Resource added for the Psychology (includes Sociology) 108091 courses.

Welfare mothers are popularly viewed as passively dependent on their checks and averse to work. Reformers across the political spectrum advocate moving these women off the welfare rolls and into the labor force as the solution to their problems. Making Ends Meet offers dramatic evidence toward a different conclusion: In the present labor market, unskilled single mothers who hold jobs are frequently worse off than those on welfare, and neither welfare nor low-wage employment alone will support a family at subsistence levels. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein interviewed nearly four hundred welfare and low-income single mothers from cities in Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois, and South Carolina over a six year period. They learned the reality of these mothers' struggles to provide for their families: where their money comes from, what they spend it on, how they cope with their children's needs, and what hardships they suffer. Edin and Lein's careful budgetary analyses reveal that even a full range of welfare benefits—AFDC payments, food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies—typically meet only three-fifths of a family's needs, and that funds for adequate food, clothing and other necessities are often lacking. Leaving welfare for work offers little hope for improvement, and in many cases threatens even greater hardship. Jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled women provide meager salaries, irregular or uncertain hours, frequent layoffs, and no promise of advancement. Mothers who work not only assume extra child care, medical, and transportation expenses but are also deprived of many of the housing and educational subsidies available to those on welfare. Regardless of whether they are on welfare or employed, virtually all these single mothers need to supplement their income with menial, off-the-books work and intermittent contributions from family, live-in boyfriends, their children's fathers, and local charities. In doing so, they pay a heavy price. Welfare mothers must work covertly to avoid losing benefits, while working mothers are forced to sacrifice even more time with their children. Making Ends Meet demonstrates compellingly why the choice between welfare and work is more complex and risky than is commonly recognized by politicians, the media, or the public. Almost all the welfare-reliant women interviewed by Edin and Lein made repeated efforts to leave welfare for work, only to be forced to return when they lost their jobs, a child became ill, or they could not cover their bills with their wages. Mothers who managed more stable employment usually benefited from a variety of mitigating circumstances such as having a relative willing to watch their children for free, regular child support payments, or very low housing, medical, or commuting costs. With first hand accounts and detailed financial data, Making Ends Meet tells the real story of the challenges, hardships, and survival strategies of America's poorest families. If this country's efforts to improve the self-sufficiency of female-headed families is to succeed, reformers will need to move beyond the myths of welfare dependency and deal with the hard realities of an unrewarding American labor market, the lack of affordable health insurance and child care for single mothers who work, and the true cost of subsistence living. Making Ends Meet is a realistic look at a world that so many would change and so few understand.

Including education has profound consequences, undergirding the case for the productivity of welfare state programs and the explanation for why all rich nations have large welfare states, and identifying US welfare state leadership. From 1968 through 2006, the United States swung right politically and lost its lead in education and opportunity, failed to adopt universal health insurance and experienced the most rapid explosion of health care costs and economic inequality in the rich world. The American welfare state faces large challenges. Restoring its historical lead in education is the most important but requires investing large sums in education, beginning with universal pre-school and in complementary programs that aid children's development.

Comprehensive economic evaluation of overtime working includes theoretical, empirical and policy aspects based on international evidence.

WAGES are of prime importance in any advanced economy such as ours. They affect us all far more than seems evidenced in our concern about them. Everyone buys wages, in a sense, with every purchase he makes. And three-fourths of all incomes in the United States represent pay for work done in the employ of another. So nearly every one of us is on both sides of the wage exchange, in one way or another. We all know in a general way that wages have been rising for a long time in this country, but there is evidence aplenty that the economic principles which apply to wage problems are not well understood. Probably they are no better understood now than in the early thirties when measures adopted to combat the depression proved to be such colossal failures. Fearing another depression like that which followed World War I, we now seem enmeshed in chronic and progressive inflation, which Lenin once said was a sure and simple way to destroy the capitalist system. Our “prosperity” now seems to be riding on the horns of a dilemma that will surely end in the destruction of capitalism unless we can resolve this problem which in large measure is a wage problem. I shall deal with the wage problem in a manner that may seem oversimplified. Basic principles always have a way of seeming simple. Yet if they be principles, they can no more be oversimplified than can the law of gravity or the listing of chemical elements be oversimplified. What is needed in our complex society of millions of products sold by millions of business units to over a hundred million traders through billions of transactions each year is to get back to simple economic principles. These are working tools for solving problems that seem more complex than they really are. Two Roadblocks In helping another person to resolve this wage problem, it seems to me that two roadblocks to his understanding may first have to be removed. They obstruct a thorough insight into the wage problem. One roadblock is the difference between money wages and real wages, which results in serious misconceptions. In a period of inflation such as we have long been enduring, or of deflation, a comparison of money wages in two separate years tells you no more about their relative worth than would a comparison of a daily wage in the United States with that of Chile — $10 as compared with 5,000 pesos, for instance. Money wages must first be converted into real wages before we can see their patterns of change. The other roadblock has to do with the effect of unions on wages. If you were to describe an elephant to a person who has never seen one and who had never even seen a picture of one, you probably would not describe a flea and then say that an elephant doesn’t look like that. This would not be very helpful unless the person believed that an elephant looked like a flea. In the case of unions, there seems to be a firm and widespread belief about their effect on wages such that this question must be dealt with at the outset. So we shall start there. When speaking of wages and what makes them rise, the meaning will be the over-all level of wages — the general welfare, in that sense. To speak otherwise of wages, such as wage rates for one or a few persons, would involve special situations which are not the object of this discussion. A bank robber might succeed in gaining a high wage for his hour of work; a few persons, through power and special privilege, might likewise gain some short-time advantages at the expense of the others who work. But such gains of some wage earners at the expense of other wage earners are not the aim or meaning of this analysis of why wages rise.

Exploring the consequences of federal devolution on state budgets, this work deals with three major areas of concern: the effect of moving large numbers of welfare recipients into labour markets; the planned federal reforms in the health care field; and trends in federal aid.