low-Wage Economy," in Washington, DC, about the situation as regards TANF reauthorization and the lessons he had drawn from the struggle at that point. Although the situation nationally and internationally has changed in unexpected ways since the conference, many of his comments remain relevant. Here is the full text of his talk.

I thought I would begin my presentation this morning by telling a little story. I was in a meeting with Senator Kennedy last week, who was ranting about the fact that we are unlikely to see any time soon any kind of legislation on the Senate floor to deal with pensions; we are unlikely to see on the Senate floor legislation to increase the minimum wage. The fate of the welfare bill as you probably heard is in a lot of doubt, and the conclusion to his rant I thought was right on the mark as we think about what the agenda and the strategy for the coming period need to be. He said that all of us tend to talk too much about poverty and inequality. We know what the central task is, which is to deliver more money and resources to poor and working class Americans, and we know that the indispensable cause of that will be building more power and organization for low-income and working class Americans. And I do think that those are the central tasks of our time, as we move forward, and they are pretty good litmus tests for the things that we think about pushing and advocating for in the coming period.

I want to talk a little bit about where we are in the welfare wars-and we're not finished yet-and what lessons we might draw from the experience of the last year and a half or two in the fight about the reauthorization of the welfare law, because I think it offers lessons beyond welfare reform. And finally provide some thoughts about what the emerging agenda for addressing the issues of the low-wage economy might be.

As people here probably know, the President proposed a welfare plan that was shocking to many, and that plan essentially passed the House of Representatives in May; and some of the main features of it were a proposal to substantially increase work requirements on poor families, both increasing the number of poor families who will be expected to work and also the hours in any given week that they would be expected to work. The proposal also called for significantly reducing access to education and training in what counts as work, and it called for a new marriage promotion fund under the idea that what low-income women need is not in fact more money but-men. [Laughter] And finally it-in something that hasn't gotten very much attention-it called for superwaivers, which is kind of a next step in the devolution agenda, the idea that governors and states would be able to mix and mingle funds from a whole variety of different programs with very little in the way of restrictions or Federal rules. So the evidence-free zone was very much in effect in the development of this plan.

The Senate Finance Committee passed a bill which is awaiting action on the Senate floor-passed a bill in July. The bill is, in my view, somewhat better than current law in a number of respects. It also increases work requirements in the sense of the number of people who-the portion of welfare caseloads that-must be engaged in work. It does not increase the work hour requirements for low-income families. It does increase what counts as work, so that 30% of welfare parents could engage in education and training for up to two years, a significant number could go to four-year college, barrier-removal activities, mental health, drug treatment-those kinds of things could count as work activity for between three and six months. It does increase funding for childcare, though not nearly enough to meet the need. It excludes from work requirements parents with sick and disabled children.and it includes a new at-home infant care program, which is essentially paid leave for low-income parents, so allowing parents with infants or toddlers to stay home with their kids, either part-time or full-time, and receive income to compensate them for that. The bill does have a lot of limitations. There is not enough money. There is very little in the bill that deals with time limits, which obviously are hitting in many states now. And there are other limitations. But I do think, particularly in the political [climate] we're in of a Republican administration that's gone off the deep end on this issue, a Republican House that is equally extreme, and a Senate that, although nominally Democratic, is far from progressive, it is a substantial victory in many respects to get a bill that is an advance over current law in all these areas.

In terms of where we are, we are essentially in gridlock. The President condemned the Senate bill. The House has excoriated it. The President, in my favorite line in this debate, said that education and training was not his idea of how to promote independence for welfare parents. This, from the president who went to Yale on his father's coattails, is a pretty remarkable statement in my view. So it's not clear what will happen. There are efforts to bring the Senate Finance bill to the Senate floor. It is not clear whether they will get a time agreement, because we were spending so much time on this Homeland Security Bill, and we may be spending a ton of time on the resolution to go to war with Iraq, whether they will be able to do that. If they don't put the bill on the Senate floor, and if we don't have a five-year reauthorization, there is discussion about either a one-year bill or a three-year bill. .[A]lthough things are confusing, I would urge people to continue to advocate, and some of the key issues to highlight for you, that are likely to come up in any of the variants of how this might proceed, are: immigrant benefits, there certainly will be a lot of push-back from the Administration and from the House on the issue of whether immigrants are entitled to Medicaid and Welfare; the work requirements issue; education and training; superwaivers. All those issues would be very much in play in any of these scenarios in all likelihood, so I think it's very important to keep up the activity, the momentum.

So, what are some of the lessons that we might draw out of this experience over the last couple of years? You know, to borrow a phrase, one might say that the welfare debate in 1996 ended in tragedy and that this debate in 2002 is likely to end in farce. On the downside, I think would loom that the kind of elites who make opinion in this town are more socially distant from the realities of life in working class and poor neighborhoods than one might ever have imagined, so for a long time there was essentially a long victory lap by members of both parties about the so-called successes of the 1996 law and almost no nuance or admission that there were things that needed to be done to change it. And I think a lot of the responsibility for that goes to our former president, Bill Clinton, who cleared the way for this new kind of ideological consensus that we're still grappling with. Relatedly, I think, another lesson on the downside is-which we're not learning just in the welfare arena sorry to say-is that the Democratic Party is, with some notable exceptions, close to brain-dead and close to spineless. So very early on in this debate a group of conservative Democrats associated with the Democratic Leadership Council came out with a welfare reform plan that was similar in many key respects, particular with regards to the issue of increasing work requirements, to the President's plan. And it sapped a lot of energy to try and fend off their activity. So, those are some lessons I think on the downside, which aren't surprising.

On the upside, it is remarkable in my view that a proposal to stiffen the work requirements on poor people made by a president who was at the height of his popularity in February when he came out with it, is not likely to be enacted into law. That in the very conservative Senate a bipartisan group of senators rejected tougher work-hour requirements for poor families in my view is fairly striking. I think the President thought this would be a slam-dunk, and it has not proved to be so. So the President can be beaten-would be lesson number one.

Lesson number two is: in the Democratic Party, I think it has been for some time the conservative Democrats in the Democratic Leadership Council who really set the tone and the agenda for the Democratic Party, and it looked like they were going to do that again this year. Their coalition around their proposal has essentially, in my view, come crashing apart; and the highlight of that, in my view, was when 200 poor women dumped waffles on Hillary's lawn and got covered in the New York Times for doing so to protest her move to the right-her lurch to the right-on this bill. It's the first time in my memory that I can remember any Democrat getting spanked for selling out the poor constituency of the party, and that's a very salutary event in my view.

Third, I think, another lesson out of this experience is, in my view, at least we were much better organized than we were in 1996. In March of this year, 2000 low-income Americans came to town and marched on HHS, and the day afterwards the President reversed his proposal to repeal the minimum wage protections for welfare recipients to allow them to be paid a dollar an hour for working forty hours a week for paltry benefits. And Senator Max Baucus, who is no liberal paragon, conservative chair of the Senate Finance Committee, came out and pledged to the crowd-which we'll see if he maintains it all the way through, but so far hasn't been too terrible-that he wouldn't let any bill go through the Senate that would hurt poor Americans. And he only came to that event, not because, I think, he wanted to, but because he had to, because he had to be in relationship with organizations in his state that were going to hold him accountable for his behavior. So I think we did a better job of organizing this time around than in 1996.

Fourth, I think, we had some new ideas. And where we had those ideas we did pretty well. So over the last few years grassroots organizations and others have been pushing a number of new ideas in the welfare policy agenda, and many of those were reflected in the current debate. So the idea of allowing welfare recipients to fulfill their work obligations by going to college; that happened in a number of states over the last few years, most notably in Maine. Thanks to the advocacy work of a Legal Services Backup Center, a parents and scholars program was created, and that proposal is reflected in the Senate bill. The creation of transitional or public jobs programs in about 30 or 40 sites around the country has created a kind of intellectual infrastructure and the base of experience from which to advocate for a similar program, which is in fact contained in the Senate version of the legislation. And, perhaps most radically of all, this at-home infant care idea of essentially recognizing that for low-wage working women they don't get parental leave through their jobs, and they need to get income to be able to stay home with their kids for some period of time or reduce their work hours-that became law because it happened in places like Montana and Minnesota over the last few years. So I think to the extent that there are new ideas on the table, this time around they didn't come from the right. The right was promoting work and marriage, marriage and work, and state flexibility to boot. They were all ideas recycled from the last debate.

Fifth, I think an encouraging factor is that public opinion has certainly changed since the mid-1990s. At the least, one could say that the edge in public resentment towards very poor families is substantially less than it was. And one might be able to assert-and I say this at the risk of having a pollster on my right-that there is public support for a number of the things that we want to do, whether it's education and training or even some of the more difficult proposals around time limits and other issues-child care certainly.

The sixth lesson that I would draw as experience is that, in thinking forward to our next agenda for low-income Americans-and I agree very strongly with Terry about this-that we don't do ourselves a service by building programs with a very, very narrow constituency. One of the realities about welfare today is that there is hardly anyone left on it, either because people can't get it, even if they desperately need it and deserve it, or because they've been knocked off. So I think, looking ahead to the future, looking at more universal ways of delivering income and other benefits to a broad sector of the low-wage working population ought to be very much our agenda.

So let me just close by talking about what I think we ought to think about going forward. I just highlight, I guess, five areas that I think ought to receive a lot of attention from progressives who care about the issues of low-wage work.

The first is structural reforms to the low-wage labor market itself. Over the last few years we've seen the reemergence of a bottom tier in the low-wage labor market, where labor law really no longer applies, where people are working for below the minimum wage with no protections effectively from Federal or state health and safety laws, subject to enormous abuse. These are day laborers standing on street corners, these are garment workers, these are domestic workers. There is a vast unregulated labor market in America now, and that needs to be brought back under Federal scrutiny and regulation. And the program there is multi-pronged. It's increasing wages; it is strengthened and real enforcement of Federal and state labor law; it's eventually getting back to the issue of a right to organize for these and other workers; and it's bringing attention to the fact that for millions of these workers at the bottom, they don't enjoy a single sick day a year. They don't have a single vacation day a year. They don't have paid parental leave. So this whole issue around the conditions and terms of low-wage work strikes me at the heart of what we ought to be thinking about in the next period of time.

Secondly, we do need to rebuild an agenda around income support. There are lots of good reasons why people either can't be employed or shouldn't be employed. And our public policy needs to come to grapple with that. The welfare system has essentially imploded as a rational response to the problem, but either because people are disabled, or because there aren't jobs to be found, or because they have responsibilities for caring for relatives or children, young children, disabled people in their home, there are very good reasons to provide public sources of income to these families. What the ideas are to recreate that structure of support for these families are, I don't know. And I think we have to have some very serious discussions about it. Maybe a combination of paid leave, changes in the tax code, changes in unemployment insurance, a whole set of things, but we cannot just because these issues are difficult and hard, give them up.

The third issue is immigration. It is now the reality in our country that one in four poor children in our country lives in an immigrant-headed household. And that is a revolution that has occurred over the last decade. We have in particular eight million undocumented workers and their families in this country who live in the shadow, who are subject to enormous exploitation and abuse at the workplace, and whose condition is not just a source of oppression to them but drives down working conditions and labor standards across the board. Because it is made harder for them to organize, to the extent that there is a cheap and easily exploited labor pool available to employers, that hurts all workers. And this may seem difficult to say in the Ashcroft era, where we have gone, taken enormous steps backwards with regards to the rights of immigrants in the last year, and it's a laundry list of things that have gone wrong, but I do think it is both possible and necessary to mount a serious effort to adjust the status or legalize a good portion of those eight million undocumented workers. One might make the argument that the single biggest antipoverty measure one could take in the next decade would be in fact a broad legalization program for these workers and their families.

Fourth, health care, and I won't say very much about this. The Bush administration is waging a kind of covert war on the Medicaid program. States are requesting waivers much as we saw the welfare program implode in the early nineties because of state waivers that imposed work requirements and so on, we're seeing the same phenomenon beginning to unfold here. This at the same time that the recession has again sent the number of people without health insurance moving upwards again, and ultimately we need to get back to this agenda of expanding coverage. It may be incremental; it may be universal. There are long debates among all of us that we could have about it, but the issue has increasing political salience.

Finally, the last thing I would say about what our agenda should be is: we do need an opportunity agenda. It strikes me that one of the great contradictions of our current political moment is this sense among Americans that there are two sets of rules under which we operate, one for the rich and favored, and one for the rest of us. And that is no more the case than it is in the areas of public education for young people and also education and training opportunities for adults. And, as progressives, we ought to be forthright and unapologetic about an opportunity agenda that speaks to that core value that think Americans hold of equal opportunity. That ought to be a winner for us in this coming decade.

So just lastly some reflections on what it will take to get us there. I agree with what Wade [Rathke] and Terry [Mizrahi] and others said. You know, there is no substitution for more organizing at the base. It ultimately, if we get some of these major changes in national policy, it will come because low-wage Americans through unions and community organizations are increasingly organized in greater numbers to demand these changes at every level of government. There just isn't enough there there yet to win the kinds of things that we all want to win. Secondly, we clearly need, and I think this is one of the lessons out of the last couple of years, we clearly will benefit from greater coordination among those organizations that do exist at the local level and the national level to leverage the power that we do have for things that really matter. Thirdly, I think we have learned that to the extent that we have an affirmative vision and ideas that speak to core American values, they can get real political salience. And whether it's on education and training or on other issues I think many of the ideas that we're going to be talking about are potentially winners. And they need to be tested, not just thought up in think tanks but run on the ground, in states and cities, as the living wage movement has done, as other movements have done. To the extent we get new ideas in national politics, they won't come from Washington. They will come because people are figuring them out in their church basements, in their homes, in their communities. And finally, you know, we have a saying in community organizing that there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, and I think that could never be, that's incredibly true about the politics of inequality. I think we have to be somewhat fearless in this new era about holding the Democrats accountable to the core constituencies. If we don't, I don't know who will. There has to be, as in the Republican Party there is an edge of fear about betraying what they believe to be their base, which keeps them in check, there similarly has to be, we have to rebuild an edge of fear on the Democratic side. And that is a difficult thing to do and a controversial thing to do, but I don't think we'll make progress until that fear factor exists again.

So I do want to say that I enter this new period with a tremendous amount of optimism. Before nine-eleven we saw larger numbers mobilized in the streets on a whole range of issues, immigration, living wages than we'd seen in a long, long time. There is no question that nine-eleven has taken the wind to some degree out of those sails, but I think both the demographic, the organizational, the economic realities underneath that momentum at the local level are still present, and it's up to our imagination and our will to rekindle it over the next couple of years. But I think we can make great strides on this anniversary of Michael Harrington's The Other America in doing something serious about it. So thanks. [Applause]