organized—except a new work requirement. Liberal activists expressed their frustration with FAP’s hollow promise of an income floor to their congressional allies, through an organized campaign of phone calls, letter writing, public hearings, and private meetings.58
FAP missed its mark with liberals in part because support for the working poor was not a top priority for the liberal welfare reform coalition in the late 1960s. In the politics of labor rights and social provision after the New Deal, much of the organizing and advocacy for workers remained distinct from advocacy for the poor on public assistance. And liberal activists who were focused on the economic conditions of workers—such as trade union leaders—had serious concerns about the FAP strategy of income guarantees.
Labor objected to the gains that might accrue under FAP to employers paying low wages, through the combined effect of the work requirement and a government wage supplement for the working poor. Just as business leaders shared Anderson’s worries that FAP would diminish workers’ incentive and imperative to work, labor leaders shared Shultz’s concern that it would eliminate employers’ incentives to raise wages. A week before Nixon released his plan, AFL-CIO president George Meany declared flatly, “The AFL-CIO vigorously opposes the use of federal funds to subsidize the employers of cheap labor.” Three months later, the United Automobile Workers voiced concern that FAP would “freeze present wage levels, and subsidize the sweatshop employer.”59 Labor leaders were worried in part about the ripple effect of depressing wages throughout the nation’s wage structure. As a political strategy, therefore, they preferred regulations aimed at business—such as boosting the minimum wage—over increased spending strategies aimed at poor and near-poor workers. Some labor leaders also wanted a government-backed employment guarantee, one that would make the federal government the employer of last resort for all those unable to find work. This, they argued, would aid workers and tighten the job market.60
Although their concerns about FAP’s proposals for the working poor were pointed, the liberal coalition directed its strongest opposition at FAP’s provisions for the welfare poor. Many in the social work community backed the principle of a federally provided income guarantee, but they objected to the administration’s work measures as too punitive, and to FAP’s benefit levels as far too low.61 In its ninety-eighth annual meeting in June 1970, the National Conference on Social Welfare called for an adequate, federally financed income maintenance program for the poor—then sent telegrams to Senate members demanding passage of a plan with benefit levels more than triple those of FAP.62
Welfare recipients and rights advocates organized under the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) were the most vocal in their opposition. After sustained mobilization against the 1967 WIN amendments, the NWRO became the leading critical voice on the liberal left in the FAP debate. The organization wanted a minimum income of $5,500 for a family of four (not the $1,600 income floor proposed in FAP). This would bring the income of a mother with three children to approximately 50 percent above the poverty line, though it would still leave them in the bottom quarter of family incomes.63 The NWRO also objected to FAP’s work rules for welfare recipients. There was a logic behind the organization’s position. The NWRO’s base was heavily Northeastern and urban, and its active core was composed of African American women activists. Two-thirds of its members were from nine industrial states, with a particular concentration in New York City. Not coincidentally, current welfare recipients were concentrated in the Northeast and California. Nixon’s FAP offered little to this constituency. By one government estimate, the net income—in cash and in-kind benefits—of a welfare family of four living in public housing in New York City at the time was $5,665. The NWRO’s demand of $5,500 therefore reflected, in the view of organizers, nothing more than a principled refusal to take a step backward.64 This was a logical extension of the welfarist entitlement principle, but it smacked of unreasonable demands to the administration and to conservatives.
Liberal members of Congress shared the view that any proposed reform should ensure gains for families currently on welfare. The administration pointed out repeatedly that FAP would help the nation’s poorest welfare recipients, particularly in the South, and that it would expand assistance to many new recipients. But the fact remained that it would only raise the benefits of approximately 10 percent of current recipients. This led Fred Harris (D-Okla.), a leading welfarist Democrat (and rare Southern liberal), to pointedly question HEW secretary Elliott Richardson when he testified before the House in 1970: “Apart from the ten percent of AFDC families now living in the seven states making the lowest welfare payments, will any existing welfare family be better off?” Richardson’s answer confirmed many liberals’ primary reason for opposing FAP: “No.”65
FAP’s work requirement, moreover, did not play well among liberals. If conservatives read less into Nixon’s workfare rhetoric than the Nixon administration intended, then liberals read more into it—seeing a tough and punitive demand. Some used familiar arguments to challenge the premise itself, particularly for mothers of young children: these parents, they argued, were entitled to remain home to care for their children, if they so chose. Many of these advocates accepted the value of encouraging and creating opportunities for work—but like many New Deal welfarists a generation earlier, they believed work should be voluntary, and that any work obligations should not undermine the basic safety net. Testifying on behalf of three national religious bodies, John Cosgrove told Congress, “Mothers of school aged children should be given the choice of taking care of their children or accepting jobs or training.”66
In addition to challenging FAP’s work requirement, a number of liberal lawmakers and advocates demanded a debate on the consequences of pushing AFDC recipients into the existing low-wage labor market and the terms under which they would be integrated into it. It would be unconscionable, Representative Ronald Dellums (D-Calif.) argued on the House floor, to “provide an incentive for people to get off welfare” and have them join the “40 percent of the labor force in America who … earn between $5,000 and $10,000 a year and … are the working poor.”67 Incentives to work, they suggested, should come from better conditions and guarantees in the job market—not from punitive policies imposed by government. Abraham Ribicoff, former secretary of HEW and now a Democratic senator from Connecticut, pushed for “a strong program of public service employment” in jobs with good working conditions and “opportunities for career advancement.”68
Liberal advocates concurred: “Persons should not be referred to jobs paying less than the Federal minimum wage,” Cosgrove told Congress, and FAP should “be accompanied in special legislation by a higher minimum wage with broad coverage; renewed efforts to end discrimination, a fully-funded low-income housing program; and recognition of the Federal Government as the employer of last resort to ensure that there are in fact jobs for which people would be trained and to which they could be referred.”69 Absent safeguards regarding wages and conditions, the work requirement “would only serve to create a pool of cheap labor,” testified other liberal and labor leaders, undermining wages and working conditions for all workers.70 AFL-CIO legislative director Andrew Biemiller also demanded that Congress protect welfare recipients facing work requirements by including provisions stating that the employment must be suitable and that it must pay either the prevailing or the minimum wage, whichever was higher.71
The heated racial politics of welfare further undercut Nixon’s effort to build support for FAP. The larger civil rights community wavered between quiet skepticism and open hostility toward the Nixon plan, swayed in part by the NWRO’s staunch opposition. Leaders of black social service organizations such as the Urban League—already suspicious of the conservative president—were reluctant to support his plan.72 The NAACP did not actively oppose it but would not actively support it, urging significant changes. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights took a similar stance, underlining concerns about work requirements.73 Black leaders sought to expose the implications of FAP’s work requirements for disproportionate numbers of poor minorities. The black press, along with civil and welfare rights leaders, condemned the expanding effort to force welfare recipients
