When a struggling mother of two in Milwaukee hits hard times, she turns to a local welfare office for help — a welfare office outsourced to a private, for-profit company. Inside, staff preach the power of work, place people into unpaid “work experience” and enforce work requirements for welfare recipients, all in the name of teaching self-sufficiency.
But who’s set to benefit most? That struggling mother or the for-profit company she turned to?
Host Krissy Clark takes listeners into the world of for-profit welfare companies to examine America’s welfare-to-work system, work requirements and the multimillion-dollar industry that’s grown up around it.
The $80 Million Acre (from “How We Survive”)
Chapter 6: The Welfare to Temp Work Pipeline
Chapter 5: Profits and Perverse Incentives
Chapter 4: The Battle of Newburgh
Chapter 3: Race and rumor
Chapter 2: The compliance machine
Season 6: The Welfare-to-Work Industrial Complex
25 years after welfare reform, let’s revisit “the magic bureaucrat”
My boss is an app
Inside baseball
Big Boss, Little Boss
To catch a chicken
The liquid workforce
“To suffer or permit to work”
Who’s the boss?
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Answering your “History of Now” questions
Without a home in a pandemic
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In The Dark
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Marketplace
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