Volume 8 – Issue 3 – 2004
Wade T. Roberts and Tim Bartley
Jean-Claude Croizet and Marion Dutrevis
“Who Put the ‘Welfare’ in ‘Corporate Welfare’? Race, Gender, and the Critique of Business Subsidies”
Daniel Egan
University of Massachusetts – Lowell
Abstract: Political forces on both the left and right have, with increasing frequency, defined public subsidies for business as “corporate welfare.” While the concept has its origins in the New Left, it was discovered by the political mainstream only in the 1990s. As a result, the dominant definitions of the problem presented in political debate have been those associated with conservatives. The power of “corporate welfare” as a symbol in mainstream political debates today lies in its equation of government subsidies for business with social welfare received by the poor. As with social welfare, corporate welfare is said to create a culture of dependency that must be eliminated. I argue that this critique makes use of longstanding racial and gender constructions of worthiness that are central to the US welfare state. If the term is to reclaim its earlier radical meaning, greater effort must be made to changing the context in which “welfare” is defined.
“Battering and the Poverty Trap”
Lisa D. Brush
University of Pittsburgh
Abstract: Structured interviews with women on welfare (n=40) reveal the costs of taking a beating. Thirty-five percent of respondents reported having been physically abused by their current or most recent intimate partner. Compared with their peers, physically abused women earned less, worked fewer weeks, and more frequently worked part-time involuntarily. Women whose partners sabotaged their work effort experienced more hardships associated with poverty than did other respondents. The causal connections between the dual traps of poverty and abuse are complex. Irrespective of the direction of causality, battering and poverty diminish the lives of a significant proportion of women on welfare.
“‘The Battering State: Towards a Political Economy of Domestic Violence”
Madelaine Adelman
Arizona State University
Abstract: A political economy of domestic violence situates domestic violence within cultural-historical context to reveal the intersection between domestic violence and (1) the organization of the polity, (2) the arrangement of the economy, and (3) the dominant familial ideology expressed normatively through state policies. The combination of these components makes visible the articulation between domestic violence and an often invisible set of conditions in US society – structural inequality as shaped by “family values” and the logic of state-economy relations. The analysis of the political economy of battering as it intersects with poverty and globalization highlights the contours of “the battering state.”
“The Wages of Day Labor: Homeless Workers in the Temporary Help Industry”
Wade T. Roberts
University of Arizona
and
Tim Bartley
Indiana University
Abstract: This paper develops two theoretical perspectives on the distribution of wages in formal day labor markets – an economic view of day labor as an undifferentiated “spot market,” and an organizational view that emphasizes “market-making” organizations. We assess the utility of these theories with original survey data on homeless men in the formal day labor industry in Tuscson, Arizona, utilizing hierarchical linear models. Consistent with the spot market view, there is little differentiation in the market with respect to formal wage levels. However, once we take account of the hidden costs of employment, there is some variation in the “real wages” of day labor, which is explained by organizations’ use of practices that externalize costs onto workers. These findings suggest the utility of an organizational approach to understanding the operation of seemingly “marketized” forms of employment.
“Socioeconomic Status and Intelligence: Why Test Scores Do not Equal Merit”
Jean-Claude Croizet
Universite Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France
and
Marion Dutrevis
Universite Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Abstract: Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds perform worse on standardized tests than other students. Two experiments investigated whether the testing situation per se contributes to the relationship between social class and intellectual achievement. In Study 1, students from low or high social class took a GRE-like test that was described either as diagnostic or not of intellectual ability. When described as a measure of intellectual ability, low socioeconomic status (SES) participants performed worse than high SES participants. However, when the identical test was presented as nondiagnostic of intellectual ability, low SES participants scored as high as their SES peers. Study 2 extended this finding to an IQ-like test, the Advanced Progressive Matrices Test. The implications of these results with regard to the meaning of the relationship between social class and test scores are discussed.
“Services to African American Children in Poverty: Institutional Discrimination in Child Welfare?”
Nancy A. Rodenborg
Augsburg College
Abstract: Using national secondary case file data, this study addressed race, poverty and service equity in public child welfare. Two research questions were posed: (a) Do poor children and families receive services to meet the conditions of poverty? (b) Does service delivery impact African American and Caucasian children equitably? Answers to questions were framed within the context of institutional discrimination theory. Using descriptive and variance estimation statistics, African American children were found to be poorer on all indicators. Service disparity occurred due to higher African American poverty coupled with low overall rates of poverty-related service. Indirect institutional discrimination was suggested.