With welfare legislation for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families reauthorization making its way through the House and Senate, interviews with the following are available:
LIZ ACCLES
Accles is with the Welfare Made a Difference National Campaign, which is organizing with a host of other groups the “Shirts Off Our Backs Day” in Washington, D.C. — a series of events and actions on Monday, October 27. The group documents the stories of people who have received welfare and struggled out of poverty.
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HEATHER BOUSHEY
An economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Boushey coauthored the recent paper “Jobs Held by Former Welfare Recipients Hit Hard by Economic Downturn.” She said today: “The poor performance in the job market has made finding a job more difficult for virtually everyone, but particularly for poor and disadvantaged workers. The TANF reauthorization bills in the House and Senate increase the work requirement, but work is harder to come by.”
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GWENDOLYN MINK
Co-editor of the just-published book Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics, Mink is a member of The Women’s Committee of One Hundred — a group of feminist scholars and advocates who are “concerned about the connection between women’s poverty and our society’s failure to support caregiving work when it is performed by poor women for their own families.” She said today: “The TANF reauthorization bill reported out by the Senate Finance Committee will do great damage to poor families who need welfare. Inadequate child care funding is only the tip of the iceberg. Republican plans to tighten the regulation and restriction of TANF parents undermine the rights of poor mothers to care for their children and infringe their basic equality and liberty guarantees…. The Finance bill also wastes federal money on marriage and fatherhood promotion programs which infringe basic constitutional privacy guarantees, threaten mothers’ safety, and will push mothers into dependency relationships with men that they may not want. Moreover, marriage promotion deflects attention away from the real causes of poverty for mothers and children — women’s low wages, the lack of child care and the lack of economic recognition for the work of raising children.” Mink is also author of the books The Wages of Motherhood and Welfare’s End.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167