Renata is 28 hours on the schedule I keep outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas — 28, no exceptions, the ceiling I drew so her Medicaid stays open and her SNAP card stays hungry enough to arrive. She bathes your father on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The lift track above his tub is the one I didn’t install. The Lord has not once asked me about the 28th hour.
Scott Winship and Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute write in National Review this week that the work requirements at the heart of welfare reform are the most effective tool we have to reduce dependency and poverty. That is the firm’s position, filed. The gentlemen describe the instrument. I hold the instrument. I set the hours it runs on. Come look at the schedule with me.
The line is the Affordable Care Act’s, and it is drawn at 30 hours. 2 more hours a week and the law would call Renata full-time. Full-time means an offer of coverage. The published average benchmark premium in Arkansas this year is $774 a month. The firm’s share of an offer would have been 80%. $619.20 a month I decline to spend. The 28-hour ceiling costs $0.
I have 184 under the same ceiling on the Pine Bluff roster. The arithmetic, in one place:
| The state’s average benchmark premium, Arkansas, this year | $774 / month |
|---|---|
| The firm’s share of the offer I decline to make, 80% | $619.20 / month |
| The law’s full-time line | 30 hours |
| Renata’s schedule | 28 hours |
| The price of the ceiling | $0 |
The ceiling pays me $113,932.80 a month. I will not show you the long division. The ceiling’s already done it.
Count it on your fingers if you need to.
The work requirement is what keeps her hand open for the wage I post. The relief is what keeps her at the wage I post. The wage is what keeps her Medicaid open. The Medicaid is what keeps her daughter alive. The schedule is what keeps me whole.
Winship and Corinth would call this a virtuous circle. I call it a loop, and I have closed it. The loop has teeth, and the teeth are her children’s appointments. Renata took her daughter to the dentist on the 9th of last month. She missed 3 hours. The attendance point docked her 4% of the week’s pay. The visit cost her $33.60 in lost wages. The county clinic added a $14 copay. I kept the $33.60 and moved on. She took her son to the WIC recertification on the 21st. Another 3 hours. Another 4%. The WIC office stamped her card. She came back smelling like a clinic and not like a place I own. The stamps are not mine. The benefits are not mine. The schedule that docks her 4% every time her children’s benefits demand an appointment is mine. The signature on the time sheet is mine.
Same Reform. Different floor.
Cora is a housekeeper on the night audit at the Comfort Inn off I-40 in West Memphis. She makes $7.25 an hour because $7.25 is the federal floor, and because the federal floor is the wage the state of Arkansas permits me to pay a TANF recipient assigned to my work-experience placement. The state refers her. The work requirement compels her. I sign the placement form. She makes 14 rooms per shift. The spray she uses on the tub is the bathroom cleaner the brand sent the hotel at $14.97 a case. The gloves are the thin nitrile pair from the back of the supply closet, sized large, because the right size was back-ordered. The sheets she strips and folds are the sheets you slept between last Tuesday on the drive to your sister’s wedding in Dallas. You paid $119 for the room. I kept $43.91 of that $119 after the chain, the franchise, and the property. A margin the work requirement lets me hold because the woman who turned the bed could not, that night, have walked away.
Let me put the numbers where you can see them.
The state of Arkansas pays my firm, Apex Workforce Solutions, a placement fee of $2.15 per worker per hour. I pay Cora $7.25 an hour, of which the state reimburses me $4.82 through the TANF work-supplement. Cora’s net cost, after the placement fee, runs me $2.43 an hour. I’m paying you, by way of your tax dollar, $4.82 an hour to clean a Comfort Inn. Thank you for the subsidy.
The math, in the earned column:
| Item | What I keep |
|---|---|
| Placement fee, less wage, less state subsidy | $2.43/hr per worker |
| Saved recruiting cost (the work requirement recruits for me) | $1,180 per hire |
| Saved onboarding cost (the state’s WEP orientation is my training) | $420 per hire |
| Saved unemployment insurance (the state carries the UI; I don’t) | $312 per quarter, per worker |
| Productivity gain from compulsory attendance | $0.74/hr per worker |
I run 247 placements. The arithmetic, annualized, is $1.93 million. Not bad for a thing I never had to ask for.
Read the next sentence twice.
$1.93 million is what I keep, in a year, because the State of Arkansas compels 247 women to clean Comfort Inns at $7.25 an hour.
The Reform did not announce itself as a wage cut. It announced itself as a moral restoration. The wage cut arrived at the same address, on the same day, in the same envelope. Same address. Same day. Same Reform. The state called it personal responsibility. I called it Tuesday’s payroll.
Cora’s back locked in March. She didn’t tell me. The state does not require her to tell me; the work-experience placement is a placement, not an employment, and the workers’ compensation I don’t carry. The state clinic that treated her back charged $87 to the Arkansas Medicaid program, which your tax dollar funds, and the clinic’s attending physician cleared her to return to 14 rooms a shift within 11 days because the clinic’s contract with the state measures return-to-work as a quality metric. She returned. The back locked again in June. She didn’t tell me. The state clinic cleared her again. The cycle is the cycle. Her back is not on my ledger. Her back is on yours.
You’re counting the way I count now. Good.
The freedom that arrived was mine. The discipline that arrived was hers.
One rung down, in Memphis: Tasha is 26 hours on the flatwork line at the industrial laundry I run off Lamar Avenue. 26, the same ceiling drawn 2 hours lower because the work is hotter and the bench is deeper. The refused object is not the same. Hers is the bus fare she cannot afford for the shift that starts at 5:30 a.m. Renata’s is the lift. 2 rosters under the same ceiling might be a coincidence. 184 schedules on the same line — that’s a design.
Lift your eyes off the one body for a moment. The lesson is bigger than this one floor.
I’ve spent 30 years grading men into this arithmetic at Warden University. My graduates sit in the firms that set your wage, and one of them priced your last raise. The 28-hour line is drawn by managers I trained, from a handbook I wrote, and they are graded on the margin. The best of them draw the ceiling at 28 without doing the subtraction at all, and I say that with the pride a teacher keeps for a prize student. The prize student sets the ceiling without ever being told why the ceiling exists. You are not looking at one placement firm. You are looking at a graduating class. It produces the next class. I am one professor. There are departments.
The Reform’s ledger, audited honestly, reads as a transfer from her body to my balance sheet, with the federal Treasury serving as the clearinghouse.
Step back. I want you to see the principle.
Welfare reform is not a partisan program. It is a managerial program. It is the principle that the cost of discipline should be borne by someone other than the disciplinarian, by the disciplined, in fact, and by the taxpayer who is told he is being charitable. It is the 1834 commissioner’s stone walls, written in 1996 ink. It is Cato selling the worn-out slave, the receipt for which lives on the same ledger as the work-experience placement form. The theological frame was already old when Paul sent Onesimus back to Philemon; the institutional frame was already old when the Speenhamland magistrates set the bread allowance; the American frame was already old when Frick posted 300 Pinkertons on the Monongahela to teach the men at Homestead that the union was the disorder and the lockout was the peace. Welfare reform is the most recent redraft. There will be another redraft.
The doctrine has been written down once, and I quote it because the verse settles the question Winship and Corinth declined to settle:
For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. — 2 Thessalonians 3:10
The bread follows the production. The production follows my schedule. The schedule is the translation. The relief is the engine. The work requirement is the lever.
The doctrine has an endgame. It is not in my job description. If the work requirement ever succeeded completely, if every family earned enough to leave the relief rolls, the lever would go slack, and the lever is the product. The gentlemen in the journals may work that out. I keep the current quarter. The current quarter is full. The next back is in the onboarding folder. I am told the Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps a table of back injuries among home-care aides. The binding on that report is not on my shelf. The books close on the 28th hour. That is the whole of the settlement I require.
The welfare state was the brief, expensive interruption between the plantation and the staffing agency. I haven’t built the staffing agency to escape the plantation; I’ve built it to inherit the plantation’s yield while the plantation’s maintenance obligation is paid by the very people the plantation once held. The TANF recipient is the modern sharecropper, with the difference that the crop is now the wage, and the merchant is now the state, and the rent is now the work requirement. The arrangement is not new. The arrangement is the oldest there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. The arrangement will outlast this decade’s vocabulary.
Return to the floor. Renata is on Tuesday. The lift for your father’s tub runs $1,500 installed. It pays for itself in 2.4 months of the $619.20 I keep. This is the 9th month of declining it. The refusal is not about the money. The money is the excuse. I have the order form. The order form is the only part of the tub I have ever touched. I have not asked Renata what she would prefer to do with a Tuesday. The placement fee is the same regardless. The back locks in October either way. The state does the recruiting. The Reform did the work.
The relief is the engine. The work requirement is the lever. The order form is in the drawer. Tuesday is on the schedule. The lift is not.
— Sterling A. Varice
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.