Contingent Government Workers and Labor Solidarity: The Case of Contract Welfare-to-Work Staff and Their Clients

Contemporary US labor solidarity faces new opportunities and challenges in the midst of global economic and governmental restructuring. Indicative of these changes the 1996 welfare reform has created a new brand of contingent government contract workers to implement welfare-to-work while simultaneously fostering contingent work among welfare clients. In this paper I use ethnographic data from a major city in New York State to explore the relative positioning of these labor groups and I ask whether contingent government workers could mediate between organized labor and welfare recipients, thereby facilitating political collaboration. I conclude by identifying considerable structural and interpersonal barriers to solidarity including lack of contingent worker consciousness, difference in “skill” levels, antagonistic relationships with clients and a tendency to interpret client hardships in terms of personal defects. I contrast these findings with instances where labor unions have become involved in welfare issues and propose steps toward a new paradigm for labor solidarity.

Frank RidziEmail:

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Frank Ridzi   is Director of Urban and Regional Studies and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Le Moyne College. He has conducted research and written in the areas of social welfare policy, sociology of work, and student affairs. His recent work has appeared in such places as the Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, Research in the Sociology of Work, Review of Policy Research and the NASPA Journal of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.