“The most succinct and accurate way to comprehend why pushing people into forced labor to prove their worth in order to have food and shelter through our social safety net programs is to understand this fundamental truth: slavery is the original work requirement.”

This excerpt comes from our new paper in collaboration with expert Ife Finch Floyd and the Center for Law and Social Policy, Work Requirements are Trash.

We explore the economic, narrative and historical reasoning against the obsession of bipartisan leaders to force labor in exchange for social safety net benefits.The paper draws on extensive research over the course of several decades proving the inability of work requirements to actually increase workforce participation, as well as exposing the anti-black and highly sexist nature of their rise. Despite their putrid nature, they still persist — including the income requirement of the expanded Child Tax Credit’s most recent iteration currently under consideration by Congress.

While meant to police the bodies of Black Americans, work requirements negatively impact all of us by perpetuating the narrative that our value as humans lies only in our perceived productivity. To force labor in exchange for what should be a safety net none of us fall below is not only a moral failing, but a political one: the reality is, work requirements don’t work. They are more likely to keep people in poverty, kick off Black and brown people from crucial benefits and funnel people into dead-end jobs. 

You can read the full paper here, and dive into our accompanying series with NPQ here.

We’re also excited this week to release Leveraging Our Local Power, a framework for localities to engage in wealth-building strategies for Black Americans. Maven Collaborative’s Re-Imagining Wealth Fellow Natasha Hicks, one of the paper’s co-authors, wrote an op-ed in Next City to close out Black History Month on the importance of leaders at levels of government investing in equity-building: “There is no better way to honor Black history and the fullness of the Black experience than committing as a field to change course in our failing to address racial wealth inequality.”

In addition to pushing for an end to the racial wealth inequities and exposing the myriad reasons work requirements should go in the garbage, both papers offer a vision for a new future — abandoning punitive, racist, sexist and ineffective policies in favor of those shaped by the truth that our society will only evolve and flourish when the abundance of our prosperity is shared.

In solidarity,

Team Maven