Activating the Unemployed addresses this growing interest in work-oriented measures.  This represents a shift in the dominant discourse on social welfare from focus on the citizen's rights to social benefits to emphasis on their responsibilities to work and lead an active life.  In this volume, a distinguished array of international contributors provide cross-cultural perspectives to analyze recent diverse policy initiatives to activate the unemployed in nine countries.

Money, its acquisition and use, is a major concern of the modern world, a concern from which Christians are not excluded.  Poverty does not only affect the people who ar poor themselves but everyone else as well.  This book examines capitalism and socialism, while presenting the theological basis for Christian response to world poverty, both institutionally in churches, economic entities, and governments, and individually in taking a Christian's taks to feel compassion for others as they follow their Lord's example. 

RAL:  HC110.I5 C586 2000

Description:   The authors, social activists rather than economists, explain the growing economic insecurity and inequality in the U.S. While they do not have a comprehensive blueprint for change, they offer an analysis of the problems that they believe threaten human values and our quality of life.   The first three chapters explain the impact of the growing inequality on daily living; examine trends in income, wages, savings, and wealth; and consider the causes of inequality, such as the rise of corporate power and the decline of worker power.   While Chapter Four discusses the building of a fair-economy movement, the final chapter offers an action plan for reducing inequality with ideas such as lifting the income and wealth floor for people at the bottom; progressive taxation on income and wealth; and policies that fundamentally redistribute power and wealth.  While many will not agree with the ideas in this book, all voices should be heard in a democracy searching for solutions to economic problems.  The book is an engaging activist guide to closing the gap between the rich and everyone else in America, that is thoroughly illustrated with charts, graphs, and political cartoons.  Economic Apartheid in America is an action-oriented, movement-building guide to closing the widening gap between the rich and everyone else in the country.

The relationship between welfare caseloads and the economy is one of the key issues addressed in this new book edited by Sheldon H. Danziger.  Using the most current data available, a group of the nation's leading researchers examines the effects of welfare reform prior to and after enactment of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).  What they find is a mixed picture.

On August 22, 1996 President Bill Clinton signed legislation that signaled the end of welfare as we had known it.  Aid to Families with Dependent Children (ADFC), which had its origins in the Social Security Act of 1935, was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), ushering in a new policy era of block grants, work requirements, and time limits.  The contributors to this book offer critical assessments of the current wave of welfare reform and its implications for families in poverty.  Chapters focus on federal poverty policies, welfare reform efforts in Illinois, the dynamics of welfare receipt, the transition from welfare to work, state waiver demonstrations, the effects of poverty on children and families, and the politics of welfare reform.

What were the effects of a "compassionate conservative" approach to fighting poverty in the past?  What might its future effect be?   These are the questions that guide this study of historical and contemporary attempts to promote the self-reliance and prosperity of America's urban poor by encouraging the practice of commonplace virtues such as diligence, sobriety, thrift, and family responsibility.  In Part One Joel Schwartz considers the efforts of four nineteenth-century moral reforms who expounded this strategy - Joseph Tuckerman, Robert M. Hartley, Charles Loring Brace, and Josephine Shaw Lowell.  Schwartz examines what they did (and why), the obstacles they faced, and their successes and failures in overcoming them.  Part Two describes the twentieth-century critique of moral reform.   Drawing from the work of figures such as Jane Addams, Walter Rauschenbush, and Frances Fox Piven, Schwartz traces the rise of a belief that the virtues promoted by the moral reformers were individualistic and "bourgeois," hence inapplicable to the lives of the poor.  Part Three assesses African Americans' historical commitment to the virtues of the moral reformers, which are apparent in the writings of figures as divergent as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Malcolm X.  Moving to the present, the author discusses the renewed commitment to a self-help strategy for fighting poverty evident in the widespread interest in the work of faith-based charities and in recent shifts in public policy.  He concludes by assessing the reasons to be hopeful - but also skeptical of the success of that strategy.

Description:  Using a case example of how Pennsylvania blue Shield trained, hired, and retained several hundred welfare recipients on its work force, From Welfare to Work offers a compelling success story and a broad discussion of welfare reform, public policy, and corporate social responsibility.  It also offers a practical explanation of the specific steps needed to establish such a program, including corporate tax incentives, business and government collaborations, and the special needs of welfare recipients.  Demonstrating that it is possible for corporate America to combine bottom-line goals with socially responsible goals, this book is essential reading for all corporate executives who combine concern for the well-being of their companies with a sense of social responsibility.

Description:   Against the backdrop of a robust economy, hundreds of thousands of people remain out of work for long periods of time, causing economic psychological hardships for entire families.  Hardest Times examines in depth what happens to men, and to their families, when they remain out of work for longer than six months, a period the government designates as long term unemployment.  Cottle examines long term unemployment as a traumatic event.  Through the words of men who have experienced long term unemployment, he demonstrates that work is crucial to the formation of a man's identity, and that without work, many men often find no purpose for living.  The in-depth studies that Cottle undertook reveal here why some men abandon their families or, in some instances, are driven to commit murder or suicide in the face of lingering unemployment.   These often-heart wrenching stories encourage readers to consider the implications of long term unemployment for the men who experience it, the families who endure it, and the society that tolerates it.

Description:  For the last quarter century, Americans (and much of the Western world) have had a passionate love affair with an old flame:  the market.  Blau, a professor at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, examines the consequences of this indulgence for the four-fifths of the population who gained little from this boom; explores the potential of market approaches in areas such as education, job training, and poverty and welfare; and suggests that, when we begin to see the market's flaws at some future date, we should recognize democratic accountability and economic security as the touchstones of a progressive response.  The problem with reforms that rely on the market, Blau urges, is they can't compensate for market deficiencies (indeed, the most vociferous market advocates deny the market has any deficiencies!)  Blau calls for thorough accountability in the workplace as well as government, recognizing that employees are stakeholders -- in fact vital partners -- in producing the "value added" that is the corporation's ultimate product. 

Insecure Times systematically analyzes social and economic insecurity and its effect on a range of issues and institutions, including its causes, the role of the state, housing, and family life. 

Description:  Harvard anthropologist Katherine S. Newman explodes the myth of America's unmotivated poor in No Shame in My Game, a study of low-wage workers and their job-seeking peers in Central Harlem.   This is also frontline perspective:  in addition to hundreds of interviews, Newman also put her research assistants behind the counters of the fast-food restaurants alongside the study's subjects.  The results show that America's largest group of impoverished citizens is not the unemployed, but the working poor.  But what will move readers most is the struggling workers themselves, who suffer the indignities, exhaustion, and low compensation of jobs as "burger flippers" because, as one fast-food restaurant employee, Larry, says, "It's my job.  You ain't puttin' no food on my table; you ain't puttin' no clothes on my back.  I will walk tall with my Burger Barn uniform on."  Newman explains how obstacles such as cuts in welfare, lack of health insurance (almost half of employed Americans under the poverty line have no coverage), and substandard education undercut even the most determined efforts of working poor like Larry.  Fortunately, she also offers a thick list of old and new potential solutions to this crisis, from Earned Income Tax Credits to new training programs linking private industry to public schools with at-risk youth.

Depending on where she lives in the 1990s, a low-income mother with dependent children faces different work expectations and approaches to government benefits.  The Canadian province of Alberta considers a mother to be 'employable' when her youngest child is six months old.  In Australia, the comparable age is sixteen years.  Yet both Canada and Australia have ostensibly 'restructured' their social programs in the past few years along neo-liberal lines, to create less state involvement in the labour force and family life, lower taxes and government expenditures, and less generous social programs.  This book discusses why cross-national differences and similarities exist in the recent restructuring of social programs for low-income mothers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

This study is based on empirical work that examines historical levels of states' UI trust fund balances between recessions, and the specific methods used to finance trust fund balances.  These methods include traditional means of financing, tax-based indexing, state reserve funds, and "flexible" financing such as solvency taxes and legislative response mechanisms.   In addition, he addresses the tradeoffs of financing UI debt by either borrowing from the U.S. Treasury or state bond issues.

Description:   The young people defined as "Gen Xers" in the media and popular imagination almost never include poor or working-class young adults.  These young people - a huge and important part of our society - are misrepresented and silent in our national conversation.  In The Unknown City Michelle Fine and Lois Weis offer a groundbreaking, theoretically sophisticated ethnography of the lives of young adults (ages 23 to 35), based on hundreds of interviews.  We discover their views on everything from the construction of "whiteness" and affirmative action to the economy, education, and new public spaces of community hope.  Finally, Fine and Weis point to what is being done and what should be done in terms of national policy to improve the future of these remarkable women and men.

Whose Welfare? concludes with a historical analysis of activism among poor women.  By illuminating that legacy, the volume challenges readers to build progressive agendas from the demands and actions of poor and working-class women.

Description:  University of New Hampshire sociologist Duncan looks at the social relations and political and economic institutions that perpetuate poverty in rural America.  "Blackwell" (place names have been changed) in Appalachia and Dahlia on the Mississippi Delta, are two of the poorest areas in the U.S. Duncan studied the lives of the residents of these places, and what she found was communities where the "haves" and "have nots" inhabit different worlds within historically structured, rigid class and, in Dahlia, race divisions.  In both places local elites (coal company operators in Blackwell, plantation owners in Dahlia) control not only the economic life of the community but the political life as well.  Their power is near absolute, and they use public institutions, including schools, to further their own interests, and punish those who cross them.  The poor remain "powerless, dependent, and do not participate" in civic life.  A kind of stasis sets in where the poor see no option but to give way to those who have always had power, and the powerful resist change as it may threaten their status.  In contrast, "Gray Mountain," in northern New England, is a town with a strong civic culture based on a blue-collar middle class that has created public institutions from little league to effective schools that serve all in the community.  Duncan, through in-depth investigation and interviews, concludes that only a strong civic culture, a sense among citizens of community and the need to serve that community, can truly address poverty. Yet class and race relations in places like Blackwell and Dahlia preclude such a sense of community.  Her answer, going against so much conventional wisdom, is federal government intervention, especially to create equitable school systems where they do not exist.  Only such intervention, Duncan asserts, will give the poor the knowledge of alternatives, the hope they not lack.