A desperate means to dignity Work refusal amongst Philadelphia welfare recipients ■ Carol Cleaveland Monmouth University, New Jersey, USA ABSTRACT ■ Sentiments favoring a sweeping overhaul of the United States’ social welfare system culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 – a law that mandates states to move almost all recipients from cash assistance on welfare to paid work. This ethnographic study examined work refusal among women who left menial jobs to return to welfare, or to subsistence by other means. Seventy interviews and 18 months of participant observation revealed a pattern of confrontations with authority figures at various job sites as well as resentment of the subservience often demanded of workers in the lowest tiers of the primary economy. Confrontations in training programs and at work afforded impoverished women the chance to express their resentments about being relegated to unrewarding, low income work and to maintain vestiges of even a defiant dignity in the face of a hostile social order. KEY WORDS ■ work refusal, welfare-to-work, poverty, working poverty, women’s experience In November 1996, the United States Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), an overhaul of the nation’s social welfare policies that dismantled a system of income supports for poor Americans dating back to the Great Depression. graphy Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 6(1): 35–60[DOI: 10.1177/1466138105055656] ARTICLE at GEORGE MASON UNIV on January 24, 2016 eth.sagepub.com Downloaded from