28
welfare reform policy is a form of the “new racism” in that it is a race-neutral policy that
reinforces racial inequality by virtue of its failure to address pre-existing racial barriers
operating in society, in this case the economy, especially labor markets and most
especially hiring practices.
Welfare reform is requiring many of the single mothers receiving assistance to go
to work, many for the first time. They need to be earning enough money so they can
support their families as breadwinners even as they continue in their roles as
homemakers. They need to earn enough money so as single mothers they can cover the
additional costs of having their children cared for when they are at work. Yet, most of the
studies of women leaving welfare show they are earning approximately only about
$7.50/hour (Loprest 1999). Even with income supplements from policies such as the
Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), these low wages are not enough to support a family.
In addition, these jobs often come without other needed benefits such as health insurance.
Part of the problem for nonwhite recipients is the lingering forms of employment
discrimination extant in the labor market. Harry Holzer and Michael Stoll (2002) find that
employer demand for welfare recipients is race-related. The job market continues to not
be sufficiently open to hiring nonwhites and this makes their transition off welfare more
difficult than ostensibly race-neutral welfare policies would assume. In their study of the
determinants of employer demand for welfare recipients using survey data on employers
in four large metropolitan areas, Holzer and Stoll find that the “conditional demand” for
black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) welfare recipients lags behind their representation
in the welfare population, and seems to be more heavily affected by employers’ location
and preferences than by their skill needs or overall hiring activity. Thus, for Holzer and
Convention