When my unemployment checks from the steel mill ran out, I went to the employment office. Anything but welfare. The woman there wasn’t very helpful at first–“Do you have any references?” I knew my old boss would give me one, but I didn’t have anything written down. Finally she lined me up with a dry-cleaning job–not much money, and I wouldn’t get paid for two weeks. But it was better than nothing.
Good thing I’d bought plenty of tokens with my first paycheck. I was off to the pawnshop, where I managed to pick up an old refrigerator cheap. And back to show the social worker the receipt. She let our kids come home, and we ate together for the first time in days. We still had no stove, and I’d been ignoring the utility bills all month.
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My month as a downwardly mobile ex-steelworker lasted just one hour, in the basement of Resurrection Catholic Church just east of Wayne in the far northwest corner of Du Page County, and that was plenty. Along with five men and about 50 women–most of them members of the church who had been invited by its social concerns committee–I took part in a “welfare simulation” (a poverty simulation, really) in which each of us played the role of a poor person. For that hour we lived in a world where ATMs mean nothing and you had better get a receipt when you pay cash, because the person you’re paying just might claim you didn’t.
The idea of the simulation is to make middle-class people feel what it’s like never to have enough money for necessities–and at the same time to be subject to the arbitrary rules and condescending coldness of a welfare bureaucracy. The simulation is simple–chairs, tables, and paper. In the center of the big room are clusters of chairs, each group labeled with a family name. People choose where to sit, and each family gets an envelope containing information on who’s in the family, their income, and their assets, if any. It’s up to each group to decide who will play which role. Tables around the edges of the room represent the significant institutions in the family’s life: the employment office, welfare office, transportation-pass office, bank, currency exchange, grocery store, welfare rights organization, legal assistance, pawnshop, foster care, jail. The “poor families” in the center are usually almost all white; at least half of the “bureaucrats” outside are black, many of them current or former welfare recipients.
Among these activities is Women for Economic Security (WES), a group of current and former welfare recipients who lobby the General Assembly and the Department of Public Aid and who also get training and education. Two years ago WES, which is coordinated by Eddye Owens, brought together an interracial and interclass group of church women–Creating Bridges–to talk about welfare-to-work issues.
“Mr. Casper” said, “I felt really below the earth because everybody was so cold. This world has to change in some way.” Owens responded with the story of a woman who waited in a public-aid office from 8 to 5 on a Monday and from 8 to 1 on Tuesday before she was told she was at the wrong office. “Mrs. Folly” outdid her by waiting three “weeks” at the welfare office during the simulation. “We started out trusting that the system would help us along. After a while I learned you can’t trust anybody.” Not even yourself. “Mrs. Guten,” an AFDC mother of two, lost one child to foster care and bought no groceries at all during the first week. “But when I got a dental bill I made sure that was paid!” she said. “It was hard to think.”
It’s ironic to hear such a criticism in Du Page County, which, of all the built-up areas on the planet, must be one of the most hostile to pedestrians. But after a time it seemed that Owens might have wanted to plant a “Kunes” in the audience if he hadn’t already been there: his dour skepticism seasoned the debriefing session and roused the other participants to reply. A former computer programmer and young mother of two said, “Right now in my own life I’m very comfortable. If we did not have a car, I could put the two kids in the stroller–if I were fortunate enough to have a double stroller–and push them a mile to the grocery store. But I could only take home a small bag. I’d have to do the same thing again the next day, and the next. And that’s with the resources I have now. How could I possibly do any self-improvement with all my time taken up with these menial tasks? Where can these people find any time to get themselves off the system?”
