workfare: servitude or success formula?

Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 1,Iol. 3, No. 2, 1990

Workfare: Servitude or Success F o r m u l a . 9

Patrick J. Keleher, Jr.1

Neither welfare nor workfare is much o f a "choice. " But workfare leads to real choices, freedom, and autonomy. Welfare represents the state's acceptance o f its duties to honor the welfare claim rights o f those citizens in real need o f temporary public assistance. In contrast, workfare recognizes additional claim-rights, namely, those that enable full agency and autonomy through education for employment, with a view toward ensuring that the dependency period is indeed temporary. Critics o f workfare cannot be unaware o f the educational resources--especially those o f open-access community colleges, open days, evenings and weekends- that taxpayers have put at the disposal o f everyone who is at all serious about self-improvement.

KEY WORDS: workfare versus welfare; public assistance; Illinois' Project Chance; education for employment; welfare and dependency.

INTRODUCTION

The concept of a welfare right is a new idea that is developing into a promising subject for philosophical investigation. Its theoretical development, however, con- tinues to lag behind developments within the even faster-paced social practice known as welfare. At a time when some philosophers still wonder whether the notion of a welfare right makes sense, the social practice known as welfare, taking it as a settled point that such rights do indeed exist, is moving rapidly ahead along a line of major reform known generally, imprecisely, and in some circles pejoratively, as "workfare."

Workfare is one component, the work-experience internship component, which lends its name to the whole multicomponent welfare reform experiment being under- taken, in one version or another, in twenty-eight states, including three of the biggest-Illinois, California, and New York (Ellwood & Summers, 1986; Kaus, 1986; Kirp, 1986; Lamar, 1986). As will be shown, in its strongest versions workfare requires certain welfare recipients, under pain of financial sanction, to participate in job training programs or to work in public or private sector jobs arranged for by the state. Under workfare, the welfare transaction is viewed as an exchange: training

~Vice-President, City Club of Chicago, Chicago Illinois 60601.

91 0892-7545/90/0600-0091506.00/0 �9 1990 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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or work experience in return for public assistance. Such training or work experience is not op t iona l -no t , that is, if the recipient wishes to enjoy the full benefit level that would otherwise obtain. While continuing to obligate the state as second-party benefit provider, in fact while increasing short-term welfare program operating budgets, workfare adds a new first-party dimension to the welfare transaction, by obligating the aid recipient actively to participate in the new program. A new duty is joined to an existing entitlement.

There precisely is the novelty and, for some, the rub. For example, Massachusetts Welfare Commissioner Charles Atkins, commenting on mandatory programs, says unequivocally, "I think workfare is slavery" (Kaus, 1986, p. 25). That, of course, is but one opinion. Any time an entitlement right (itself a questionable notion, as we shall see), one that has been enjoyed by itself, is suddenly joined to a new duty, you have a situation sure to attract the attention of theorists as well as practical defenders of welfare rights.

This paper presents the viewpoint of an applied ethicist. It resists the tempta- tion to rehearse the largely sociological and socioeconomical analyses of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Lawrence Mead, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Charles Mur- ray, to name but a few voices in a lively national discussion (Jackson & Murray, 1986; Mead, 1986; Murray, 1984). Instead, I will isolate and critique some of the values at stake, and the ethical principles operative, in the workfare experiment, an experiment of considerable philosophical interest, owing especially to its resistance to the classificatory pigeonholes into which ethicists are wont to slot their subject matter.

As it evolves into workfare, the social practice of welfare is outpacing whatever philosophic theory might coherently explain and justify the emerging practice revision. Here I attempt some catch-up philosophizing on the workfare phenomenon. I argue that any mandatory workfare scheme designed along the general lines of the Illinois Department of Public Aid (IDPA) model known as Project Chance -wi th which I am acquainted as a board member of two Chicago not-for-profit job readi- ness programs enrolling, among others, Project Chance t r a inees -any such welfare scheme would best be described as a success formula, and an emancipatory one at that; certainly never, with all due respect to Commissioner Atkins, as a type of slavery. Ironically, the more likely candidate for Atkins' slavery metaphor is the existing welfare program, which workfare promises to reform. Since "slavery" is such an in- flammatory expression to so many of the very same people whom workfare will enable, the word "slavery" and its cognates had best be reserved, if used at all, to describe the present system. To contextualize my philosophical observations, I will preface them with an overview of Project Chance.

To Illinois Governor James Thompson, by itself a welfare check is just a dead end. Real concern about someone's welfare, Thompson says, requires that we help him or her find a job. He endorses Project Chance as a way to see to it that people on welfare acquire the education and skills they need (note the prioritization) to achieve independence and compete in the job market. Gregory Coler, former IDPA Direc- tor, promotes Project Chance as nothing less than an entirely new way of thinking about welfare. Echoing Thompson's independence-through-work theme, Coler in- sists that, rather than looking at welfare as an end unto itself, we must reconceptual- ize it as a temporary stop along the road to a job and independence.

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As the largest department in state government, the IDPA has a $3.5 billion annual budget. Illinois spends more on welfare than on any other single endeavor, more than on schools, roads or law enforcement. Its welfare caseload consists of women and children living alone and receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), about 240 thousand families with 490 thousand children in an average month. Another 100 thousand single adults receive General Assistance (GA) grants.

Project Chance aims to place almost 113 thousand aid recipients into full-time, nonsubsidized jobs in the three-year period 1986 through 1988. At the project's core is education for the two-thirds of adult recipients who are elementary or secondary school dropouts. Each such recipient will have another chance to acquire a high school education or its equivalent. Once this basic educational level is reached, Project Chance then offers a variety of options to prepare individuals for full-time employment, including job clubs and job search training, job skills training, work experience intern- ships with government agencies and private not-for-profit organizations (workfare proper), even college courses. It should be clear that Project Chance is an education- driven approach to welfare reform.

For some recipients participation is mandatory, while those not required to take part are strongly urged to volunteer. Those required to participate in either an educational or work program-about half the Illinois caseload-include healthy AFDC recipients with no children under six years old, and all GA recipients who are not physically or mentally disabled. Complete daycare services and transportation al- lowances are available to both mandatory and voluntary participants. Refusal to cooperate may lead to the reduction or termination of grants for mandatory participants. Partnerships with private enterprise are being established to ensure that Project Chance trainees are equipped with competencies needed in the job market, and to build a job placement network (Coler, 1985).

As a large-scale institutional practice, welfare is less than 30 years old, though its lineage traces back at least 50 years to the Works Progress Administration of the mid-1930s, which, interestingly enough, most consider more a workfare than a welfare initiative, since it combined relief with constructive work (Butler, 1986). Symp- tomatic of the current welfare condition are the chronic, and in many cases worsening, indicators of social pathology in areas such as household formation, illegitimate births, teenage pregnancy, high school completion, functional illiteracy, alcohol and other substance abuse, and crime, especially crimes against the person. Indeed, alarm about the formation of a so-called permanent underclass, which some critics contend is amply evidenced by generational welfare dependency, has sparked serious community concern in Chicago and across the nation (Chicago Tribune, 1986).

Today, the condition of persons on welfare is described in terms that of themselves tell why the practice demands revision. Welfare is described variously as a condition of dependency, marginalization, dysfunction, anomie, hopelessness, and, as I have cautiously suggested, servitude. Since all these descriptors admit of degrees, most commentators agree that the condition of welfare recipients, bad enough as it is, would be even worse were the welfare practice nonexistent. On this point, though, there is disagreement. Whereas some view welfare itself as the creator of this de- structive condition, others see it more as its conservator and perpetuator (Ellwood & Summers, 1986; Kaus, 1986; Kaus et al., 1986; Mead, 1986; Murray, 1984, 1986).

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This disagreement notwithstanding, an unusual bipartisan consensus is now calling for reform of the practice, not for its abolishment. One reform, we know, is called workfare.

Welfare is a social institution through which the state helps to meet the subsistence needs of certain of its subjects by provisioning elemental subsistence goods, among them cash, medical care, housing, and food stamps. Eligibility requires that two conditions be met. Need is the first condition. Welfare is for persons in need of subsistence goods, but need alone is not a sufficient eligibility condition. Except perhaps for an ascetic few, everybody has such needs. Besides need, there must be a second condition, that of being u n a b l e - o r being unable without undue hardship upon oneself or one's d e p e n d e n t s - t o secure subsistence goods, either through one's own productive efforts or by the exchange of assets under one's legal control. Only when both conditions exist is someone eligible for welfare benefits. Since the first condition, needing subsistence, is more or less a given, it is the second condition, being unable to help oneself, that is of interest to us (Wellman, 1982). I have mentioned both conditions because too often, it seems to me, stress is placed on the need condition, whereas it is the inability condition which should be accentuated.

As was noted, among those to whom welfare coverage extends are mentally and physically disadvantaged persons, and single mothers who might otherwise support themselves were it not for the preschoolers in their care. Since for these people workfare participation is not mandatory, they are not the welfare recipients I want to talk about. Let me call those whom I do want to talk a b o u t - m a n d a t o r y workfare par t i c ipan ts - the "productively disabled," a term most fitting, since the productive abilities of these welfare recipients are nonexistent, minimal, or unwanted in the labor exchange market. As I see it, our understanding of workfare turns on this central idea of productive ability. Workfare enables the productively disabled. That is its point and purpose. Welfare, on the other hand, entitles, but fails to enable, the productively disabled. It entitles them to subsistence goods, but in a condition of continuing dependency upon the state, a condition of other-directedness reminiscent of slavery in some of its benign variants. To remedy this, workfare seeks to put an end to the second (and infinitely more important) condition of welfare eligibility, the condition of being unable to help oneself. By providing education and work experience, in- strumentalities that lead to nonsubsidized employment, that is, to economic self- sufficiency, workfare effects the transition of the productively disabled from a condition of economic (and in many cases, psychological) dependence to one of economic (and psychological) independence. For this reason I have described workfare as "emancipatory."

The very fact that there are productively disabled persons may be taken as presumptive evidence that their background institutions, economic and perhaps educational, have failed them. The state admits as much when, through its legislative procedures, it establishes and maintains the welfare system as a corrective to its background institutions. This system embodies the societal understanding that the productively disabled are entitled to at least the minimum subsistence level they would otherwise wrest from the economy, had not the background ins t i tu t ions -upon which we all must ultimately rely for economic self-sufficiency-fai led in their case, through no

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fault of their own. Extended entitlement, extended in some family situations from one generation to the next, was never intended, yet unfortunately this is just what has occurred in the absence of the many enabling services that workfare now proposes to make available.

Welfare is a "positive" right, something we will discuss in more detail later. Un- like a "negative" right, such as the right to physical security, which is generally held (inexactly, as will be observed) to require only noninterference or forbearance on the part of others, welfare, as a positive right, is a right to something provided by others, namely, to economic subsistence goods and services. This right requires the state to take positive actions, among them actions through its taxing authority, where- by the productively able have consented to support the productively disabled, those who cannot support themselves. As an institution, welfare testifies to the interdepen- dencies between person and person, and to the dependencies between person and institution.

By accepting the welfare benefit, the productively disabled person in effect rati- fies the fact that his or her productive abilities are nonexistent, minimal, or unwanted in the marketplace. Unable to be economically self-sufficient, he or she has no viable alternative but welfare, which as presently constituted is a condition of economic dependency upon the state. Welfare, then, is a "choice" in only an attenuated sense of the term. Though intended to be temporary, the welfare assistance period is, for all practical purposes, potentially open-ended ad infinitum, since welfare has no built- in mechanism for overcoming the productive disablement that drives people to welfare in the first place. Now workfare, through its education and work experience components, provides just such a dependency-escape mechanism. To be effective, though, this escape mechanism requires a good-faith cooperative effort on the part of the aid recipient to develop his or her marketable productive abilities by participating actively in the program. Once the state makes these enabling services available, participation, except for the cases noted earlier, is mandatory for all would-be aid recipients. Admittedly, and I will concede as much to Commissioner Atkins, this at first seems even less a "choice" than the conventional welfare alternative. Yet, unlike the welfare "choice," the workfare "choice" at least looks to the end, indeed, measures itself by its success in bringing about the end of an economic dependency period in which the recipient functions at a level of considerably diminished agency, enjoying, yes, certain rights to well-being, but not enjoying the full measure of freedom rights consistent with undiminished human agency, a situation to be discussed shortly.

In either case, welfare or workfare, the "choice" is not a perfect one. The prospective aid recipient may hardly be said to have any truly "live" option, and to that extent both welfare and workfare may be said to resemble servitude. But the all-important difference, one that undercuts the servitude metaphor as applied to workfare, is that welfare is not designed to end the servitudelike condition, whereas workfare is so designed. We would be better of f dropping the metaphor altogether and frankly admitting that welfare and workfare are both paternalistic social arrangements, and then seeing where our analysis leads us. In the case of welfare, then, we have a paternalism that, inasmuch as it offers no escape from economic dependency, is effectively self-perpetuating. In the case of workfare, on the other hand, we have

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a self-liquidating paternalism, one with a built-in dependency-escape mechanism. Viewed this way, workfare is paternalism in the best denotative sense of the word, a paternalism that lets go, that counts its success by those whom it enables to move from dependency to autonomy. Workfare is a form of paternalism to end paternalism.

Of course I share Commissioner Atkins's concern about the potential for bureaucratic abuse of the workfare system. Such potential exists in any large-scale public program. But this is to say nothing more than that the workfare program must be designed with built-in safeguards for maximizing educational and employment options and for treating aid recipients with the equal concern and respect due to all persons at all times, safeguards that are designed into the Project Chance model. Once these safeguards are in place, though, it is hardly unfair to require that certain would-be aid recipients participate in the education and work experience components of the workfare program. This program, as we have noted, is made available at taxpayers' expense for productively disabled persons who are unable to help themselves. Assuming the workfare program to be sensitively designed and administered, those who withhold their cooperation would then be assumed to be unwilling as well as unable to help themselves. They would, in effect, be expecting society to support them indefinitely in a condition of economic dependency, an expectation society has no good reason to fulfill and every good reason to discourage. The unfairness in such cases would lie on the side of the uncooperative would-be recipients, certainly not on the side of the society that makes workfare enablement services available.

The problem with the present welfare arrangement is one that r ed u ces - though not without a significant remainder, a remainder I will be touching upon much l a t e r - to a problem of severely diminished human agency. By agency ! mean the ability to formulate fo r oneself a life plan with possibly numerous goals, to know the requirements and the range o f means for attaining those goals, to be in a position to select the appropriate means, and to be able to try to execute, to make real, one's life plan. Simple inspection of the verbal elements in this definition (formulating a life plan, knowing requirements and means, being able to try, etc.) leads one to conclude that today's typical welfare recipient functions far below this normative level of agency. By virtue of the very fact that recipients continue to be unequipped to help themselves out of their productive disablement, welfare entails diminished agency. Workfare, as we shall observe, entails increased agency.

Let me emphasize that I am not citing welfare as the cause of this condition of diminished human agency, inasmuch as I believe the diminishment would be even more intolerable, much more, were the existing welfare system not in place. But I do think that, until reformed, the system itself will be a prime contributor to the maintenance of an unacceptable level of diminished human agency, a level that I contend is the common denominator in the long list of negative descriptors which we have heard ascribed to the condition in which welfare recipients find themselves. Be- fore turning to the agency problem, though, some prefatory comments about the general status of rights, especially welfare rights, may be helpful.

There is far from universal, even general, agreement as to what theoretical un- derpinnings, if any, support the institutional practice named welfare. Still open in the minds of some philosophers are questions involving the definition of that class of rights known as welfare rights, questions as to what rational grounds might estab-

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lish their legitimacy, and questions about their range of applicability or coverage once legitimated. I will comment briefly on these three issues- the definition, the grounds, and the range of welfare rights.

While philosophical and legal theorists employ various rights typologies, the definition most frequently encountered, which I will use, has it that a right is a valid claim by some first party A to some X against some second party B. Correlative to A's claim-right is B's duty to honor A's claim, though, as we shall see, this correlativity becomes problematic with certain classes of rights, such as human rights and welfare rights, where B may not be readily identifiable or, if identifiable, may lack the ability to honor A's claim. Workfare, while preserving the correlativity between rights and duties, proposes to add a new dimension, that of reciprocal first- and second- party obligations. Indeed, it is this new dimension, termed by Patricia Werhane "the complementary reciprocity of accountability relationships," that more than anything distinguishes workfare from welfare as we know it. Put another way, now both parties have claims aga ins t - and obligations toward - each other. Rights and duties become reciprocal as well as correlative (Werhane, 1986, p. 259). The obvious new ingredient in the public assistance transaction is the duty of the first-party aid recipient actively to participate in the various educational and work experience components of the workfare program.

Rights may be broadly classified as "moral" rights and "legal" rights. Moral rights are all rights held to exist prior to, and independently of, any legal or institutional rules, rights whose recognition is called for by the moral principles of an en- lightened conscience. Joel Feinberg notes that moral rights so conceived form a genus divisible into various species of rights having little in common except that they are not (necessarily) legal or institutional rights. For our purposes, the most important species of moral rights is "human" rights (once commonly known as "natural" rights), described by Feinberg as "generically moral rights of a fundamentally important kind held equally by all human beings, unconditionally and unalterably" (Feinberg, 1973, p. 85). Claims to human rights (e.g., the right to life), their proponents maintain, are analytic: To be a person just is to be a holder of human rights, which attach to the person simply qua person. Important subsets of human rights are "freedom" rights (e.g., the right to choose one's associates) and "welfare" or "economic" rights (e.g., the right to some minimum level of economic subsistence). "Legal" rights are those rights found in positive human law, which recognizes many moral rights by incorporation (e.g., the right to physical security as protected by the corpus of criminal jurisprudence), though it does not "create" these moral rights as it does, for instance, certain rights of principals under the Restatement of Agency.

Another broad classification, that between "negative" and "positive" rights, gets at the "X" in the rights definition, that is, at the substance of the right, that to which the right is a claim. The X in turn specifies the type of duty or, in some cases, disability imposed upon B as second-party addressee of the claim-right. Negative rights (e.g., to choose one's associates) have been generally thought to demand little more than noninterference or forbearance on the part of the state and other second parties. With a negative right, the X to which A lays claim requires B's nonobstruction of A's actions or state of being. Feinberg subdivides negative rights into active and passive. Active negative rights emphasize A's right to act or not to act as A chooses (e.g.,

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to worship God in accordance with one's chosen religion), where B's duty is to stand aside, to avoid obstructing A's enjoyment of his or her right. These active negative rights are sometimes called "liberty" rights. On the other hand, passive negative rights (e.g., to enjoy one's property and privacy) stress A's right not to be done to by others in certain ways, not to be made recipient of their actions, where B's duty is not to initiate any action that would interfere with A. Such passive negative rights are known as "security" rights. Feinberg states that perhaps the major source of moral perplexi- ty in the political governance of free persons is that one person's active negative (liberty) rights can be protected only at the expense of another's passive negative (security) rights and vice versa (Feinberg, 1973, p. 60). But this is just another way of describing one important function of rights, noted below, namely, the distributional function of staking out the boundaries of individual and group freedoms in a world where unlimited freedom would spell social chaos, where the freedom of all must at times be limited in the interest of the freedom of each. Negative rights may be moral rights, legal rights, or both.

Negative rights to (civil and political) liberty and security, an established part of the Western intellectual, political, and legal tradition, seem settled and familiar to us. They have been joined recently by the more controversial class of rights known as "positive" rights, a class that includes "welfare" rights, known also as "economic" or "social" rights. Here the X to which A lays claim requires of B something beyond mere noninterference or forbearance. This newer type of claim-right obligates B to take positive steps to ensure that A enjoys some X. This X most often takes the form of economic goods and services. For example, the welfare right to a minimal level of economic subsistence is a positive right which obliges the state as B to allocate fiscal resources to the establishment and maintenance of a welfare system. These resources must be "transferred" from the general taxpaying public, in what some consider a coercive, expropriative violation of the taxpayer's passive negative right to enjoy his or her income property without undue governmental interference. This is why welfare rights, all of which are positive claim-rights, are so politically delicate in free societies. It should be noted that some philosophers, foremost among them Robert Nozick, deny categorically that there is any such thing as a valid positive claim- right (Nozick, 1974). Assuming for the moment that these new positive rights are valid claim-rights, we have then yet another clash between types of rights, this time between the negative and positive classes, whereas before we noted the potential for conflict between the active and the passive subclasses of negative rights. Advocates of positive rights consider them moral rights which should be incorporated into positive law as legal rights, with all the attendant enforcement guarantees that would entail. Obviously, some positive human rights (specifically, welfare rights) are already legal rights, but to acknowledge this is to say nothing about whether these welfare rights are creatures of the law or whether the law merely recognizes their moral pre- existence. We will come to these questions shortly.

For all its usefulness in conceptualizing rights, the negative/positive rights dichotomy tends to be misleading. Recent work by Henry Shue has shown that these two rights classes are neither all that dichotomous nor mutually exclusive. Illustrat- ing this point, Shue observes that some negative rights, such as the passive negative

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right to physical security, do in fact require the state to undertake positive measures (e.g., the maintenance of law enforcement agencies, the criminal court, and penal sys tems)-a t taxpayers' expense -o f t en extremely elaborate and costly measures. Our national defense budget is a supporting footnote to Shue's argument (Shue, 1980). Bearing Shue's important qualification in mind, we will nevertheless find the negative/positive rights distinction of great help in analyzing any particular claim-right, especially when it comes to understanding the X to which it is a claim and the obligation it imposes upon B. The negative/positive distinction serves to alert and sensitize us to situations where honoring A's positive claim-right requires expropriation and redistribution of B's personal income through the fiscal transfer mechanism. These are viewed by some as serious rights-in-conflict situations. We will be discussing whether rights trade-offs might be justified in such cases.

In addition to the moral/legal and negative/positive classifications, there is another way to understand rights, namely, by their function. Claim-rights may serve one or more functions. Some rights confer or ensure autonomy in specific areas of activity, an important function wherever some conflict of wills exists or is likely to occur. They serve to distribute and demark rights boundaries. Other rights work to protect interests, sometimes those of right-holders unable, perhaps never able, for any number of reasons, to assert their claims in their own names. Others, to use Ronald Dworkin's expression, function as "trumps" in that they protect the rights of an individual even in the face of collective goals (Dworkin, 1978). Some rights are considered foundational, basic in that they help to ensure the necessary conditions precedent to the enjoyment of all other rights, by eliminating or meliorating what Henry Shue calls the "standard threats" to their enjoyment, threats such as malnutrition and physical or psychological coercion. Attention to the function(s) of any particular claim- right brings to the foreground the purpose or intention for which A or A's represen- tative would press the claim, though by this I do not understand it to be the case that a claim-right requires for its existence the performative act of claiming. Com- mon to all rights is what Richard Brandt calls their "focusing function." A right, as Brandt puts it, "sets at the center what it is that a person is to be enabled to do, have or enjoy, and that it is important for the welfare of the person" (Brandt, 1983, p. 43). This look at functions rounds out our brief inspection of the definitional elements and the most important classes of claim-rights.

In the Western World at least, numerous rights are taken for granted, as self- evident givens. But upon scrutiny they quickly turn problematic, their lucidity suddenly overcast. David Ozar identifies numerous features found in the human being that have been adduced as justificatory grounds for the ascription of rights. Among these are free will, rationality, sensitivity to pain, dignity, worth, the ability to ap- preciate and respond to affection, the ability to form relationships with fellow humans, and the common sharing of basic needs and interests (Ozar, 1986). None of these proposed grounds for rights is without its explanatory drawbacks. For example, not all humans (e.g., the severely mentally handicapped, the mentally deranged) may be said to be volitional and rational. Sensitivity is not peculiarly human; it is something we share with nonhuman animals, perhaps even with plants. "Dignity" and "worth" seem to be question-begging, unless some further feature is picked out

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as the basis for ascribing dignity and worth. And needs and interests, except maybe for a very short list common to all humans, are notoriously relative from person to person and from culture to culture.

Singling out just one of these candidate features of the human being as the ground for rights runs the risk of either excluding from their range of applicability some humans, such as the severely mentally handicapped, or including nonhumans, such as animals and plants. The first possibility, excluding some humans from the advantages that rights are intended to ensure, is an outcome rights theorists try to avoid when building their explanatory constructs. For this reason, Susan Moiler Okin cautions us that the only way to avoid the danger of such individuals being denied all rights is to perceive these rights as variously founded on a number of characteris- tics and on those basic needs that tend to be nearly invariable from one human being to another (Okin, 1981, p. 236). Prominent advocates of multiple grounds for rights, like Okin, are the Catholic bishops, probably the most highly visible advocates of welfare rights in the United States today. They of course ground their main argument for rights of any sort in their belief that the human person is created in God's image and destined for eternal life, hence possesses an inestimable dignity and worh which rights serve to protect. Yet they realize that this foundational belief is not shared by large segments of the pluralistic audience they are targeting in their recently com- pleted pastoral letter on economic justice and the U.S. economy. So the bishops list other grounds likely to appeal to the wider audience, grounds such as the human ability to reason and understand, the human ability to shape personal and communal life plans, and the human capacity for love and friendship (U.S. Catholic Confer- ence, 1986).

In my main argument below, I will show how we can heed Okin's caveats while still offering but a single ground for welfare and workfare rights in particular, and for rights in general. That single ground is a factual (as opposed to valuational) considerat ion- the fact of human agency, a ground most accommodating in that it entails many of the features of the human being, such as free will, rationality, and basic needs, which have been adduced as the ground for rights.

The matter of the extent of coverage or the applicability of claim-rights poses some interesting problems, for which the concept of social relationships offers some solutions. If, for example, we take moral rights to attach to the person simply qua person, then we might expect such rights to be claimable wherever there happen to be persons. Or might we? Negative human rights, such as freedom of speech, nomi- nally require noninterference or forbearance by others, but it would be naive to think they all might be claimed successfully without some sort of formal social relat ionship-such as the s t a t e - t o guarantee their efficacy, for example, by incorporation as legal rights. This is not to say, of course, that each and every negative human right deserves such societal protection. To the extent that any negative human right requires some positive contribution by others, as Shue has shown us some negative rights do, to that extent will there be all the more need for a cooperative social relationship for marshaling whatever resources it takes to honor the claim-right. The role of formal social relationships in determining the coverage of certain claim- rights becomes unmistakably obvious when we consider positive human rights, such as the welfare right to some minimal level of economic subsistence. This right by

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definition always requires some positive contribution by others, for which some sort of cooperative social scheme is essential. To make any sense, a valid positive claim- right (and a negative one, too) must have all the definitional ingredients we looked at earlier. It must be a valid claim by some first-party A La some X against some second-party B. Where B, the second-party addressee of the claim, is unspecified or unspecifiable, the claim is inert; it lacks efficacy. A's claim is likewise inert when, for example, B is a state which, though specifiable, lacks internally and is unable to secure externally what resources might be needed to make available the claimed X. This is just another instance of "ought implies can." And the claim may be effectively inert where B (again, some state), is specifiable and has adequate resources to provide the X, but has not, through its governmental arrangements, seen fit to make X available to claimants, for whatever reasons. The upshot of all this is that rights, both negative and positive, but especially the latter, are claimed in context, in a societal context and against an institutional background, a context which deter- mines what if any likelihood of success the rights claimant may expect to enjoy.

As societies develop, claim-rights, both negative and positive, may grow from an inert to an activated stage, from what Feinberg calls "ideal directives" to that of "full-fledged" rights. If it occurs this way (there being any number of possible development patterns), this ontogenesis would most likely reflect an expanding societal understanding of the person. For instance, the very understanding that the person has a claim-right is a concept only a few hundred years old. Negative rights might be expected to emerge earlier, because they usually take fewer economic resources to guarantee, hence do not require the broad social consensus needed for establish- ing the more extensive institutional arrangements that positive rights involve. The right to physical security, for example, is a basic human right that might initially be recognized by limited agreements for mutual protection, followed over time by law-making and law-enforcing institutions, and by what derivative security rights these institutions might safeguard. Later might come positive rights, as has been the Western experience, rights which generally require a higher level of social and economic or- ganization to effectuate. These rights would require a social consensus to establish whatever transfer and redistribution institutions would be in order. Only where there is the social consensus- the political w i l l - f o r these rights, is there a way for them to be realized concretely. Here ought implies both "will" and "can." This is what I mean by saying that the extent of coverage or the applicability of certain claim-rights is inextricably linked to the cooperative social relationships that actualize them. Claim- ing certain key rights in the absence of in-place guarantor institutions would be about as futile as presenting a treasury bond for redemption in a society without an established treasury. In these cases energies are best spent on forging the social consensus that will migrate the claim-rights from ideal to real existence.

What does all this say about the applicability of moral claim-rights, especially about human rights and, within them, welfare rights? I think it says that these rights may be considered "universal" in an ideal way only. They make moral sense to the extent that they indicate the direction in which morally aware societies should be head- ed. Their realization is utterly dependent upon the combination of sociopolitical relationships and economic resources we have been discussing, a combination that at various points over time will have a different configuration within any given society

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and from one society to the next. To this extent, the social expression of moral claim- rights is constrained by the realities of time, place, communal self-understanding, and economic development. This means, too, that any list of human rights realizable universally in the here and now must be remarkably brief. It would resemble, I believe, Henry Shue's short list of "basic" rights, a set of four rights which together are necessary for the enjoyment of any other rights, namely, the "rights set" to security, subsistence, political participation, and unrestricted movement (Shue, 1980, p. 86). Yet is even this short list of basic claim-rights realizable universally at the moment? I think not. While making moral sense, they remain ideal directives, teleologi- cal aspirations for a large part of our world, though fortunately not for us in the United States, where, having the requisite combination of political will and economic resources, we have institutionally operationalized all of Shue's foundational rights, and have in fact built a complex edifice of derivative rights - both negative and positive r i gh t s -upon that foundation.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of the rights-opera- tionalizing role played by the cooperative social arrangement that is the state, here meaning those nonauthoritarian and nontotalitarian states where political and economic institutions may be said to reflect the popular consensus. These essential state institutions may be viewed as arising from social contract, historically real social contract, in contrast to the ideal social contract of some Rawlsian thought experiment. From one important perspective, the negative and positive rights we have been discussing, at least in their particularized expressions, may all be viewed broadly as social contract rights derived from more general principles of fairness intended to guarantee the basic structure of society to be just. From a more narrow perspective, though, these rights may be seen as consisting of three types, of which only one type is, strictly speaking, a social contract right. These types are (1) autonomy rights, (2) rights to well-being or welfare rights, and (3) social contract rights. I take it that type (1) rights apply mainly to rational adults, type (2) to all human beings, and type (3) to either, depending upon the subject matter of the right. In this schematic approach, used by Rodney Peffer developing upon an article by Jeffrie Murphy, rights categories (1) and (2) are taken to be proper to the person simply qua person, what we earlier called moral human rights. Types (1) and (2) are rights that every society, to the best of its ability, should try to guarantee, though not every society, as we have noted, will be able to do so. Examples of type (1) autonomy rights would be largely negative rights, such as freedom of speech and movement. Type (2) well-being or welfare rights would be limited to those positive rights to elemental goods and services that protect our basic biological needs as human organisms, the most basic such need being survival. The positive right to at least a threshold level of economic subsistence would be a type (2) right. Peffer's type (3) rights, social contract rights in the narrow sense, attach to the person qua citizen, not qua person. Type (3) social contract rights are additional autonomy and well-being rights over and above the basic rights included in types (1) and (2), additional rights which a just society, given its concrete conditions of production, should guarantee its people, simply by virtue of the contingent fact of their being members of that particular society at that particular time. Peffer gives as examples of type (3) rights the rights to a free education, to adequate health care, and to a fair trial (Murphy, 1978; Peffer, 1986, p. 418).

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While his tripartite "narrow" view of social contract rights is analytically informa- tive and in some respects strikingly similar to the Gewirthian argument we are about to discuss, I tend to prefer Peffer's "broad" view, the one in which all three types are subsumed under one superordinate class known as social contract rights. While the qua person and qua citizen distinctions help to explain the grounds for any particular claim-right, it is the social-contracting dimension that explains what moves the claim-right from possibility to actuality. At this point let us return to the concept of agency, in which I believe we will find the best available key to a coherent understanding of rights of any sort, and which is, if you will, the telos toward which all welfare reform efforts should be aimed.

When we begin to break apart the concept of human agency as defined earlier, among the first elements that come to mind are conditions internal to the human being, such as mental soundness and emotional equiIibrium. While necessary for fully effective human agency, these conditions are not sufficient. We must look also to the external societal context, the milieu with all its background institutions, in which the would-be purposive agent forms his or her concept of the good and works toward its attainment. There we hope to find the condition o f freedom, socially guaranteed in a climate hospitable to the exercise of negative claim-rights as we have been describing them. At the very least, we must find freedom from unreasonable interference with the execution of one's life plan, freedom to be self-regulating in the control of one's behavior, freedom to set and attempt to accomplish one's objectives, and to do so with deliberateness, volition, and a u t o n o m y - a l l this, without coercion and with knowledge of all circumstances relevant to one's choices.

If you hold a theory similar to Robert Nozick's, this type of essentially negative freedom, freedom from interference by others, is all that agency requires and all that may be expected. Any broader definition of your agency requirements would butt up against the freedom rights of others, which Nozick considers largely unabridge- able. On the contrary, I would argue that the freedom dimension does not exhaust the rich concept of human agency. Still another dimension must be admitted to our analysis. Though necessary, freedom alone is an insufficient formal condition of agency, which, if it is to be effective in any nontrivial sense, must be complemented with another condition, a material one. This is the condition o f well-being, understood as those basic g o o d s - s u c h as life, health, physical security, subsistence or minimal economic security, and, at least in technologically advanced economies such as ours, e duc a t i on - basic goods which, following Alan Gewirth, constitute the generic abilities and conditions which, backed by enabling negative and positive claim-rights, each and every one of us needs in order to act effectively, either at all or with reasonable prospects of success in realizing the ends for which we act (Gewirth, 1985). Agency, then, has two essential, mutually interpenetrating dimensions: freedom and well-being. Each dimension calls for support by claim-rights. The freedom dimension needs the support of negative r i g h t s - b o t h active negative and passive n e g a t i v e - t o civil and political liberties. The well-being dimension must be buttressed by both basic rights to personal security in a Shuean sense and positive social and economic rights, the most fundamental of which are welfare rights.

To recap, full human agency is the undiminished capacity to formulate a life plan and take whatever appropriate actions that plan entails. Besides certain mental

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and psychological competencies, the conditions of freedom and well-being, both socially guaranteed by the appropriate background institutions, are necessary, insepara- ble prerequisites for actions that would enjoy any likelihood of success. I use the adjective "full" because human agency is essentially a potency that reduces to various degrees of actuality, along a continuum ranging from no agency to full agency. Rational adult persons, for example, will generally have both freedom and well-being requirements and are eligible for whatever rights these requirements entail, whereas other human beings, infants for example, have only well-being requirements and their related rights. My use of the expressions "person" and "human agency" throughout this discussion of welfare and workfare may be taken to refer to rational adults unless otherwise noted. This is not the place to broaden the discussion to include moral personhood, a subject which I admit a complete treatment of human agency would have to accommodate. I am arguing that the existing welfare system, while it com- mendably maintains human agency, maintains that agency at an unacceptable stage of arrested development by neglecting the freedom dimension of human agency. On the other hand, workfare, provided it is implemented along the lines and with the sensitivities of Project Chance, will shift the entire welfare system closer to the full agency end of the continuum by its balanced attention to both the freedom and the well-being requirements of meaningful agency. Workfare provides the marketability that ensures the autonomy that comes with economic self-sufficiency. Unlike welfare, workfare recognizes and establishes the link between education, employment, and agency.

Human life, at least life of any quality we would consider truly worthwhile, is a process of "doing," not simply one of "being" or "subsisting" or "stayin' alive." To do is to act, and as we have seen, to act in a fully human way the actor must have both of the socially guaranteed conditions of undiminished agency, namely, freedom and well-being. These are minimal conditions for the very possibility of agency. From the fact that these two conditions are needed for full human agency, we must, so I think, conclude that the agent, any and every would-be purposive agent, has rights to these conditions, human rights, claimable against the agent's state, rights that the state has correlative duties to guarantee.

Agency is at the heart of morality. All moralities, as Alan Gewirth notes, have in common a concern for action. As he defines it, a morality is a set of categorically obligatory requirements for action, requirements addressed at least in part to every actual or prospective agent and intended to further the interests, especially the most important interests, of persons other than or in addition to the particular agent. A purely factual consideration of human action will reveal action to be the logically appropriate ("dialectically necessary") ground for justifying the ascription and content of human rights. This approach recalls the type of analysis of the structure of the human act conducted by Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. Gewirth holds that every would-be purposive agent subjectively regards his or her purposes as good, by whatever valuational criterion the agent happens to employ, be it prudential, aesthetic, moral, etc. Afortiori, the agent, being rational, must likewise regard as good the "proxi- mate general necessary conditions of his acting to achieve his purposes," namely, freedom and well-being. Put another way, whoever wills the end wills the indispensable conditions ensuring the possibility of its attainment. Thinking prudentially, the agent

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cannot logically fail to claim for himself or herself these two conditions, what Gewirth calls the "generic features of action," as an entitlement, an entitlement grounded in his or her needs as an agent. "There is," he says in a critical passage, "one, and only one ground that every agent logically must accept as the sufficient justifying condition for his having the generic rights, namely, that he is a prospective agent who has purposes he wants to fulfill." Next, by the logical principle of universalizability, the agent must grant that all other prospective purposive agents are likewise entitled holders of these generic rights, thereby elevating the prudential maxim to a moral one applicable to the entire class of purposive agents. The universalizability principle has it that " . . . if some predicate P belongs to some subject S because S has the quality Q (where the 'because' is that of sufficient reason or condition), then it logically follows that every subject that has Q has P ." Substituting the personal pronoun 'T ' for S, "being a prospective agent with purposes to fulfill" for Q, and "have the generic rights to freedom and well-being" for P, I must, under pain of self- contradiction, generalize this case (my own) to all other fellow humans with the quality Q, that is, to the universe of would-be purposive agents. Thus the single Gewirthian notion of agency entails many of the features we looked at earlier as candidate grounds for rights, features such as volition, rationality, and basic needs. His idea of "needs" is most unusual in its comprehension, sometimes used synonymously with "conditions of agency," a usage that would treat freedom and well-being as human needs. This has to be considered an ontological usage of "needs," a usage tied into Gewirth's core understanding of the human person, covering all needs that might be considered essential, from biological and psychological needs to spiritual and intellectual needs (Gewirth, 1981, p. 124 passim, especially p. 132).

The human rights to freedom and well-being, then, are grounded in and justified by the human need for agency from which they derive. Some will object that, in moving from need to rights, we have made the category mistake of crossing from the descriptive to the normative, f rom fact to value, from "is" to "ought." Here is not the place to try to set aside this objection, though I think it might be gotten around. One way would be to redescribe the move as one from a value premise to a value con- clusion, since, arguably, value is partly constitutive of agency. Without some valued end, no intentional human action would take place; indeed, the value to be realized is what the action is all about, its whole point and purpose. But development of this argument would carry us far afield from workfare.

Were we to extend our analysis of agency, something that cannot be done here, I am reasonably confident that we could establish agency as "the metaphysical and the moral basis of human dignity" (Gewirth, 1985, p. 26). As I mentioned, the ascription of "dignity" and "worth" points to some feature beyond itself. That feature, so it might be argued, is agency. For our less controversial purposes, limiting ourselves to the rights and duties implicit in agency, we noted earlier that freedom rights, for example, rights to the enjoyment of civil and political liberties, are more settled and familiar to us, having as they do a much longer intellectual and legal history than do most of the rights to well-being. Yet, as we have seen, it is these newer, substan- tive rights that are concurrently requisite for any meaningful exercise and enjoyment of freedom rights. I am not arguing for the priority of either rights category. Both share the paramountcy; neither is subordinate to the other. Freedom rights without

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well-being rights would be, quite literally, unactionable-form without substance. Conversely, well-being rights without freedom rights would be paternalism at best, tyranny at worst. Our current welfare system is a case in point; it is an undesirable paternalism, the type with no internal mechanism for its self-extinguishment and which does not equip aid recipients to exercise their freedom rights, at least not their economic freedom rights as self-supporting agents. The welfare system does not provide an education/work experience springboard to employment and economic self- sufficiency, a springboard without which public aid recipients cannot be said truly to enjoy the freedom and autonomy rights essential to unimpaired human agency. As Henry Shue observes, well-being rights without certain freedom rights, such as the right to economical and political participation and the right to freedom of physical movement, are not rights at all, but rather are more on the order of permissions or indulgences. A person may not be said to be enjoying a right when he or she is enjoying the substance of a right (i.e., the X to which the right is a claim) in total dependence upon the arbitrary will of others (Shue, 1980, p. 81).

Still comparatively young as social practices go, our progressive and humane welfare system bears institutional witness to the state's recognition and acceptance of its duties to assist temporarily disadvantaged citizens to enjoy the conditions of agency, primarily by provisioning certain basic goods, among them cash, medical care, and food stamps, goods which ensure their recipients' enjoyment of the well- being component of human agency. Nearly thirty years of experience have informed our societal self-understanding of the welfare practice so that we now realize that it is maintaining human agency at a suboptimal level, when it should be facilitating development toward that self-sufficiency which is the practice's very raison d'etre.

Welfare, by attending to their well-being needs, does a passing fair job of helping people who cannot help themselves to subsist, to stay alive. But it does little to position them to be able to have some real choices. It does an unacceptable job of helping them to start helping themselves, to become agents, doers in their own right. It maintains the productively disabled in their disability, whereas it should be focusing its entire institutional strength on their enablement. Its success at entitlement masks its failure at enablement. Certainly not by design, the system is a closed loop of dependency, of de facto paternalism, and not, like workfare, the acceptable, self- liquidating kind of paternalism. Until the workfare experiment, what had been un- deremphasized if not overlooked is the one basic good that will open the dependency loop and end the paternalism, a basic good which is a most important constituent of freedom and well-being. That basic good is education, here construed broadly to include the totality of remedial and basic education, skills training and training-related services epitomized in the Project Chance model with all its many components.

Contrary to a widely shared misperception, Project Chance and most of its kindred state workfare programs do not position government as employer of last resort. Instead, they position government as educator and enabler, perhaps of last resort. They provide the preparation, the placement and, to sustain the alliteration, the pipeline through which welfare recipients pass from dependence to independence. The misperception centers upon the work experience component, the component that is workfare in its most literal sense. In the Illinois model, work experience is a subsi- dized internship, typically with a government agency or private not-for-profit organi-

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zation, a part-time internship of limited duration. The internship is an educational preparation for the permanent job at the end of the workfare pipeline. It teaches the recipient, who more often than not has never held any sort of job, what the "real world" of work is all about and, importantly, what behaviors employers and co- workers expect. And it gives the recipient a valuable work reference to list on future employment applications. Throughout all the components of workfare, from intake assessment through final job placement, the governmental role is best understood as that of educator or enabler.

Our final and most accurate definition of workfare is enablement through education. Workfare's ethical significance is that it represents the enhancement of a com- passionate social practice, welfare, in the direction of full human agency. It helps to overcome the present condition of diminished human agency by providing, as a new claim-right of the recipient against the state, education for employment-the instrumental means to economic independence- as a basic good of freedom and well- being. It transcends entitlement toward enablement, and in so doing changes the thrust of an entire social institution from subsistence maintenance to self-sufficiency.

Self-sufficiency is just one of numerous "self-" compounds we tend to associate with the concept of full human agency. Some others are self-reliance, self- determination, self-direction, self-mastery, and, perhaps most important from the philosophical and psychological perspectives, self-respect. For example, self-respect figures prominently in John Rawls's general concept of the g o o d - right along with liberty and opportunity, and income and wealth-as a primary social good, that is, as one of those things a rational person wants, whatever else that person wants. Rawls considers self-respect the most important primary good, so important that the rational contractors in his hypothetical original position would wish to avoid at almost any cost whatever social conditions might undermine self-respect (Rawls, 1971). Now, to the extent that it enables people to become autonomous agents, to become their own persons, workfare overcomes the depreciating conditions of heteronomy and unemployability that, more than anything, undermine self-respect. Workfare, as a comprehensive educational system for employment preparation and job placement, can restore or, more often than not, bring about a sense of personal value and confi- dence in one's abilities, two of the most important psychological outcomes of the growth from diminished to full agency. Through the nonsubsidized job that is its terminal objective, workfare helps to create in the individual what psychologists call the "locus of self-control," as well as the "occupational ego boundary" considered the primary source of self-identity (Gini & Sullivan, 1986; Murray, 1986; Rawls, 1971). Thus workfare addresses the freedom condition of human agency in a way that welfare, for the most part, neglects.

Work as a primary expression of self-identity is an age-old concept, one very much alive in a nation bent on reclaiming its work ethic (Kaus, 1986). H o m o economi- cus is center stage in this age of deregulation and privatization, of intra- and en- trepreneurship, and of global economic competition. I do not mean that Americans work for the intrinsic rewards of their occupational pursuits, desirable as that may be. No, most work for rewards external to the activity of working, for the material goods their purchasing power makes available, for status, and for a host of other extrinsic reasons. Work, at least in this society, enables the worker to form a self-

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identity as an independent person, as a free economic actor. Workfare is one important way by which a person becomes such a free economic actor, an agent in the full sense of that important term. There precisely is the workfare link between education, work, freedom, and agency. My main argument, which I have now presented, is that the problem with the present welfare practice is one that r educes -wi th significant enough r e m a i n d e r - t o a problem of severely diminished human agency, a problem that the reform experiment known as workfare tackles head-on.

My argument for full human agency through workfare has been, by and large, "rights talk." Like most such talk, it has centered more on the individual than on the community. Recall that earlier I mentioned that workfare adds a new duty to the public assistance transaction, namely, the first-party duty of the recipient, under pain of financial sanction, to reciprocate the welfare benefit by actively participating in the workfare program. At precisely this crossroads of growing ethical interest, the individual's rights of agency and that very same individual's duties of citizenship in- tersect, an intersection that cannot be examined in this article. (For one such examination, see Becker, 1986.) Once again are being heard long-ignored voices talking "virtue" and "duty," voices that, while usually supportive of individual rights and continuing to be so, insist that they be counterweighted by such considerations as the virtues of citizenship and industriousness, solidarity with others, the obligation to work, and contributory justice, or the obligation to be active and productive participants in the life of the community (Becker, 1980; Mead, 1986; U.S. Catholic Con- ference, 1986).

We have seen that neither welfare nor workfare is much of a "choice." But even if each is more like a "nonchoice," only one "nonchoice," namely, workfare, leads to real choices, freedom and autonomy. The person on welfare today is not the human agent he or she might otherwise be, is not someone able to formulate with real prospects for success a life plan with possibly numerous goals, is not someone who knows the requirements and the range of means for attaining those goals, is not someone in a position to select the appropriate means, and able to try to execute, to make real, his or her life plan. That, as we saw much earlier, is our working definition of full human agency. Workfare, by providing the (economic and psychological) freedom condition along with the well-being condition of agency, makes genuine agency possible. It is unfortunate that some people, like Commissioner Atkins, view workfare as slavery, a metaphor as self-defeating, in my considered judgment, as it is mis- conceived. It is a position at odds with both the self-interest of the welfare recipient in particular and the public interest, that of the commonweal, in general. Unlike the state, welfare is a social practice whose origins are available to historical inspection. We do not need the hypothetical construct of a Rawlsian original position to ascer- tain the intentions of either the original designers or the contemporary reformers of the practice. We know as a matter of record that the practice represents the state's acceptance, through its legislative procedures and taxing authority, of its duties to honor the welfare claim-rights of those citizens in real need of temporary public assistance. Workfare recognizes additional claim-rights, those that enable full agency and autonomy through education for employment, with a view toward ensuring that the dependency period is indeed temporary. Workfare amends the welfare contract, if you will, from its present one-sidedness to something more like reciprocity or ex-

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change: P a r t i c i p a t i o n becomes the q u i d for the enab lemen t quo . Socie ty makes a w i n / w i n of fe r , with pa r t i c i pa t i on its accep tance price.

The b u r d e n o f p r o o f , one I cer ta in ly would no t want to shoulder , is u p o n those cit izens who wou ld argue tha t w o r k f a r e is some how unfa i r , s ome how inden tu r ing . Such an a rgumen t is no less misgu ided t han the "menia l j o b s a r g u m e n t , " ano the r se l f -defeat ing ref ra in f rom people who should know bet ter , people who should know someth ing a b o u t the d igni ty o f bo th w o r k and the worker , a n d a b o u t the psycho logical e m p o w e r m e n t tha t comes with ga infu l e m p l o y m e n t and self-suff ic iency. I have obse rved tha t wha t is "menia l " w o r k to some o f my col leagues is qui te o f t en very mean ingfu l work to those for w h o m the w o r k is the p a s s p o r t to economic self- suf f ic iency and self-es teem. These cri t ics are peop le who canno t be una w a re o f the vast educa t iona l resources - especial ly those o f our open-access c o m m u n i t y colleges, open days , evenings, and w e e k e n d s - t h a t t axpayers have pu t at the d isposa l o f everyone who is at all ser ious a b o u t se l f - improvement .

No t jus t a c h e c k . . , bu t a chance. This P ro j e c t Chance m o t t o is an I l l inois ex- p ress ion o f m y thesis t ha t w o r k f a r e is best descr ibed as a success fo rmula . W h e t h e r viewed f rom an individualis t ic , cont rac ta r ian , communi t a r i an , or most any other ethical perspect ive , w o r k f a r e is the r ight d i rec t ion in which to advance the i m p o r t a n t social prac t ice o f welfare . As do the welfare recipients w h o m w o r k f a r e will enable , work fa re , too , deserves a chance to succeed.

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workfare: servitude or success formula?

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