The first has to do with the impact of former Democratic president Clinton’s assault on welfare. In a front page article in the June 3 New York Times entitled, "Strict Limits on Welfare Benefits Discourage Marriage," the big-business paper noted that as the Bush administration seeks "welfare legislation with more stringent work requirements and more support for marriage, an unexpected contradiction is emerging."

Two recent "rigorous" studies of welfare programs in Connecticut and Iowa show, according to the Times, that the "stricter work requirements of contemporary welfare policy significantly reduce the chances that a single mother will wed." The researchers suggest two main reasons for this development.

"Like middle-class married women whose divorce rates spiked when jobs and rising wages made them more self-reliant, some women who moved from welfare to work may have become less willing to settle for the wrong man, they say. At the same time, strict work requirements and low wages may have left some mothers with less time, energy and income to attract a partner or nourish a relationship."

The author of the Connecticut study, Bruce Fuller, a social scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, said, "If tough-love work policies suppressed marriage at this magnitude nationwide, just under a quarter-million women would not be getting married in any one year." These figures mirror the longer-term trend of rising numbers of women holding jobs outside the home, along with a steep drop in the number of households headed by married couples, today standing at a little more than 50 percent.

It was under the Clinton administration that the so-called Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was passed. The bill’s name was taken from Republican Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America. The legislation eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children and limited welfare payments to any particular individual to five years.  
 
Assault on Social Security
The effect of this legislation involves much more than Clinton’s reactionary campaign pledge to "end welfare as we know it." As Jack Barnes says in Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, "It was the biggest single success of the rulers so far in beginning to erode the federal Social Security system--a conquest won by working people through the struggles that built the industrial unions in the 1930s, and substantially extended through the mass civil rights movement of the 1960s.

This "was the first time in nearly two-thirds of a century," says Barnes, "that an entire category of working people--single mothers and their children--have been eliminated from the kinds of protections Social Security has guaranteed for retirees, children, workers injured or thrown out of a job, and others vulnerable to the instabilities and devastations inherent in capitalism, both in good times and bad."

Single mothers form a section of the working class that is expanding in the United States, a fact that marks an important change in the structure of the family. Barnes notes that "nearly a third of all children today are born to women who begin raising them in so-called single parent households, which currently make up roughly half of all family units."

Barnes says the change is "irreversible--a product of the greater economic independence women have achieved as a result of their increasing integration into the workforce, and of the social gains of struggles for women’s liberation." At the same time, he says, this means "poverty and social crisis" for millions of working-class women and children, and "registers the reality of class relations under capitalism and the fact that only a socialist revolution can open the door to the transformation of these oppressive social relations."

This fact is brought home in the Iowa research, which revealed that the welfare-to-work program not only means "more work and less marriage," but also "less money." The Times reported that "when contributions from other household members were counted, the welfare-to-work mothers averaged $300 less each month than mothers assigned to traditional welfare."

Many single mothers are forced to juggle two jobs, on top of taking care of their children.

A Bush administration spokesman said that he saw nothing "inconsistent" in the research and the administration’s plans to spend $300 million on its pro-marriage campaign. One woman asked, "Are they going to give discounts on divorces when they promote marriage?"

Another "irreversible" historical trend is the changing composition of the working class wrought by immigration. Barnes points out that "over the past half decade, the United States has taken in roughly half of all emigrants to the imperialist countries--one half!" and that "nearly 11 percent of the U.S. population today is foreign-born, and the percentage of immigrants in the ranks of the working class is substantially higher than that."  
 
‘Gains of ‘90s did not lift all’
More facts to back this up appeared in the June 5 Times in "Gains of ‘90s Did Not Lift All, Census Shows," another front-page article. The main conclusion of the Census Bureau report is that despite the "surging economy of the 1990s," the "poor remained entrenched."

The report contained figures on immigration from the 2000 census. More than half the foreign-born population--52 percent--came from Latin America, an increase of 44 percent in the decade. Of the 281.4 million people living in the United States in 2000, some 31.1 million were foreign-born, reported the Times. This represented an increase over 1990 of 11.3 million, or 57 percent.

"The increase in the immigrant population, which many state officials believe was undercounted, surpassed the century’s greatest wave of immigration, from 1900-1910, when the number of foreign-born residents grew by 31 percent," observed the daily. In addition, "for the first time in the 1990s, immigrants moved far beyond the big coastal cities and Chicago and Denver and Houston, into the Great Plains, the South and Appalachia." One example is that the foreign-born population of Franklin County, Alabama, grew from 0.19 percent to 5.55 percent, or from 79 people to 1,734.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which advocates stricter immigration controls, notes that "no country has ever attempted to assimilate and incorporate 31 million newcomers." Director of research Steven Camarota said, "these numbers represent an enormous social experiment with high stakes."

The U.S. ruling class, in search of cheap labor, knows that this massive labor inflow is essential to their "productivity miracle"--which is based more than anything else on low wages, forced overtime, lengthening of the workweek, and wide use of part-time and temporary work.

Unlike the worried partisans of the CIS, Barnes welcomes these "reinforcement brigades" that strengthen the fighting capacity of the working class. "The experience and traditions--and image--of the working class and labor movement in the United States are being enriched by the diverse cultures and lessons of struggles by workers and peasants from Latin America and the Caribbean, from Asia and the Pacific, from Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere," he says.

"The historic wave of immigration transforms the proletarian movement in the United States into something more and more recognizable as the class that will overthrow capitalism," Barnes concludes.  
 
 
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