by Phil Wilayto Coordinator, A Job is a Right Campaign, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Before the managers of any large corporation shut down a factory, they take extraordinary steps to prepare for the action. High-level strategy meetings are held with the department heads of production, human resources and public relations. The company's relationship with the union is examined. Members of the local city council and county board are discussed, one by one. There is consideration given to any activist organizations in the area.
All this is done with the aim of neutralizing any possible opposition to the shutdown. Deals are cut, private promises are made, a public relations campaign is carefully prepared and implemented. And finally, orders are given to beef up security, including alerting the local police department as to the day the shutdown will be carried out.
If the management of one company routinely goes through such extensive preparations before closing a single plant, what greater steps would the corporate class as a whole take before it moves to close down a 60 year-old social program that millions of people depend on for their survival and many millions more benefit from?
Long before so-called "welfare reform" swept the country, preparations were being made for this historic reversal of government commitment to the poor. Books like "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve" were funded, written and distributed to "prove" that welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children were "counter-productive" and only further institutionalized poverty. Supposedly objective studies were published that painted a picture of widespread corruption and abuse in the welfare system. Demeaning and racially-tinged code words were popularized. Legislative programs were drafted, not by legislators, but by professional right-wing ideologues. And finally, "grassroots representatives" were recruited to help explain to low-income communities why the new "reform" programs were in their best interests.
A key player in this preparation for welfare reform was the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee. Best-known for its funding of the book "The Bell Curve," a piece of pseudo-science that attempted to "prove" the racial inferiority of Black people, the foundation is based on the family fortune of Milwaukee's Allen-Bradley manufacturing company. Harry Bradley was an early financial supporter of the arch-reactionary John Birch Society, based in nearby Appleton, Wisc.
In 1984, Allen-Bradley was bought out by the Rockwell International Corp., with much of the profits from the sale going to the foundation. With a half billion dollars in assets, Bradley is now the preeminent conservative grantmaker in the country. It is a leading representative of the family fortune-based foundations set up by Corporate America since the early Seventies to both mold public opinion and initiate pro-corporate government policy.
Bradley's current president, Michael Joyce, formerly headed up the New York-based Olin Foundation and was a member of the Reagan presidential transition team. Joyce had been recruited to lead Olin by Wall Street investment banker William Simon, who later served as Reagan's Treasury Secretary. When Joyce left Olin for Bradley, Simon replaced him as Olin's president.
Along with Olin, Bradley funds the major right wing think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, which developed the 20-volume "Mandate for Leadership" for the Reagan Administration, giving Reagan his program of supply-side economics, massive budget cuts and the Star Wars missile "defense" plan. Bradley funds the Manhattan Institute, which supplies New York City Mayor Giuliani with his position papers on privatization and budget cuts. Also the American Enterprise Institute, home to such racist authors as Charles Murray ("Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve") and Dinesh D'Souza ("The End of Racism.")
Bradley funds a host of anti-labor, anti-poor public interest law firms, state-based think tanks and conservative publications. Further, through organizations like the Philanthropy Roundtable, it plays a key role in coordinating the activities of other conservative grantmakers, such as the Olin, Sarah Scaife and Smith Richardson foundations.
So-called "public interest" law firms funded by Bradley played pivotal roles in the recent overturn of affirmative action in the state university systems of California and Texas. Bradley-funded lawyer Clint Bolick drafted the legislation that would end affirmative action on the federal level. It was Bolick who, in an opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal, coined the term "Clinton's Quota Queen" to attack Lani Guinier, President Clinton's nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. Bolick has also defended Wisconsin's "school choice" program against legal challenges by the program's opponents. That program, the development of which was heavily funded by Bradley, is now being viewed as a national model for school reform.
Bradley is only the 51st largest foundation in the country, but it's the biggest one that concentrates on promoting racist, anti-labor policies. And because it's also by far the largest foundation of any kind in Wisconsin and maintains a close relationship with the state's reactionary governor, Tommy Thompson, it has been able to use the state as a kind of social laboratory for its right-wing initiatives. This is particularly true in the areas of school choice and welfare reform, but also includes the issues of prison labor and child welfare. For Bradley, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and even the entire public school system all fall under the heading of "the regulatory welfare state" that is targeted for destruction.
W-2 is essentially a program designed to create a large pool of super-low-wage workers to serve the needs of businesses unwilling to pay a living wage. What distinguishes W-2 from other welfare reform programs is that, as of this past September 1, it forces all former welfare recipients to either work or be actively engaged in job-hunting. No exceptions are allowed: not for the disabled, for students, for mothers of infants as young as twelve weeks, for teenaged mothers living with their parents or for those with mental disabilities or alcohol or drug dependencies -- all must work.
Furthermore, since there are few alternatives in poor, inner-city neighborhoods to welfare or now workfare, punitive removal from the program means the loss of any income. And this can mean the loss of one's own children, since with no visible means of support, the county or state can take away the children of someone who has been "sanctioned" off the program. For this reason, the W-2 worker is really a captive worker, making W-2 a modern-day form of slavery.
It was Bradley that funded the books "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve" that helped prepare public opinion for the destruction of the welfare system. In Wisconsin, Bradley funded a bogus "study" that purported to show that large numbers of Illinois residents were illegally collecting welfare checks from Wisconsin. Then, through a grant to the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, Bradley funded the development of the W-2 program itself.
Hudson is a right-wing think tank whose board of directors includes former vice president Dan Quayle and former NATO commander and Nixon chief-of-staff Gen. Alexander Haig. Two of its priorities are the dismantling of the Social Security system and the privatization of the public school system. Using money provided by Bradley (and also the Stewart Mott and Annie E. Casey foundations), Hudson opened an office in Madison, Wisc. and spent two years working with state officials to develop W-2.
Another Bradley-funded outfit, the Washington, D.C.-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (Robert L. Woodson, Sr., president) has played a key role in the implementation of welfare reform, both nationally and here in Wisconsin. At the request of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the NCNE convened a "national task force" to make recommendations to Congress as to how "burdensome government regulations" could be removed from the delivery of services to the poor. (As if serving the poor is a goal of Newt Gingrich.) That task force met here in Milwaukee in a national conference jointly funded by Bradley and Milwaukee's Helen Bader Foundation. The resulting "recommendations" included ending requirements that organizations caring for young children be trained, certified, inspected or supervised.
Milwaukee is now seeing the results of that particular recommendation, as a system of "provisional" day care centers for W-2 mothers is being set up in inner city private homes, staffed with other W-2 mothers, with no inspections for the presence of lead paint, no formal training for the caregivers and no oversight by responsible agencies. While the W-2 mothers may themselves be excellent providers, the effort is systematically sabotaged by a lack of resources for nutritional programs, educational aids and structural improvements like proper fire escapes.
The passage of W-2 in Wisconsin -- a process directed as much by Democrats as by Republicans -- gave Bradley the chance to experiment with the lives of poor people in a much more detailed way. While most welfare recipients in the state are white (which is true for the country as a whole), the largest single concentration is in Milwaukee's Black community, making single Black mothers on welfare the prime target for W-2. Because Milwaukee is also one of the most hyper-segregated cities in the country, it makes a convenient, geographically defined "laboratory" for programs such as welfare reform and school choice. As a result, a tremendous amount of attention has been paid to neutralizing any possible opposition from the community to the implementation of W-2.
Heavy pressure is being exerted on churches and other institutions in the Black and Latino communities to cooperate with the W-2 system, primarily by "hiring" W-2 workers under the "community service" job category. These workers receive only their regular welfare grants, so the "employers" are receiving totally free labor under the guise of providing "work experience."
This is in addition to the tremendous amount of money pouring into the agencies awarded the contracts to administer the W-2 program. Through these primary contracts and then a multitude of sub-contracts, a whole constellation of non-profit agencies and community-based organizations have been seduced -- or forced -- into the W-2 system. The message is: Get with the program, or find yourself another line of work. The Bradley and Bader foundations continue to play a major role in the development of this network.
A particular threat to the cultural integrity of the community is the skyrocketing number of children being taken from their mothers and placed in foster homes. The time period for severing the legal ties of these children to their parents was reduced from one year to six months by the State and then to three months by the County. That means that just three months after a child is taken from its parents, he or she can be put up for adoption. And because the State recently took control of the child welfare system from Milwaukee County, Black children separated from their parents may well be routinely placed with white families outside their own community. Proposals for "group homes" and orphanages have also been raised.
One historical parallel would be the seizing of Native American children from reservations and their placement in "mission schools" in order to divorce them from their communities and culture. The Australian government recently agreed to pay reparations to the native Maori people for similar programs enacted in the past against their communities.
What's happening here in Milwaukee is more than just another form of welfare reform. It's an attempt to politically, economically and culturally transform an entire community so as to guarantee the smooth transition to a system of super-low-wage, captive labor for the benefit of the corporations. While the ultimate goal is the lowering of wages and social benefits for all poor and working people, the immediate target is the Black community.
This background to the development of W-2 is the focus of a 140-page report by the grassroots labor/community organization A Job is a Right Campaign in Milwaukee. The report also examines the particular corporations and large "non-profit" agencies that are now directly benefiting from W-2. Particular attention is paid to Goodwill Industries and Manpower, Inc., two key players that have a presence in many other cities.
Finally, the report offers a plan of action to counter workfare programs like W-2. If the essence of W-2 is to create a captive, low-wage workforce for the benefit of corporations unwilling to pay a living wage, then the solution is the unionization of workfare workers, with the goal of winning a union contract that guarantees decent wages, benefits and a legally binding grievance procedure.
The major battlegrounds over welfare reform, school choice, social security, etc. will be in states like New York and California with the largest numbers of poor and working people. But activists In those areas would do well to examine the prototypes of the programs now being developed in Wisconsin.
The complete, 140-page report can be ordered by sending name, address and a check or money order for $12.00 (includes shipping) to: A Job is a Right Campaign, PO Box 06053, Milwaukee, WI 53206. (Make check or money order payable to: AJRC/W2.)
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