While most recent media coverage of the financial crisis focuses on the economic downturn’s impact on the middle class, in an article which ran last month in The Nation Katha Pollitt asks: “But what about the people who already were poor before the crisis? Like women on welfare?”
To help her answer that question Pollitt cites Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer’s new book on the subject Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market—an eye-opening account of how the welfare reforms of the past few decades have afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants’ economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.
In the article Pollitt argues that if welfare reforms were failing economically impoverished single-parents before, the financial crisis has greatly amplified the socially devastating effects they’ve had on America’s underclass. Read it online at The Nation website.