The Uncertain Hour

This week, we’re dropping into your feeds to tell you about another podcast we make here at Marketplace that we think Uncertain Hour listeners will like. It’s called “How We Survive.” And it’s about how people are navigating solutions to a changing climate. We’re excited to bring you the first episode of the new season.

Buckeye, Arizona is a small city with dreams of becoming “the next Phoenix.” It’s one of the fastest growing cities in the country. In the past few decades, its population has ballooned more than 20-fold and the city plans to add more than 100,000 new homes in coming years.

The only catch? Growth requires water. And Buckeye doesn’t have enough. So what’s a small city with big dreams to do? Part of the answer lies in one scrubby acre of land way out in the desert that’s owned by a group of investors who are banking on water scarcity.

Since the 1990s, most cash welfare recipients have been required to get a job or do mandated “work activities” to receive their monthly check. These requirements are intended to help parents who are struggling financially into jobs that will help keep them out of poverty and off government benefits. But is the work requirement system meeting either of those goals?

According to our analysis of data from Wisconsin, an average of nearly 70% of employed welfare participants worked at temp companies. These companies put people to work in other companies, trying to fill temporary jobs where the work is often grueling and the pay low. 

Welfare-to-work has been so good for temp agencies that some of them actively lobby for more work requirements for government benefits through campaign contributions and white papers. “It gives us a pool of more people we can help,” said the CEO of one temp company whose franchises have ranked among the top 10 employers of Wisconsin welfare participants. “A person loses self-esteem when they don’t go back to work. Whether it’s voluntary or involuntary work is very important for their psyche.”

On this episode, host Krissy Clark looks at the cozy relationship between for-profit welfare companies and temp companies desperate to put people to work in some of the country’s most precarious jobs. Plus, a frank discussion with an architect of our modern welfare-to-work system, former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson.

For a deeper dive into the numbers about how private welfare contractors make money and some other eye-popping data, check out the work of our colleagues at APM Research Lab.

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Antoine Dukes is a natural born salesman. And when he started working for a for-profit welfare company, he figured it was a good way to put his skills to work helping needy Americans find jobs that would get them back on their feet.

But when he tried to avoid sending people to minimum wage jobs, something happened that made him realize that these welfare companies are rewarded with taxpayer dollars for getting welfare recipients into just about any job, even if the job would not support their family and would leave them still needing government help to make ends meet. 

In this episode, host Krissy Cark sheds light on this opaque business model — and has a frank conversation with the founder of America Works, one of the first for-profit welfare-to-work companies in the country. 

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In 1961, city officials in Newburgh, New York, declared war on their poorest residents by proclaiming, without evidence, that the city was overrun by welfare cheats. It was a moment in history when the belief that certain people need to be forced to work gained influence in our country’s system to help poor people.

Officials led by City Manager Joseph Mitchell launched a campaign of harsh crackdowns on welfare recipients that included surprise police interrogations, rigid eligibility restrictions and forcing able-bodied men to work to receive a welfare check. But were these new rules designed to reduce welfare fraud or to target members of the city’s Black community? 

After a national controversy erupted over Newburgh’s welfare rules, the city found  itself at the center of a fight over welfare policy that’s still playing out today.

Producer Peter Balonon-Rosen takes us back to Newburgh to tell the story of its war on welfare and how race became central in a battle over welfare policy.

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In the 1950s, a rumor that people were moving to Newburgh, NY to live off welfare riled up the city. When city leaders essentially declare war on welfare — and the people who get it — things tumble out of control.

Plus, how national suspicions grew about people getting welfare right as more black people started gaining more access to welfare benefits.

Host Krissy Clark and producer Peter Balonon-Rosen go back in history to tell a surprising origin story of part of our welfare system — and take a magnifying glass to how our country determines who deserves help and who doesn’t.

Give today to help cover the costs of this rigorous reporting. Every donation makes a difference!

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A single mother of two in Chicago was working and taking classes to become an addiction counselor when her life fell apart. The father of her youngest child assaulted her so badly it put her in the hospital. Worried for her safety and the safety of her children, she fled to Milwaukee and signed up for welfare, hoping it would live up to the promise of providing employment and self-sufficiency.

Instead, she ended up in a Kafkaesque maze of “work activities” that didn’t lead to a real job or independence. When her life hits another crisis, things really start to fall apart.

Host Krissy Clark examines the roots of this cookie-cutter regime and discovers that a fundamental part of the problem lies in how the federal welfare reform bill measures success– in a way that has little to do with whether the program is helping participants gain family-sustaining employment.

Give today to help cover the costs of this rigorous reporting. Every donation makes a difference!

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When a struggling mother of two in Milwaukee hits hard times, she turns to a local welfare office for help — a welfare office outsourced to a private, for-profit company. Inside, staff preach the power of work, place people into unpaid “work experience” and enforce work requirements for welfare recipients, all in the name of teaching self-sufficiency.

But who’s set to benefit most? That struggling mother or the for-profit company she turned to?

Host Krissy Clark takes listeners into the world of for-profit welfare companies to examine America’s welfare-to-work system, work requirements and the multimillion-dollar industry that’s grown up around it.

There is a growing chorus of politicians who argue that there’s a simple solution to help all kinds of problems, including poverty, labor shortages and government deficits: putting more work requirements into government welfare programs. Some are calling it Welfare Reform 2.0. But as politicians push these programs in the name of ending “welfare dependency,” behind the scenes there’s something else going on. A group of multimillion-dollar corporations have built their businesses on these welfare-to-work policies. And critics say they have cultivated their own cycle of dependency on the federal government. 

So where did this idea of requiring labor in exchange for government aid come from? And does it actually help people climb out of poverty? Turns out the answers is surprising — and troubling.

“The Uncertain Hour” is back with season six, a deep dive into the welfare-to-work industrial complex and the multimillion-dollar companies running for-profit welfare centers.

It’s been 25 years since our country upended its welfare system – and so we’re looking back at our very first episode.

We spent that first season of “The Uncertain Hour” reflecting deeply on what welfare had become. Each of those episodes can still help us understand what’s happened to one of our nation’s oldest safety net programs, on this anniversary of its so-called “reform.”

In this reprise episode, we tell the story of the “Magic Bureaucrat” — the former director of a suburban county welfare office who helped launched the welfare reform movement 25 years ago, with the aid of a self-produced pop album.

Check out the whole first season to learn more — from the story of a woman who exposed the racism built into the welfare system from its early days, to an investigation of some of the very surprising ways states have spent federal welfare funds in the last 25 years. Money has gone to marriage counseling workshops, college scholarships for middle-class families and religious “crisis pregnancy centers” that try to steer women away from abortions.