Leaving Welfare

Employment and Well-Being of Families
that Left Welfare in the Post-Entitlement Era

Introductory chapter | Table of Contents

Welfare recipients left the rolls in surprising numbers following enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. This exodus led many researchers to ponder the fate of welfare leavers, prompting an array of studies that examine how former recipient families fared during the first years after welfare reform. It also made researchers wonder whether welfare reform was a success in terms of helping leavers find work and reach self-sufficiency, or whether leaving welfare was merely an end in itself.

Acs and Loprest pull together information from a host of leaver studies to provide a bottom line assessment of what was learned. They compare welfare leaver outcomes across geographic areas and the nation as a whole. This effort allows them to paint a comprehensive picture of the employment, income, and hardships families experience after leaving welfare. Furthermore, Acs and Loprest go beyond summarizing results to draw out major findings, to put these findings in the context of national results, and then to discuss what they mean for welfare reform in general. They also propose ways to enhance income support programs that would help welfare leavers economically and encourage them to stay in the workforce.

The book begins with a discussion of the studies upon which this book is based, including the methods used in the studies and why the studies were selected for inclusion in the book. Acs and Loprest proceed to analyze national data that show that the majority of welfare leavers (about 60 percent) went to work after enactment of the PRWORA. While there is a fair amount of churning among this group, the jobs that leavers took typically pay more than the minimum wage but lack comprehensive benefits packages; for instance, fewer than half of these workers are eligible for paid sick leave.

The authors also discuss long term prospects for individuals who want to work, such as job retention and earnings growth, as well as their potential participation in programs including food stamps and Medicaid, and they examine welfare leavers who had a less successful experience under welfare reform. Many in this group choose not to work because they either don’t want to or don’t need to.

Finally, as a result of the booming economy of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the authors admit that the findings presented in this book may have been cast as a best-case scenario. Had the economy not been the job-creating machine that it was during this time, welfare leavers as a group almost certainly would have been worse off.

120 pp. 2004
$40 cloth ISBN 0-88099-311-1 / ISBN-13 978-0-88099-311-1
$15 paper ISBN 0-88099-310-3 / ISBN-13 978-0-88099-310-4

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