Leading experts and journalists offer an incisive, wide-
ranging critique of welfare reform. In the four years since
Congress acted to "end welfare as we know it," millions of
people have been forced out of government assistance
programs into low-wage, dead-end jobs with few, if any,
benefits. Making Work Pay brings together the foremost
thinkers in the fields of social policy and public affairs
to examine the effects of the new national prosperity on
the working poor—to ask what happened to the second half of
President Bill Clinton's welfare reform, which was supposed
to "make work pay." As Robert Reich notes in his
introduction, "like other ideas that have had the
misfortune of becoming political slogans, 'making work pay'
went from obscurity to meaninglessness without any
intervening period of coherence." This book, which
originated as a special double issue of The American
Prospect magazine, brings coherence to the original notion,
and updates it for a new century. In Making Work Pay,
leading policy analysts and journalists examine the broad
fallout of welfare reform: Marcia Meyers shows how welfare
offices undermine welfare reform; Naomi Barko reveals how
the gender gap in wages hits low-income workers hardest;
Harold Meyerson describes the growing movement to organize
low-wage workers; and Michael Massing details welfare-to-
work programs that actually work. Arriving as Congress
considers the reauthorization of welfare reform, and
including reports of state programs, Making Work Pay is a
timely contribution to a pressing debate.
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