Papers
One of the most popular economic policy ideas is also one that simply does not work. Instead of increasing economic mobility and good employment opportunities, a large body of research over the past two decades has shown that work requirements have had the opposite effect: forcing recipients into dead-end jobs or leaving them financially precarious. Time and again, they have been proven to be an ineffective and punitive tool that deepens poverty and disproportionately leads to public benefits denial for Black and brown people. But making people work to secure basic needs and safety is a practice that goes beyond recent economic policy to an earlier history of labor in the United States: slavery and its aftermath. In this series with NPQ and accompanying paper co-authored by subject expert Ife Finch Floyd and staff of CLASP and the Maven Collaborative, we lay out the myriad reasons that work requirements are trash.