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[...] Both American and Mexican labor are cheaper for being divided, and there is no obvious reason to believe that more labor laws, like raising the minimum wage, will change this fact if there remains a surplus of undocumented workers to whom these laws technically apply, though in practice they are unenforced. The real wage, calculated as the average rate paid to documented and undocumented workers alike, explains Trump’s rise more than his virulent racism does. Racism is a side effect of a regime that keeps labor laws on the books only to look the other way when millions of brown people are subjected to conditions far beneath these standards.
The wall isn’t racist; the border is racist. The wall is an effort to force a broader recognition of the privileges the border grants to professionals, who are the primary beneficiaries of American immigration and trade policy, and to redistribute some of its racist benefits downward. The only solution to this problem is to raise the price of labor power in Mexico, and then everywhere else. But given the limited political horizon of the professional left, for whom a higher minimum wage for American citizens is the best that can be hoped for, perhaps the unemployed people of Indiana can be forgiven for thinking that the wall is more realistic.
[...] What most women needed, they argued, was not a blanket guarantee of political and legal equality with men but the economic security provided by protective legislation.
Both sides enlisted support from male allies. The Woman’s Party made common cause with business interests who benefited from unregulated access to women’s cheap labor, and the maternalists were backed by trade unionists who saw protective labor regulations as a way to keep women from competing for men’s jobs. As the labor movement gained influence in the 1930s, the maternalists’ power grew, and they succeeded in blocking the passage of the ERA indefinitely. When FDR was elected in 1933, many prominent maternalists were appointed to his administration, including his secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, which enabled them to play a decisive role in shaping the federal welfare state.
But while the maternalists’ protective legislation laid the groundwork for the New Deal’s federal labor regulations, the specifics were left to the men. Many of the benefits enshrined in the New Deal were tied to employment, but the drafters were careful to distinguish among different types of work, providing generous benefits to some workers and none to others. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the first federal minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws; the National Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed workers the right to bargain collectively; and Social Security’s old-age and unemployment insurance programs did not extend to many low-paid workers, including farm laborers, maids, housekeepers, laundresses, child-care workers, and companions to the elderly, thus excluding most women, as well as black men, from the economic security and political recognition these laws afforded to the white male industrial working class.
Bill introduced his plan to dismantle welfare, by that point called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, early in his campaign. Speaking before students at Georgetown in fall 1991, he claimed that the “New Covenant” he wanted to offer the American people could “break the cycle of welfare”:
Welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life. In my administration we’re going to put an end to welfare as we have come to know it. I want to erase the stigma of welfare for good by restoring a simple, dignified principle: no one who can work can stay on welfare forever. We’ll still help people to help themselves. And those who need education and training and child care and medical coverage for their kids — they’ll get it. We’ll give them all the help they need and we’ll keep them on public assistance for up to two years, but after that, people who are able to work, they’ll have to go to work, either in the private sector or through a community service job. No more permanent dependence on welfare as a way of life.
At the time, AFDC was perhaps the most widely reviled program in government history. Since its passage, in 1935, it had become a symbol of everything that was wrong with redistributive government programs. Among its most vociferous critics were welfare recipients themselves, who were subjected to a battery of moral tests and denied the dignity and title of a worker, no matter how much unwaged housework and child care they did. Although AFDC gave all unemployed mothers the right to benefits, states were free to set additional eligibility limits, and many did. In 1943, Louisiana became the first state to institute “employable mother” laws, popular in the rural South, which suspended benefits to mothers at planting and harvest time. “Suitable home,” “man in the house,” and “substitute father” laws denied benefits to mothers who caseworkers could prove were having regular sex, the regulations being loose enough that “regular” was interpreted as anywhere from once a week to once every six months. Social workers were often sent to examine the homes of welfare recipients, searching for unwashed dishes and unmade beds. How you were treated depended on where you lived: the laws tended to be harsher in regions with more black mothers on welfare. Payments in the South were, on average, about half as large as in other parts of the country. As black Americans migrated to northern industrial cities, those cities’ welfare laws became more restrictive.
Having abandoned the maternalists’ sentimental defense of motherhood as a sacred calling, most second-wave feminists had no terms in which to mount a convincing justification for income support to poor mothers. Other women were working; why shouldn’t they work too? But for middle-class women, work meant public recognition, self-determination, the right to be seen as autonomous individuals and to participate in civic life. For welfare mothers, especially black women, who made up two-thirds of all domestic workers by 1960, it meant watching other women’s children, preparing their food, and scrubbing their floors, services that professional women increasingly relied on as they entered the workforce in greater numbers. The version of welfare reform Bill Clinton envisioned was much more generous than the bill eventually passed by the Republican Congress in 1996. It would have included child-care and job-placement programs — but it would still have required welfare recipients to work. Hillary’s support for the bill reveals the deep fault lines of class and race that fractured the second-wave feminist movement, as white middle-class women purchased their independence from domestic labor by shifting the burden to working-class women of color.
In one of her early essays, the political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues that all existing welfare states have foundered on the question of what role to allot women. As long as women perform a disproportionate share of reproductive labor, she claims, redistributive programs based solely on employment will privilege men, even if accompanied by full-employment programs and universal child care. But the alternative — designating primary caregivers as a separate, sheltered class — is no better. Even if caregiver benefits were officially gender-neutral, their recipients would still be disproportionately female, which reinforces the sexual division of labor and leaves women underrepresented in public life. Both choices are bad; neither, as Fraser says, asks men to change.
Fraser’s answer is to propose what she calls a “universal caregiver” model based on the assumption that all workers are also caregivers and all caregivers are also workers. Conceiving a new welfare state based on this model would mean rethinking the length of the workday, socializing child care, decoupling Social Security and health insurance from employment, and returning to the welfare rights movement’s call for a guaranteed minimum income. Above all, it would mean placing feminist insights and concerns at the center, rather than the periphery, of any left politics. If the movement that Sanders’s campaign called into being is going to embody the spirit of a new revolution, this would be a good place to start.