Chapter 1: The dream

The Uncertain Hour

Marketplace

Government, News

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Chrissy. We want to know a little bit more about our listeners.
0:04.5	So we're asking you to complete a short anonymous survey.
0:07.8	It takes less than five minutes.
0:09.9	Go to Marketplace.org slash survey to complete the survey.
0:14.1	You do all of us at the uncertain hour a huge favor by filling it out.
0:18.0	Thanks so much.
0:20.6	I've spent a fair bit of time in the last few years
0:23.0	getting tours of four profit welfare offices,
0:27.0	like this one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
0:30.0	Where a video of a corporate motivational speaker is beaming down on me
0:34.0	from a TV screen in the lobby.
0:35.9	Look yourself in there.
0:37.6	And with excitement and enthusiasm say, I love my job because they pay me for working there.
0:43.4	If you've never heard of a four profit welfare office before,
0:46.5	mean either until I started reporting this story.
0:49.7	But back when Congress passed so-called welfare reform in the 1990s
0:54.0	and made work a requirement for getting certain types of government aid,
0:57.9	that same law also allowed the government to turn to private companies
1:02.2	to implement and enforce those work requirements.
1:05.0	Ever since, offices like this have popped up all over the country.
1:08.7	Tomorrow morning, get back in front of the mirror and repeat the process again
1:12.8	with excitement and enthusiasm. I love my job because.
	...

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