CHAPTER 4 Working to Just Live

Material Needs of the Unemployed in Early Twenty-First-Century Southern California

For my participants living in the suburbs of southern California in the early 2010s, some of the socially defined basic necessities of life included food, a dwelling place and utilities (gas, electricity, water), health care, a car and fuel, a phone, and internet access. They could postpone personal clothing expenditures, but if they had a baby, they needed diapers, and older children needed clothes that fit their growing bodies. Without an income, the unemployed had to make hard choices among these needs.

Food insecurity was widespread at that time. In the fall of 2011, a national survey of adults who wanted to work, but who had not had a full-time job for a year or more, found that 44 percent had problems paying for food.⁸ As important as food is for life, however, when money is limited, groceries may come second to other demands.

For example, when Jackie Gallardo lost her job at a furniture warehouse, she had many harrowing months of having to choose between buying food for herself and her children or buying gas for her car. She could ignore her own hunger, but she did not want to do that to her children, nor could she tell her car to try to get along without gasoline. The suburbs of southern California, as is typical in suburbs throughout the United States, are poorly served by public transportation. Without a working vehicle, it would be difficult for people living in this area to get to the grocery store or their next job. When ReNé McKnight’s car was repossessed, her daughter had to wake up at 3:45 A.M. to get ready to catch the first of the three buses she had to take to get to her high school. Making car payments and keeping their old vehicle running were constant preoccupations for many of my participants, as were worries about the cost of gas.

Housing was, and still is, a major concern for the unemployed. There is not enough housing in southern California, and its scarcity leads to high prices for both renters and would-be homeowners.⁹ In 2011 the median rent in the greater Los Angeles area was among the most expensive in the country, at $1,214 a month. In the greater Riverside area inland, rents were only a little more affordable, with a median of $1,076 a month in 2011.¹⁰ Nationwide, renters in the bottom fifth of earners spend nearly two-thirds of their income in rent.¹¹ The number of public housing units has shrunk by nearly one-quarter since the early 1990s, and vouchers to help renters in the private housing market are so hard to obtain that many public housing authorities have closed their waiting lists.¹² In Los Angeles County, there were 40,000 people on the waiting list in 2017.¹³

Mortgages were even more expensive. The Great Recession was created by a housing bubble fueled by a toxic brew of predatory, subprime-rate mortgages and feverish home buying that drove home prices ever higher, especially in California and a few other states.¹⁴ Jackie Gallardo, whose gas-versus-food dilemma I just discussed, had been paying a mortgage of $3,200 a month for the large home she and her husband had bought during the height of the housing bubble. While they were working full time, they could meet those payments (barely), but during the Great Recession, their work hours were reduced. They, like so many others, could no longer pay their mortgage and so lost their home.

The unemployed had fewer options than other homeowners to reduce their housing costs. Once they were out of work, no bank would let them refinance their mortgage when interest rates dropped, even if they had faithfully kept up on their mortgage payments. There were national programs that were supposed to help homeowners, but the mortgage lenders did everything they could to avoid fulfilling their legal obligations.¹⁵ Nationwide, nearly half of those who had not had a full-time job for a year or more in 2011 had trouble paying their rent or mortgage.¹⁶ Forty percent of my participants had not been able to pay rent or mortgage at some point during the time they were out of work, and almost one of five lost their apartment or home and had to move in with a family member or friend. One was living in a homeless shelter, and another moved to transitional housing for the homeless during the first year I knew her. Those numbers do not include those who were already living with another family member to save money before they lost their jobs.

Health care was also unaffordable for many of my participants at that time, and that could be deadly. National provision of health insurance in the United States is still politically contested, although it is popular with majorities of the American public.¹⁷ In 2000, I interviewed an elderly man who was nostalgic for the time when patients directly paid doctors in any way they could, perhaps by giving them a couple of chickens. Those days are long gone. Few doctors would accept payment in chickens now, and the costs of health care are so high that only a full-time chicken farmer could amass enough birds as payment. Many Americans are dependent on their employer to contribute thousands of dollars a year toward their premiums, which keeps the costs manageable.¹⁸ Those employer contributions are in turn subsidized by the US government, which exempts the cost of employer-sponsored insurance from federal income and payroll taxes, forgoing $273 billion in revenues in 2019.¹⁹ What does self-sufficiency in health care mean under these circumstances?

In any case, those relatively affordable employer-sponsored health insurance plans were largely unavailable to the unemployed. Their former employers were required by law to continue to offer them access to their health insurance plan for a while (typically, eighteen months), but the employers were not obligated to pay for any portion of it, making medical insurance unaffordable for all but the wealthiest of my participants.²⁰ At that time, Medicaid was only available to low-income children, their parents, and the disabled with few resources.²¹ The Affordable Care Act, which provided funding to states that chose to expand their Medicaid coverage, passed in 2010, but when I began my interviews in 2011 and 2012, its benefits had not yet kicked in.

Many of the middle-aged participants in my project were worried about how they would afford health care because they had no health insurance. Charity care was available at overcrowded county hospitals, but trying to obtain health care in such spaces could be a horrific experience. In one Los Angeles County hospital, a woman died writhing and hemorrhaging on the floor of the waiting room while nurses stepped around her.²² Community clinics did their best to meet the health care needs of those with low incomes, but some of those clinics lacked funding to keep their doors open. When my participant Phoenix Rises learned that her community clinic was closing for lack of funding, she told the clerk who gave her that bad news, “It’s like you just threw me in the bowels of hell. That’s how I feel.” “The bowels of hell” meant the local public hospital where she would have to wait for hours for charity care in the emergency room when all she wanted was a prescription for medication to control her blood pressure.

When I asked the unemployed how they would pay for health insurance, a response I often got is that they planned not to get sick. That plan did not work for one of my participants. When we met, he was dealing with persistent, debilitating back pain. During our interviews, he would frequently pause to breathe deeply and try to manage the pain. He did not have health insurance, so his brother-in-law gave him some money to go to a chiropractor. The pain turned out to be caused by a malignant tumor that killed him a year after our interview. I always wonder whether his cancer would have been detected sooner and he would have survived had the United States made health care available to all.

Compared to food, shelter, and health care, a phone would hardly seem to count as a life necessity. However, it was essential for job seekers, because they needed a phone number at which potential employers could reach them. They also needed internet access, either through a smartphone or a computer (their own or in a public setting) because of the way labor markets work today. Jobs are frequently posted online, and applicants are almost always required to submit their application online.

Some people might add or remove some items from my list. However, the ones I just outlined were a nearly universal core of nonnegotiable needs for southern Californians and, indeed, most Americans at the time of my research.

This, then, was the material context for my unemployed participants: what they needed, their difficulties affording those items, and some of the hardships they faced when they could not afford them. What were the social and psychological consequences of asking for assistance to pay for these necessities?

When Is the Family a Safety Net?

Anthropologists have shown that family structures vary around the world. One way in which they differ is in expectations about how economic resources will be shared.

In chapter 3, I introduced Anastasia Tang, who grew up in southeast Asia. Her parents sent her to the United States for her college education. After receiving her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she obtained a managerial job in a midsize manufacturing company in California; her husband also had a managerial job. Their life plans were disrupted when she was fired because she had chosen to go home to take care of her young children instead of attending two after-hours company events. At almost the same time, her husband, burned out from his corporate job, decided to take a long break from working. In the last chapter I explained that because neither had an income, the couple had to postpone fulfilling Anastasia’s American dream of buying a house. That was not all that bothered her about being out of work, however. What made her so emotional that it became hard for her to talk was how she had let down her parents. She explained that her father had done so much for her, including selling a house they owned that would be worth millions of dollars in the current real estate market, to fund her education. She had no way to repay them: “All those things, and I feel like I can’t even give them two dollars to help.”

I had trouble understanding why this was so upsetting and asked whether her parents needed money from her. Not at all, she told me, but that was what was so distressing. They were well off now, and she was the one struggling financially. As she explained, in Asian families like hers, the parents will sacrifice for their children; in return, adult children should provide for their parents when they are older.²³ Anastasia was unable to fulfill her part of this bargain: “And here we are, I’m forty-plus, I can’t even support my parents.” That statement gave me culture shock. To my US way of thinking, I have no obligation to support my parents if they do not need my financial support. For Anastasia, however, the very fact that there was no meaningful way for her to support her parents because they were better off than she was meant she had failed in her responsibilities.

In many parts of Latin America as well, grown children expect to give their parents financial support. In the last chapter, I described Luis Segura and Feliciano Salas, longtime US residents from Mexico, who were barely supporting themselves as day laborers after they lost their regular jobs during the recession. Nonetheless, if Feliciano’s mother called and said she did not have enough money for food, Feliciano said, “I have to borrow it from friends or something, but I have to send her some.” Luis had never made much money working for landscaping companies, but he sent remittances to fix his family’s home.²⁴

In the United States, several researchers found that “patterns of giving back among whites are nearly purely unidirectional, flowing downstream from parents to children, and continue in this vein even after children reach adulthood.”²⁵ It is uncommon for the flow to go from grown children to their working-age parents. Yet European Americans are not the only group who do not expect to support their parents or other family members. Jody Agius Vallejo studied middle-class, second-generation Mexican Americans living in southern California suburbs. Among other questions, she asked whether they have financially supported their parents and relatives and whether they feel an obligation to give back to their family. She found that their family’s circumstances when they were growing up determined whether members of the second generation felt that obligation and gave back. All but one of those who grew up in a low-income family in the United States helped support their parents and siblings. By contrast, Latinos who grew up in middle-class families in the United States exhibited the more typically white pattern of financial support from parents to children, but not the reverse. Of course, among those who grew up in middle-class families, parents usually do not need their offspring’s assistance, but Agius Vallejo noted that members of the second generation from such families also do not feel obligated to help other, less affluent relatives. She argues that what is relevant is not ethnic heritage but rather a firsthand experience of economic struggles—an experience that creates the desire to give back.²⁶

The normative one-way flow of financial assistance from parents to their children in the United States created an age divide among my participants in the availability of family support and their feelings about it. I describe the implications for my middle-aged and older participants shortly. First, however, we need to consider the fraught question: At what age are Americans expected to be self-supporting adults? There is no clear answer at the present time—neither in the United States nor in many other parts of the world.

Neither Family nor the State

The primary safety nets for my unemployed participants were their families and the state. However, those were not the only options. Sometimes friends, faith communities, and charitable organizations such as food pantries were sources of economic assistance. For my participants, that aid could come at a cost to personal relationships, or it could foster deeper ties.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the nineteenth century that one way in which Americans combat the fragmentation of their individualistic society is by forming voluntary associations.⁴⁶ There is considerable debate about whether such associations are currently in decline, but those civil society groups can be sources of assistance in times of need, as can religious communities and friends.⁴⁷

The forms of assistance that seemed to bring the most pleasure to my participants were voluntary gifts from peers that they could reciprocate in some way. Two mentioned such gifts from members of their church. When I met ReNé McKnight for our second interview, she said she was “in high spirits” because members of her dance team at church had asked her what she needed, and she was looking forward to obtaining winter clothes for her daughter and herself. Her experience in her previous church was different: “You were always for yourself. People would always be like, ‘Oh, if you need anything, just let us know!’—you know how people just say?” However, when she asked for something, they never followed through. Similarly, Marcus Walker was grateful that his church gave him money to repair his used car and pay taxes on it. Both volunteered many hours a week at their church. Like my participants who gave their time to help their parents and received financial assistance from them, there was mutuality in their relationship: both felt they belonged to a supportive community to which they gave in their own ways.

It was the same with friends. A few participants reported a comfortable reciprocity with some of their friends while they were out of work. For example, Daniel Horn, the unemployed contractor who was living with his mother, had a middle-income friend who would pick up the restaurant tab when they went out to eat. In return, Daniel helped him with yard work. Paradoxically, he was more reluctant to ask his wealthier friends for financial assistance, even though they could better afford to help him, because he could not reciprocate.

By contrast, Della Jones, an unemployed schoolteacher, had needed to ask her friends for money so often, without being able to repay them, that she could no longer bear the lack of reciprocity in their friendship: “Every time I talk to them, it was like I was getting something from them, and I could never give back.” She had needed assistance after her divorce, during her unpaid summer breaks, and after she was laid off during the Great Recession when schools had to cut their budgets. She could not afford to socialize with her friends because their get-togethers required spending money. She was so ashamed that she changed churches and stopped communicating with her friends. She said they were still willing to give her money, but she could no longer accept it. As Mauss would have predicted, Della felt wounded by this one-way charity. She missed her friends terribly, but “I just feel really yucky about always, just—I only see you when I want something. That’s not a good friend.” She also felt she was failing to live up to American self-sufficiency norms: “Maybe I’m asking for it because it’s too easy. Maybe if I learned to live without it, then I’d be a better person.”

Other gifts from peers were problematic because they came with condescending advice or conditions. Jim Wade’s church was ready to give him financial assistance, but this assistance was accompanied by lectures from older, wealthier members, who had come of age when it was easier to find a stable, full-time, well-paid job. One said to him, “Your situation now—it’s your fault because you didn’t get a master’s degree and you didn’t further your education and you didn’t apply for jobs I applied for.” Jim, who had worked in the parts department of a car dealer and at auto parts stores, resented these lectures. The older church member giving Jim these lectures did not understand that the economy had changed, and he was ignoring the advantages he had because of his family’s socioeconomic class. Jim came from a working-class family in which money was tight, and he had worked at lower-wage jobs that did not pay for higher education—unlike that church member, who had wealthy parents who could pay for the college education that enabled him to obtain a corporate job that then funded his master’s degree. When Jim could no longer afford to pay his rent, his church offered to pay for his housing but only if he and his wife lived separately. They did not want to provide for her housing because she did not attend church due to her work schedule.

Charitable organizations such as food banks that made donations with no questions asked were less intrusive. My participants did not mind the lack of reciprocity in accepting their aid because helping those in need was those organizations’ primary purpose, and accepting their assistance did not threaten any social relationships.⁴⁸ The problem was that their donations often had a “beggars-can’t-be-choosers” quality. My participant Sam Lennon noted that one of the food banks she frequented had healthy food, but another primarily provided processed foods and odd items like chocolate-covered licorice. You cannot make a meal out of chocolate-covered licorice.

In sum, not everyone can count on assistance from their family or feel comfortable accepting their help. Occasional assistance from friends, faith-based organizations, and other nonprofit agencies may feel like a loving sign of belonging and support, or it may create feelings of failure to live up to cultural ideals and may imperil relationships based on mutuality. In any case, sporadic gifts are not enough to pay the bills. That leaves government social welfare benefits.

Navigating the Deserving/Undeserving Divide in the US Social Welfare Regime

At this time in the United States, it is better in some ways to be jobless and broke during a recession than when the economy is stronger. Although it is harder to find another job, there is more public sympathy and greater state support. (“State” in this context means government, whether federal or for each of the fifty states in the United States.) Still, those unemployed during the Great Recession had to deal with shifting regulations that left it unclear which forms of assistance were available to them or could be taken without public opprobrium. They were also caught between the binary cultural categories that oppose the “deserving poor” to the “undeserving poor”—categories that could not easily accommodate the long-term unemployed like my participants, who had been self-sufficient wage earners in the past but who had been unemployed for a year or longer. At first, those who lost their jobs during the Great Recession were considered deserving of state benefits by most members of the public, but during the slack labor market that continued for several years after this recession, those who were still unable to find work contended with comments that cast them as undeserving of continued public assistance.

The United States has never institutionalized universal “social citizenship,” meaning the right for all “to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society,” as the sociologist T. H. Marshall famously formulated it.⁴⁹ Instead, the structures of public provision for those in need perpetuate a distinction, taken from the English poor laws of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, between those treated as the deserving poor (“orphans, widows, handicapped, frail elderly,” along with the “involuntarily unemployed”) and those treated as the undeserving poor (the “drunkards, shiftless, lazy”).⁵⁰ The deserving poor are imagined as having good morals and a desire to be self-supporting but are prevented from helping themselves by incapacity or circumstances beyond their control. The undeserving poor, by contrast, are imagined as perfectly able to support themselves by their work but choose not to because it is easier and more enjoyable to depend on others. Deservingness is thus tied to productivist values that people’s social worth depends on their work effort. The deserving poor are considered worthy of assistance, at least for a short time, but the undeserving poor should be forced to work. In the late twentieth century, this moralistic distinction was updated with an economistic argument that “free money” from the government is “a disincentive to work” because (these theorists assume) any rational person would choose the free money instead of the effort of working.⁵¹

The widespread unemployment, poverty, and potential social unrest caused by the Great Depression created pressure to pass the Social Security Act of 1935, which established minimal financial assistance for some of the unemployed, as well as the elderly, the blind, and dependent children.⁵² Still, the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor continued in the structure of US social welfare programs. As the historian Michael Katz notes, by the 1950s, “most elderly people, workers disabled in accidents, and the unemployed (not to mention veterans, always a special category) could claim help as a right through social insurance.”⁵³ These government social insurance programs are ones to which workers and employers contributed, along with the federal and state governments, and from which all could claim benefits if they fell into one of those categories, even if they were not needy. These groups—the elderly, disabled, and unemployed—were generally considered deserving.⁵⁴

For those in need who do not fall into any of these categories, there are other government programs, but their benefits are restricted to compel a return to waged work. As one European analyst, Stephan Leibfried, put it in the 1990s, the US social welfare regime shares with England and other Anglophone countries a conception of the welfare state as a mechanism to provide minimal subsistence while compelling waged work in the private sector. In Leibfried’s words, these nations consider “the welfare state as a work-enforcing coercive mechanism.”⁵⁵ He contrasted that coercive approach with three types of welfare-state regimes, including that of the Scandinavian welfare states, which also emphasize work but provide training for workers and jobs in the public sector to make full employment possible. The Scandinavian approach, in Leibfried’s categorization, helps the unemployed go back to work instead of stigmatizing them for being unable to support themselves in the private-sector labor market.

We can see work-enforcing welfare state mechanisms in the United States in the two best-known examples of assistance targeted to the poor: small cash stipends to low-income families with children (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families [TANF], popularly termed “welfare”) and nutritional assistance (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP], commonly called “food stamps”). Benefits in those means-tested programs are intentionally low to discourage dependence on them. Despite the myth of the “welfare queen” living a good life on government benefits, in nearly every state, TANF benefits leave a family of three people below half the federal poverty level.⁵⁶ These benefits also have time limits: since the “welfare reform” laws of the mid-1990s, the normal rule has been that able-bodied adults between eighteen and fifty without dependent children cannot receive food stamps for more than three months during any three-year period.⁵⁷ Moreover, recipients cannot qualify unless their income and assets are below the level set by their state, and they are required to engage in work activities. Even with all these restrictions, when those in need accept that assistance, it can create suspicion that they lack a good work ethic. Although majorities of US survey respondents consistently support government “assistance to the poor,” majorities also agree that “poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs.”⁵⁸

Poverty in the United States is widely distributed but is usually temporary. One long-term study found that more than half of all Americans of working age will be part of a poor or near-poor household for at least a year at some point in their life.⁵⁹ However, in the popular imagination, poverty is assumed to be the intractable condition of a small set of Americans thought to fall outside the mainstream. US racial hierarchies contribute to this othering of the poor. At any given time, a majority of those falling below the federal poverty line are white, but the poor are often imagined as Black and brown.⁶⁰ There is a grain of truth in that image: because of discriminatory job barriers, African Americans and Latinos have high poverty rates relative to their population. Nonetheless, they are not the majority of the poor overall, nor have Americans always paid attention to their economic struggles. The political scientist Martin Gilens points out that “black poverty was ignored by white society throughout most of American history.”⁶¹ In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, US ethnoracial hierarchies placed northern Europeans and Protestants on top, and researchers focused on the supposed problematic work habits and low intelligence of poor Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Ireland, southern Europe, and eastern Europe.

Poverty was not popularly associated with African Americans until the mid-1960s. Gilens found that from 1950 through 1964, most images of people in poverty in three major news magazines were of white people, but from 1967 through the end of his study in 1992, the majority of those images were of Blacks, far out of proportion to their actual representation among the poor. In the early 1990s about 60 percent of the images of poor people depicted Blacks, which was double the actual percentage of Blacks among the poor.⁶² Fed by racist stereotypes and arguments that in some low-income communities of color there was a “culture of poverty” that perpetuated state dependency, this distorted representation reinforced the association of poverty with laziness.⁶³ These cultural models hide the true extent of white poverty and stigmatize recipients of those government programs designed to help with economic adversity.

As this history indicates, recipients of unemployment benefits are generally considered to fall on the “deserving” side of the invidious “deserving/undeserving” divide. To qualify for unemployment benefits, applicants must establish a work record in the state where they apply for benefits and then lose their job through no fault of their own, typically because their employer downsized the workforce or went out of business. Those conditions fit the cultural model of the deserving poor: someone who wants to be self-supporting but is currently unable to work. Those who left their job voluntarily, were fired, had only occasional part-time work, or are new residents of the state are ineligible. Unemployment compensation for those who qualify is not munificent, but it is more generous than that provided to the imagined undeserving poor through food stamps, TANF, or general assistance for childless adults. To illustrate the difference, in late 2019 and early 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic began, unemployment benefits averaged $387 a week nationally, but the average TANF cash grant was less than half that amount at $447 a month.⁶⁴ In 2020, only half the states in the United States offered cash assistance to adults in need without dependent children (General Assistance or General Relief). In California, the General Relief benefit was just $221 a month.⁶⁵

Still, even unemployment compensation is time limited. In most states it is available for up to twenty-six weeks during normal economic conditions.⁶⁶ Like other US social welfare programs, the goal is to force a return to work as soon as possible.

A deep recession is not a normal economy. As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, when unemployment is widespread and seen as due to causes beyond the control of the laid-off workers, there is more public sympathy, and more financial assistance is provided by the state. The larger benefit is not just a humanitarian response. It is also a pragmatic effort to put more money in circulation, lest decreased spending by the unemployed drag the economy into an even deeper recession.⁶⁷

For these reasons, during the Great Recession certain social welfare benefits became more available. Unemployment compensation benefits were extended up to a maximum of ninety-nine weeks for eligible job seekers.⁶⁸ Although the amount of those benefits, which varied from state to state, remained skimpy by comparison with those provided by many other wealthy countries,⁶⁹ lengthening the period when job seekers could obtain this money was an enormous boon given the difficulty of obtaining a job at that time.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 also expanded the food stamp program. Benefit levels were increased a little, and states were allowed to waive the three-month time limit for adults without dependent children.⁷⁰ In addition, to better help those who had little to no income, many states elected to eliminate limitations on the value of assets held by applicants.⁷¹ These temporary rule changes made many of my participants newly eligible to receive food stamps for the many months they were out of work.

Thus, when we met in 2011 and 2012, most of my participants had received or were still receiving extended unemployment benefits, and some were also newly eligible for food stamps. Did they feel entitled to those benefits? We can discern their perceptions about which state benefits they could accept while maintaining their self-respect and which felt more problematic by examining not only what they said but also what they did not say—the types of support that seemed normal and acceptable enough to pass without comment.

The culture of poverty theory imagines that some groups have been socialized into a habit of work avoidance. Not one individual in my study fit that description. The only class difference I found in job search efforts is that the unemployed in middle- or upper-income households who had a partner or relative who could support them were typically less motivated to find another job right away than those who had fewer household resources. Some of the former said they were “taking a break” and resting before they looked for another job, as I show in chapter 5. By contrast, my low-income participants were very strongly motivated to find a job out of necessity.⁷² Nor were there typical racial or ethnic differences among my participants in their willingness to work.⁷³ I noticed that some of my middle-aged white participants were not looking very hard for another job. One example is Mickey Muller, the engineer I described earlier who was fired in his mid-fifties and gave up his job search, which he could afford to do because his wife earned a good salary and he received financial assistance from his elderly mother. However, I would not say that whites, or members of any other racial or ethnic group, lack a good work ethic. These middle-aged participants were self-supporting for many years when they were younger but said that the difficulties they encountered finding another job, which many attributed to age discrimination, left them discouraged. The only other demographic pattern I noticed is that my first-generation immigrant participants were strikingly less willing to accept government benefits targeted to the poor than any other group. I discuss their views later in the chapter.

Instead of having fixed attitudes about government benefits, some of my participants even changed their views during the short period of my research. Many of those who were initially reluctant to take food stamps later accepted them as their need for financial assistance increased.

As I explained, eligibility for food stamps changed, temporarily, during the Great Recession. Previously, only those with a low income and few assets qualified. To apply for food stamps, one not only had to be quite poor but also willing to think of oneself as poor. Furthermore, one had to be willing to face possible scorn for receiving a benefit whose recipients had often been accused of taking advantage of taxpayers’ generosity.⁷⁴ In the past, food stamps were coupons that, when used, were visible to other shoppers. Today, the benefit is transferred electronically to a state-issued debit card that is more discreet because it resembles other debit cards, although it may still be identifiable by another shopper looking closely or if the recipient’s attempted purchases are rejected by the cashier saying something like, “You can’t get a rotisserie chicken with food stamps” loudly enough to be heard by others in line.⁷⁵ When Congress and the states broadened eligibility for SNAP and made its benefit more generous, one might predict that the long-term unemployed would eagerly apply for help buying food. However, that is not what I found at first, because they interpreted the new rules with their old cognitive schemas.

A few who lacked housing applied for food stamps so they could contribute something to the households of the friends or relatives who were sheltering them, in lieu of the rent they could not afford. Some were willing to apply for food stamps but had been denied in the past because the income and asset limits had been so low; they did not reapply because they were unaware that the rules had changed. However, others were knowledgeable about the new rules but, for a long time, could not reconcile taking food stamps with their self-image.

Ann Lopez, whom I introduced at the beginning of the chapter, is a good example of someone who knew that new rules permitted her to receive food stamps but had trouble bringing herself to apply for them. Earlier in her life Ann had been married, but her husband did not have steady work as a carpenter. With no more education than an associate degree in secretarial work, she learned to download inventory data for a major telecommunications company, and her income helped provide a comfortable, middle-class life for her children. After her divorce, she became a self-taught IT worker for the telecommunications company until it began to outsource the work to third-party firms. When we first met, she had not had any work for a year. I asked Ann whether she had applied for food stamps. She replied that her adult daughter, who was a social services eligibility worker familiar with the new rules, had explained that she received a little too much from her unemployment benefits to qualify. Ann added, “Not that I want to go there.” By the time we met two years later for a follow-up interview, Ann had obtained only a couple of short-term positions, and her unemployment benefits from the last job had ended. I asked her again whether she had considered applying for food stamps. Ann replied, “Funny you say that, because—no, but my daughter keeps on telling me to.” She joked, “I know it’s there, and it’s available, but I figure the less food I eat, the better. I might get skinny.” Turning more serious, she stated, “I’ve never had to do that, so I don’t know that I want to do it.”

On the surface, it makes no sense to say, “I’ve never had to do that, so I don’t know that I want to do it.” Why should the fact that she did not need food stamps in the past explain why she resisted taking them when she did need them? However, her answer is understandable if we look at her values and self-image, rather than her material needs. As I quoted earlier, Ann had been proud that “I’ve always been able to provide for myself.” She did not like to think of herself as the sort of person who would ask for food stamps. Perhaps Ann also did not want to think of herself as the sort of person who would need food stamps. “I’ve never had to do that” could be another way of saying, “I have never been a poor person”; “so, I don’t know that I want to do it” could mean, “I don’t want to change my class identity.”⁷⁶

Class identity explicitly mattered to Mona Childs, who had most recently worked in marketing for retirement communities. Out of work for longer than a year and single, she still thought of herself as middle class, which she defined as “I’m not collecting food stamps yet. But, at the same time, I’m not able to afford a country club.” This comment is telling: Mona viewed “collecting food stamps” as a paradigmatic symbol of being poor, and it was as distant from her middle-class identity as belonging to a country club, which to her symbolized being rich. This is a different way of understanding what it means to be middle class than the productivist and consumerist meanings we saw in chapters 2 and 3. Instead of defining being middle class in productivist ways as being hardworking or defining it solely by her consumption, Mona defined it at that moment as not being so desperate as to need a social welfare benefit for the very poor.⁷⁷

Emily Quinn, a former executive secretary who had been unemployed for two years when we met, was similar to Ann Lopez in having a relative who was knowledgeable about the new government benefit rules. Emily’s cousin reviews applicants’ eligibility for food stamps and had urged Emily to apply for them. Her cousin explained that the program was open to more people like her because “ ‘the President said he doesn’t want people going hungry.’ ” On two occasions, Emily gave me a lengthy story about her resistance to doing so. When her cousin first raised the issue, Emily’s answer was “I’m not gonna do that. I can’t do that.” The cousin explained that Emily would qualify for about $200 a month for groceries, but although Emily’s unemployment benefits had ended and she had no other household income as a single woman, she still sat on the application.

Some of my participants never changed their mind about applying, but Emily, Mona, and Ann eventually did.⁷⁸ Emily explained that for weeks her cousin repeatedly reminded her to apply and promised that no one would know: “She would ask me, ‘Have you done it?’ And I said, ‘I can’t press Send. I just can’t press Send. I just can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.’ And finally she talked me into it, and I pressed Send.” Emily’s long story, emphasizing her reluctance and insisting that her cousin “talked me into it,” may have been her way of performing the role of the morally deserving person who does not want to take advantage of government programs.⁷⁹ As she also explained when I asked why it was so hard for her to apply, filling out the question about her needs “was another acknowledgment of where I’m at” financially, which was difficult for her to admit to herself. Emily was soon grateful for the food stamps, saying, “It has really helped tremendously.” Nonetheless, she worried that other grocery shoppers would recognize the state-issued electronic benefits card. She confided, “I still try to camouflage it in the grocery stores for those smarty-warties who may recognize the colors.” She worried that others would think she did not need that benefit because she did not look poor. She imagined another shopper in line thinking, “ ‘She’s got food stamps. Look at her. She looks really nice. She’s all dressed up.’ ”

Two years after I first met Mona, she had exhausted the maximum ninety-nine weeks of unemployment benefits. She had not found another full-time job, so she was adjusting to a lower standard of living. I asked if she was receiving any social services, and she explained that she had been telling someone about her situation, and they suggested she might be eligible for Cal-Fresh (California’s food stamp program). She was happy to receive that benefit, and she showed no shame about it. In those two years, her self-image may have changed—and so, too, perhaps her perception of food stamp recipients—as that program became more widely available.

Ann also changed her mind. Only two months after she reiterated her reluctance to apply for food stamps in our follow-up interview, she sent me a happy email explaining that her fortunes had improved since we had last talked because she had just received a distribution from the retirement fund she held with her ex-husband. She added casually, “Oh, I forgot to mention that I started collecting food stamps last month also.” Surprised, I wrote back to ask whether she had just learned something new about her eligibility. She answered, “I knew I was eligible but didn’t feel like applying. My daughter suggested it again, and I applied two months after finishing my unemployment.” Her email reveals little about her feelings about this development, but a mutual acquaintance volunteered the news: “She’s just thrilled.” When one has no regular income, food stamps are a blessing.

By contrast with their qualms about accepting food stamps, my participants took their unemployment benefits for granted.⁸⁰ They showed no ambivalence or shame in depending on an unemployment check. Typically, they mentioned it matter-of-factly, with their comments focusing not on whether they should accept unemployment benefits but on whether they were still receiving that benefit, how much they received, and whether it was sufficient for their needs. For example, Ichabod Jones, an unemployed social services program director, worried that his unemployment check would not go far: “Unemployment can only be so much. It’s gonna be like 450 [dollars] a week. The house payment’s gonna be 1,500 [dollars] for the month.”

Many used the phrasing “my unemployment,” wording that suggests a right to that assistance. It was not the only way they spoke of unemployment benefits; it was also common to say things like “I get unemployment.” Nonetheless, “my unemployment” is telling. Contrast, for example, the reluctance to collect food stamps demonstrated by Emily, Mona, and Ann with their casual references to “my unemployment” (the underscores represent my highlighting for analysis, not the speaker’s emphasis):

EMILY [answering my question about her income last year]: I had my unemployment until September, and that was $1,800 a month.

MONA: So, my unemployment, I’m not really certain when it runs out.

ANN: I was laid off for a year and I had unemployment for a year. I did not finish my unemployment [i.e., did not take the full length of benefits available because she found work].

I found twenty examples of my participants speaking of “my unemployment” in my interviews, but not one person said “my food stamps.” This difference is unsurprising, given the history of US social welfare programs. As I explained, historically the unemployed (or, at least, some of the unemployed) have been treated as having a right to government assistance, in contrast to the desperately poor, who were the only ones eligible for food stamps but have never been considered to have a right to it.⁸¹

Only one participant expressed an initial reluctance to accept unemployment benefits. Charlie Mike Romero, an unemployed IT specialist at a bank, said, “I worked for almost twenty-five years there at the bank. They gave me a letter so that I could claim unemployment. At first, I didn’t want to. I said, ‘I don’t want [it]. I’m not doing it.’ But then I said, ‘I still have the right to it.’ ” Social insurance schemes like unemployment insurance are treated both by the state and recipients as “a right.” Charlie Mike is an immigrant, and his initial reluctance will make more sense when I discuss my other immigrant participants.

Yet not all native-born Americans treat unemployment benefits as a right under every circumstance. Long-term unemployment benefits fall into a gray area in public discourses about the deserving versus the undeserving poor. The normal length of unemployment benefits in the United States is twenty-six weeks. Policies extending unemployment benefits for a longer period often generate criticism, especially from political conservatives who suspect that recipients of taxpayer-funded assistance would prefer to depend on that assistance rather than work for a living. (In chapter 7, I discuss controversies about extended unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Yet, as I have explained, during a deep recession, most policy makers and members of the public understand that there are many more people out of work than there are job vacancies, so that it is much more difficult than usual to find work. Under those circumstances, there are conflicting views about whether the long-term unemployed are “deserving” victims of a bad economy or “undeserving” loafers.

Although there was some public criticism of recipients of extended unemployment benefits in the aftermath of the Great Recession, my participants resisted characterizations of them and their fellow job seekers as not trying hard enough. Some scholars “associate the conservative turn in American politics with a burgeoning individualism that offers little sense of fellow-feeling or shared fate,” but that is not what I found among my participants.⁸² Their discourses suggest some ways that Americans can reconcile their own and others’ acceptance of state social welfare benefits with their values of productivism and self-sufficiency.

I noticed that, even after my participants found another job, they remained concerned about others who remained out of work. We might have imagined that those who obtained jobs would start denigrating others who were still unemployed, but that is not what I heard. Federal extensions of unemployment benefits expired in 2013, and Congress debated whether to continue them, ultimately deciding not to do so. That debate was in the news when I conducted my follow-up interviews. Even though most of my interviewees were ineligible for any further extensions—either because they had jobs by then or had been out of work too long—they were indignant at the insulting way the unemployed were described, as if “they’re collecting it and they’re going to the beaches every day,” as one of my participants put it. For example, by the time I reinterviewed Amber Washington in 2014, she had found a job in a social services agency. She raised the issue of the end of federal unemployment extensions before I did:

AMBER: Now I am upset that they were not able to continue unemployment benefits for people.

CLAUDIA: I was gonna ask about that.

AMBER: I was, like, “What’s up with that?” Thank God I wasn’t getting them. But for those millions of people who—I mean, what are they doing now? I really felt for them. How are they making it? What are they doing without their benefits now?

This is a humanitarian argument, a well-recognized basis for social welfare programs in the United States.⁸³ However, it is not the only way my participants justified extended unemployment benefits for themselves and the other long-term unemployed.

Others accepted the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor but positioned themselves, and others out of work like them, on the deserving side of that divide because they were making every effort to find another job. It was not their fault that no jobs were available. If having a good work ethic makes one deserving, they reasoned that they are deserving if they want to work but are thwarted by the unwillingness of employers to hire them.⁸⁴ Although conservative commentators were the ones publicly questioning extended benefits, I heard this counter-discourse from my participants across the political spectrum. Jim Wade, a political conservative, was angry at the criticisms he had heard, such as from others in his church: “One point I want to make: people like us that are on unemployment and food stamps don’t wanna be on unemployment. We don’t wanna be on food stamps. We don’t want government handouts. We wanna work. There’s a common misconception of people who’ve never been through this. It’s, ‘Well, people who are unemployed, it’s their fault because they want government handouts.’ I do not; we do not. I wanna work.” Emily Quinn, who is a political liberal, made the same point: “I know a lot of people hate people like us. […] They just looked at it [extended unemployment benefits] as another welfare program. It wasn’t. That saved my ass, and a lot of other people that I know. And all during that time, we were looking, looking, looking, sending out résumés, interviewing. Just having the door shut in our face.” Jim and Emily not only positioned themselves as deserving; they also imagined a collective “we”—“We don’t wanna be on food stamps. We don’t want government handouts. We wanna work.” “We were looking, looking, looking”—made up of their fellow long-term unemployed who were all deserving because all were trying so hard to find another job.

Many of my participants, Jim and Emily included, had gotten to know their unemployed peers in career counseling sessions and accountability/support group meetings. The smaller accountability/support groups especially offered opportunities to share personal stories over the course of multiple meetings and may have been particularly conducive to developing a collective identity. Many of the unemployed never attended such meetings, yet some of my participants who did not participate in such groups, like Carl Mathews, still developed a sense of collective identity with others in economic distress during the Great Recession. Carl traced his sense of being in the same boat as many others to a group session about mortgage modification, where he met other homeowners who could no longer pay their mortgages. That sense of shared fate was reinforced by the rhetoric of the Occupy protests, which was in the news at the time I began my fieldwork in the fall of 2011. The Occupy movement’s slogan, “We are the 99%,” resonated with Carl and with some of my other participants.⁸⁵

A final way in which some described themselves as deserving is that they had been taxpayers in the past. Tom Dunn was disgusted with the politicians who questioned the motives of those receiving unemployment: “I put in thirty years before I was out of labor paying my FICA, paying my income tax, all of these things, state disability, unemployment, all of these things I’ve been paying my whole life. I didn’t feel guilty at all getting an unemployment check.”⁸⁶ He also pointed out that the amount he received in unemployment benefits was much lower than his former salary as an IT recruiter: “These yahoos in Congress that have the temerity to say that people are literally staying unemployed so they can collect $1,850 a month; they’re out of their minds.”⁸⁷ Tom had earned more than $6,000 a month in his last job. Several others made the point that “living on unemployment is not any picnic for anybody,” as another participant put it. On average, unemployment benefits in the United States pay only 40 to 50 percent of a worker’s former wages.⁸⁸

Tom’s argument that unemployment benefits are not large enough to feel guilty about applies all the more to TANF and General Relief, the cash assistance programs targeted to the very poor. To my surprise, the handful of participants who were receiving those benefits did not describe any soul-searching about it. I was surprised because recipients of those programs, popularly termed “welfare,” have been the target of criticism from politicians and many members of the public. Before those programs were severely curtailed in 1996, welfare recipients were commonly accused of just “sitting around” and living off their monthly check instead of trying to work.⁸⁹ Yet, those of my participants who applied for and obtained this assistance did not express in their interviews the reluctance to do so that I heard from those receiving food stamps.⁹⁰

One possible explanation is that recipients were less subject to public shaming for receiving the benefits than they were for food stamps, even though both forms of assistance are typically accessed through an EBT debit card. Nonetheless, food is normally purchased in public where other shoppers can see the EBT card, whereas many other expenses such as rent and utilities can be paid in private.⁹¹

Another explanation could be that the benefits were so difficult to obtain that the very few who qualified were desperate enough to be beyond worrying about what others would think of them. When Ginger Thi lost her job as a secretary, she became homeless. Nonetheless, the first time she applied for General Relief, she was rejected because she had $100 in her bank account. She was told that to qualify, she could not have more than $50 to her name. Every participant in my study who received TANF or General Relief was either homeless or on the verge of becoming homeless.

A final likely explanation is these benefits were so meager that they were scarcely worth feeling ashamed about. When ReNé McKnight and her daughter moved to California, she had a job lined up, but the client for whom ReNé was supposed to provide home care passed away. ReNé did not qualify for unemployment benefits because she had voluntarily left her previous job in Texas and did not have a work record in California. With no other options, she applied for TANF, which provided only $490 a month for her and her daughter. It was not even enough to cover her $500 monthly rent for the only housing she could find: a guest house that was nearly uninhabitable because it lacked a working stove, heat, and hot water. Theresa Allen, who had no dependents, qualified for just $221 a month in General Relief. It was so little that she could not pay her rent, which is why she had to move in with her mother.

My immigrant participants faced even more challenging regulations than those born in this country, accompanied by different threats to their self-identity. All but two of the sixteen first-generation immigrant participants in this study were either naturalized citizens or lawful permanent residents who had lived in the United States for at least twenty years, but that did not make them secure in their subjective citizenship—their sense of belonging to the nation.⁹²

Like my native-born participants, the first-generation immigrants had no problem accepting unemployment compensation. Charlie Mike Romero, whom I quoted earlier, was the only one who mentioned any doubt or hesitation about accepting that benefit. An immigrant from El Salvador, he had been living in the United States for more than twenty-five years and had worked as an IT systems administrator for a bank. As we saw, even Charlie Mike eventually decided, “I still have the right to it.” On the surface, it seems that immigrant Americans and native-born are no different in considering unemployment compensation as a right.

Strikingly, however, no first-generation immigrant in this study used an expression that translated as “my unemployment.” Instead, they would say things like “I’m getting unemployment,” or “I am receiving unemployment pay.” Perhaps the wording “my unemployment” was not conventional in their first language. However, another possibility is that they did not feel as secure an entitlement to that benefit as the native-born do.

Saying or not saying “my unemployment” is a subtle, debatable indicator of subjective citizenship. What was not subtle at all was the vehemence with which most of my immigrant participants spurned any social welfare benefits targeted to the poor, including food stamps. With only a few exceptions, inquiries about whether they had applied for food stamps, subsidized housing, or cash welfare were met with strong denials. For example, La dama de abril, who grew up in Colombia and lived in Venezuela before coming to the United States to join her sister Lucy Guerrero, emphasized her desire to “be useful for the country”: “I would never want to ask for welfare. I wouldn’t like to live off the government. And it’s what I avoid. I want to be useful for the country, this one or whatever country, be a useful woman.” When Claudia C. asked her what she meant by “a useful woman,” La dama de abril replied, “You can support yourself, without having to have someone supporting you. You yourself can have all your necessities. You are self-sufficient, to be self-sufficient. I avoid … I didn’t come to this country to take. I didn’t come into this country to be on welfare. I don’t think like that. I came to be part of this country. To be useful in this country.”

La dama de abril had not been able to obtain lawful permanent residency at that point, so she was ineligible for any government benefits. Undocumented immigrants do not qualify for government social welfare programs such as cash welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid (with some exceptions), and even lawful permanent residents normally need to live in the United States for five years before they can apply.⁹³ Still, La dama de abril found the notion of accepting those social welfare benefits abhorrent, even had she been eligible for them. Doing so was at odds with her identity as someone who had elected to come to the United States “to be useful,” not “to take.”

La dama’s attitudes about food stamps and welfare were echoed by several immigrants who were either citizens or long-time lawful permanent residents and so were eligible for government assistance. La dama’s sister Lucy, who had married an American man many years earlier, was eligible for food stamps and other assistance but turned to her church for help rather than the government. Isabel Navarro had worked for a beauty salon and then started her own cosmetology business. When Claudia C. asked Isabel whether she had “received some kind of help as Section 8 [housing voucher] or food stamps,” Isabel replied, “No, I have never wanted to ask for it,” repeating that for emphasis. Feliciano Salas had lived in the United States for twenty-five years working as a roofer, and he had become a citizen. During the Great Recession, construction jobs were scarce, but he preferred to rely on the kindness of local restaurant managers to give him a meal rather than apply for food stamps. If my native-born participants were hesitant to accept benefits targeted to the poor, most of my immigrant participants went beyond hesitancy to flat refusal.⁹⁴

In addition to the symbolic threat posed by accepting the benefits associated with the undeserving poor, especially poor people of color, immigrants had to contend with the “public charge” laws. US immigration policy does not permit immigrants to become lawful permanent residents or citizens if they have been or are likely to become a “public charge,” defined as “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence, as demonstrated by either (i) the receipt of public cash assistance for income maintenance or (ii) institutionalization for long-term care at government expense.”⁹⁵ In fact, food stamps were not included in the public charge determinations at that time, but that exclusion was not widely known, making immigrants fearful of accepting them.⁹⁶ That is the explanation Jackie Gallardo gave for her reluctance to apply for food stamps during the many harrowing months when she had to choose between feeding her hungry children or putting gas in her car. She explained, “I was afraid to apply for food stamps or things like that because they say it affects your papers [chance of obtaining citizenship].” Jackie had become a citizen just two weeks before our interview, and she was recounting her decisions in the preceding months when she was so close to gaining citizenship and afraid of doing anything that might jeopardize it.

In sum (ironically), immigrants were more likely than the native-born to display what has been described as the typically US trait of self-sufficiency when it came to accepting government social welfare benefits for the poor. However, they were not complete rugged individualists: immigrants from Asia and Latin America were also much more likely than those who were born in the United States to give financial assistance to their parents, and they were also somewhat more likely to receive such assistance from their grown children.

Dependence or Interdependence?

At the end of Fraser and Gordon’s article, “A Genealogy of Dependency,” they quote the welfare rights activist Pat Gowens, “When dependence is not a dirty word, and interdependence is the norm—only then will we make a dent in poverty.”⁹⁷ Is that a realistic political goal?

Based on my research, I doubt that “dependence” will soon lose its negative connotations in the United States. Most of my unemployed participants disliked having no choice but to rely on family, faith communities, or state benefits like food stamps and unemployment compensation. Earning their own income was their preference. If they had had sufficient income of their own, Theresa Allen and her husband would have been able to keep the pets that were like children to them, instead of giving them away or euthanizing them, which was a condition of living with her mother. Accepting financial help from friends without being able to reciprocate became unbearable for Della Jones; it got to the point that she felt she could no longer socialize with them and maintain her self-respect. Depending on help from his church and the state made Jim Wade feel he was being judged as not wanting to work, which was far from the truth.

However, only certain forms of assistance are considered problematic forms of “dependence” in the contemporary United States, and those forms are constantly changing. Katarina Spelling was proud to have been self-supporting since graduating from college, but having her parents pay for her college education did not seem like a problematic form of dependence to her. Others of my participants in their twenties lived with one or both of their parents without considering themselves to be improperly dependent. None of my participants felt it was shameful to accept state assistance to cover the costs of their health care. I expect that soon in the United States public provision of health insurance will be as routine as public provision of education through high school. No one is judged as improperly dependent on the state if they attend public primary or secondary schools, and it is becoming the same for government-provided health insurance.

Fraser and Gordon’s more subversive move, in ending with this quote from Gowens, is to introduce “interdependence” as an alternative to the constraining dichotomy of shameful “dependence” versus proud “independence.” Time and again, I noticed that the most satisfying situations for my participants were ones of mutual aid, with the unemployed giving their time and services in exchange for help with their living expenses.⁹⁸ ReNé McKnight and Marcus Walker happily described the help they received from their respective churches, to which each devoted many volunteer hours. Fred Hernandez, Daniel Horn, Stacie McCarthy, Hillary Edwards, and Mona Childs felt their aging parent or parents needed their physical assistance as much as they needed their parents’ financial assistance.

Even relations with the state can be framed as reciprocal. In the early 1920s Marcel Mauss wrote that state socialism in France is “inspired by the principle that the worker gives his life and labour partly to the community and partly to his bosses [and] … those who benefit from his services are not square with him simply by paying him a wage. The State, representing the community, owes him and his management and fellow-workers a certain security in his life against unemployment, sickness, old age and death.”⁹⁹ In other words, workers give their labor to their employers and the community, and in exchange, the state owes them financial protection when they cannot work. As my participant Tom Dunn pointed out, he had paid taxes for decades; in return, he should be able to receive government assistance when he needed it. The anthropologist Kelly McKowen observed the flip side of this reciprocity between the individual and the state in Norway. In exchange for generous state benefits, unemployed Norwegians feel a moral obligation to return to work so they can pay the taxes that support their fellow citizens.¹⁰⁰ It is a wonderful example of Fraser and Gordon’s understanding of social citizenship, which is grounded in interdependence, not in a divide between some who are independent and others who are dependent.¹⁰¹

In this chapter I have not delved into the possible effects of gender roles on how people get by without an income. Are there the same social expectations of financial self-sufficiency for adult women as there are for adult men in the United States? How does unemployment affect men’s and women’s gender identities and relationships with their life partners and children? Those are the topics to which I turn in the next chapter.