Black Women, Work, and Welfare in the Age of Globalization

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Pinder explores how globalization has shaped, and continues to shape, the American economy, which impacts the welfare state in markedly new ways. In the United States, the transformation from a manufacturing economy to a service economy escalated the need for an abundance of flexible, exploitable, cheap workers. The implementation of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), whose generic term is workfare, is one of the many ways in which the government responded to capital need for cheap labor. While there is a clear link between welfare and low-wage markets, workfare forces welfare recipients, including single mothers with young children, to work outside of the home in exchange for their welfare checks. More importantly, workfare provides an underclass of labor that is trapped in jobs that pay minimum wage. This underclass is characteristically gendered and racialized, and the book builds on these insights and seeks to illuminate a crucial but largely overlooked aspect of the negative impact of workfare on black single mother welfare recipients. The stereotype of the underclass, which is infused with racial meaning, is used to describe and illustrate the position of black single mother welfare recipients and is an implicit way of talking about poor women with an invidious racist and sexist subtext, which Pinder suggests is one of the ways in which gendered racism presents itself in the United States. Ultimately, the book analyzes the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in terms of welfare policy reform in the United States.

Reviews

In her newest book Black Women, Work, and Welfare in the Age of Globalization, Sherrow Pinder does a masterful job in showing how economic globalization and its accompanying neoliberal model of welfare as workfare has resulted in an ongoing death-in-life racialization of poverty among poor black women. Given the current context of rampant poverty in the Unites States, Pinder makes a persuasive and passionate argument for welfare as a fundamental social right. It is a must read for those interested in how global markets affect economic inequality and gendered racism in todays societies. -- Monica Ciobanu, Plattsburgh State University of New York

Author Bio

Sherrow O. Pinder is professor of political science and multicultural and gender studies at California State University, Chico.