Hands to Work: The Stories of Three Families Racing the Welfare Clock

Journalist LynNell Hancock has produced the book that finally tells the story of the people affected by former President Bill Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it." Anyone interested in social policy should be extraordinarily grateful for Hancock's eloquent, evocative work. Following the lives of three women for several years and documenting their struggles to get off welfare, Hancock details the bureaucratic difficulties and the every day obstacles -- like the lack of affordable, decent child care -- that make this goal so elusive. With a journalist's careful eye and graceful prose, Hancock interweaves each woman's story with detailed analysis about the history of national and NYC welfare reform. In the tradition of Jonathon Kozol, her work is page-turning, deeply moving, and intellectually astute. As the clock is about to run out on the five-year limit set by Clinton's legislation, Hands to Work couldn't be more important -- or timely.

Finally an antidote to five years of endless conservative cheerleading about how wonderful welfare reform has worked to get the unworthy poor off the public dole. The Personal Responsibility Act of 1996, signed by then Pres. Clinton, launched a massive remaking of how federal, state and local governments aid the poor and define who is deserving of help. By one measure, welfare reform has been an unmitigated success: it pushed millions of poor people off the rolls and into a limbo of dubious workfare programs that offered street cleaning, for one example in New York City, as a job training. What has this all meant for poor people buffeted by welfare reform? The policy wonks and elected officials have paid scant attention to that critical question.Luckily, journalist LynNell Hancock has trained her sights on the impact of welfare reform on real people--not the statistics we're usually offered. The women she shadows for several years in researching her book are as different as they could be: a Puerto Rican mother with a drug addiction; an African American mother fending off a ex-husband with a murder conviction; and a Russian immigrant with the drive to become a doctor. Hancock is our medium as we visit their lives and witness the absurdities, the indignities, and the incredible work invovled simply in being poor. All these women, Hancock included, deserve a merit badge for having confronted the welfare bureaucracy and survived its limitless hurdles, its rules crafted by people who live in mahongany paneled offices, not roach infested apartments. With careful, sharp-eyed reporting and lively prose, Hancock lets these women's stories--with all their flaws and strengths--come shining through. They are not heroines for being poor; these women are heroines for keeping hope alive in the face of countless humiliations and degradations and for continuing to fight for better lives for themselves and their children. As Congress prepares this spring to reconsider the 1996 welfare law, every member who will cast a vote should read this book. Beautifully written, politically astute but with no finger-wagging, Hands to Work is a must read for all who think they know anything about the poor among us.