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Josh Seim, "The Welfare Assembly Line: Public Servants in the Suffering City" (U California Press, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Stephen Pimpair, your host today and we are joined by Josh Syme, who is the author of the Welfare Assembly Line Public Servants in the Suffering City from the University of California Press Press. Josh, welcome. Nice of you to join us.
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B
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
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C
So I wonder if you might kick us off by telling folks a little bit about who you are and what you do and what brought you to the book.
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B
Sure. So I'm a sociologist by training. I work at Boston College. I'm an associate professor in the sociology department there. My research spans quite a bit of different subfields in sociology. I'm interested in sociology of work welfare, but also medical sociology. Have a little bit of interest in the sociology of punishment as well. This book began when I was living in Los Angeles before I was at Boston College as the University of Southern California. And I wanted to study street level bureaucrats in welfare departments. I had previously studied ambulance workers. And in that study of ambulance workers in California, I was thinking about them as a case of street level bureaucrats, thinking about them as a case of workers and a fragmented regime of poverty governance. And throughout that book project, I mean, that was mostly just an ethnographic account of contemporary ambulance work. But throughout that project, because I was abstracting beyond ambulance work to think about what they are more broadly a case of, and I was making the argument that they were a case of poverty governance, I was in that book making sort of shadow comparisons between ambulance operations and systems of punishment on the one hand, and then also systems of welfare on the other hand. And before doing the ambulance research, I had done research inside prisons and done some research on parole. So I had a familiarity with that space. But a lot of the comparisons I was making between these frontline medical workers and welfare workers was based Pretty exclusively on my understanding in the sociological literature on welfare services. I had some personal experiences with welfare departments. I hadn't done a serious sociological setting. So it seemed like it would be the next step was to. To dive into welfare departments. And at the time I was in Los Angeles and found myself in the county that has the largest local welfare bureaucracy in the United States. So it seemed like a good case.
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C
So you made a couple of references to street level bureaucrats for folks who may not be familiar with that. Tell us a little bit about what sort of the conventional academic wisdom is about street level bureaucrats and the kinds of power and discretion they may have in the spaces where they work.
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B
Yeah, very good. So street level bureaucracy is a theory that tells us that if we want to understand how policy is made, how it's implemented, we need to study the frontline workers who interface and interact with clients directly, but also indirectly, through remotely, through phone, and to exercise wide and substantive discretion in determining who is eligible for benefits and if so, what kinds of benefits and in what particular amounts, and have a significant level of discretion over determining who is seen as worthy and deserving of benefits, services, sanctions, and so on. And there are a number of scholars in the late 1970s and early 1980s who were thinking this way. But I think many people associate street level bureaucracy reasonably with Michael Lipski's book Street Level Bureaucracy, you know, as many ways sort of cradle of this theoretical perspective. And in that book, Lipski repeatedly cites welfare offices as key examples of street level bureaucracy. And many scholars who have studied frontline welfare work since the publication of that book have extended his theorization to argue that yes, indeed, they are street level bureaucrats at ground level who are exercising again, this sort of wide and substantive discretion. A wide discretion in terms of having multiple things that they like, a sort of broad scope of things that they have decision making power over, and then the sort of substantive discretion with regard to having some influence over framing who is seen as worthy and deserving of services and so on. But when I entered welfare offices in Los angeles in late 2021, you know, with that, I mean, serial bureaucracy is one of my favorite theories. It's a sort of theoretical framework that I am biased towards. It's one that's really influenced me in my academic work. So I went there with that framework in mind. I see this as a theory driven case study. And so I was there with that framework looking for street level bureaucrats. And I really struggled to find them. Because when I was with these workers, yeah, they were busy and yeah, they were working directly and indirectly with clients and with citizens. But when I was with these workers, I was mostly tethered with them to their cubicles as they clicked and typed away at the California Statewide Automated Welfare System. Or was referred to as calsaws. And calsaws is an instrument and a tool that does a lot to pretty much explicitly curb and reduce the discretionary power of these workers. It's a database that has workers entering in standardized information, asking a set of standardized questions, and then at the end, basically has workers clicking a button that will, in a sense, sort of, as many workers say, will spit out an answer as to whether or not somebody's eligible for benefits. And if so, what amounts and at what particular kinds. So I wasn't seeing the highly discretionary kinds of frontline workers that Lipski described. I was seeing workers that I felt like were better characterized. What I call in the book proletarianized public servants. So these are what I'm framing as proletarianized public servants are workers characterized less by their discretion and more by their lack of control over both the products and processes of their labor. So that's the main theoretical reconstruction that's offered in the book, is rethinking frontline policy work, particularly in welfare departments, arguing that there are these other frontline workers that are relevant. So I'm not arguing that street level bureaucrats don't exist. It still remains one of my favorite theories. It's still the case that there are many workers who can be classified as street level bureaucrats. But I do not think that they are the only kind of frontline worker who is materializing the state, who is materializing policy at ground level. And so proletarianized public servants, as I see, is about a lack of control over the products and processes of their labor. But I want to be clear. I see these as like two poles on a continuum. So just as street level bureaucracy theory is not arguing that street level bureaucrats have total discretion, like that would be a caricature to suggest that they think that discretion is shaped by larger structural forces, shaped and directed. So too am I not arguing that proletarianized public servants have no discretion. I'm not arguing that these workers have no autonomy or agency. I think all workers carry some and exercise some autonomy and agency in the labor process. The kind of discretionary that proletarianized public servants are exercising is not so much this wide and substantive discretion. Rather, it's a narrow and superficial discretion. So narrow in the sense that there's fewer things that have discretion or power over. And it's a superficial discretion because it doesn't deal with these deep substantive policy related issues. It's the kind of discretion over things like pacing, over interaction techniques, over methods to circumvent surveillance of managers. The kinds of things that we would see agentic workers exercising within factories or within fast food establishments. Not so much in street level bureaucracies.
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C
Now that having been said, you did see some variation in that kind of discretion among different categories of workers. So I wonder if you might tell folks a little bit about eligibility workers versus welfare to work workers and maybe in there use that as an opportunity to just tell folks a little bit about the kinds of programs that you are talking about that move their way through this system.
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Yeah, very good. I'll start with that. So the Department of Public Social Services in Los Angeles county is a remarkable agency in terms of how many people it serves. So over a third of Los Angeles county residents have as of today, some active case flowing through that bureaucracy. Now by far their largest program is Medicaid, which in the state of California is called Medi Cal, which is administered through these county welfare departments. Then their second largest program would be SNAP, which was referred to in California as CalFresh, more colloquially called food stamps. Then of course there's some cash aid programs, things like tanf, Temporary Aid to Needy Families in California, referred to as CalWORKS. California loves to sort of put CAL before all these things and rebrand them as far as their own state specific versions of these programs. There's some other smaller cash assistance programs that they also administer, but those would be the three main ones that they are involved with. I think it's really interesting because in sociology, and I imagine this is the case beyond sociology as well, I feel like we've been told this narrative academically, especially after 1996 welfare reform, that we live in a kind of post welfare society. And I think many scholars have been quick to cast the welfare office into the dustbin of the American 20th century, along with the poor house and the asylum and the sanitarium. But I think that that's only true when we reduce means tested welfare to cash. Like we act as if cash is the main we even folk sort of descriptions of welfare. I think a lot of people think of cash assistance. But in the sort of contemporary welfare office thinking beyond the point of the Great Society programs in particular, cash was never really king in these offices. Cash was Never King in DPSS. At the height of AFDC in 1990, AFDC payments were still to you know, half the number of people who were receiving Medicaid at the time and half the number of people receiving food stamps at the time. And so it's absolutely true that cash assistance means, as a cash assistance has declined in this office, it's declined dramatically. But food assistance in the form of SNAP has steadily increased, and especially after the financial crisis of 2008. But even so, there was still even additional increases and of course Medicaid increases with things like Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act. So from the standpoint of administrators at this office, it's interesting to go in there and to say, oh, I hear about a retrenching welfare state, or I hear about declining numbers of people receiving benefits that is totally absurd to these managers at an agency like this. Because yeah, maybe cash assistance payments have gone down, but the number of people on food assistance and the number of people who have received means tested medical insurance, those have only increased since so called welfare reform. But the amount of resources for staffing has not increased at nearly the same rate. So this has produced this problem of how do you respond to increased demand in terms of the number of people that they're going to serve without significant increases in the number of people who are going to be staffed at the front lines? So this, this study really focuses on two kinds of workers. It focuses on the two main frontline workers at dpss, what are referred to as eligibility workers, and the other referred to as welfare to work workers or WTW workers. And I think sociology, in addition to exaggerating the sort of retrenchment of welfare offices, has done a little bit of a disservice in overemphasizing the work of these so called welfare to work workers, which are significant. I spend a lot of time with them, I shadowed them in my ethnography. I spent a lot of time in the archives studying their work and how it's transformed over time. They're definitely very important. But there are only about a thousand employees at DPSS and DPSS employs 14,000 people. Only a thousand of them are part of these welfare to work workers. These are people who are doing the case management services to connect people to mandated employment services and related services to try to increase employability. But the people that are mandated to those programs are people who receive cash aid. And as I noted, cash aid has gone down. People receiving Medicaid and food stamps. While there are certainly work requirements, and this is a sort of, we do live in the era of a work based safety net, it is not the case that those recipients are mandated to these similar kinds of welfare to work programs and the daily operations in terms of determining who is eligible to do the labor of testing and retesting the means for a variety of benefit programs. That doesn't fall in these paternalistic welfare to work caseworkers. It falls disproportionately onto workers who are referred to in the agency as eligibility workers. And eligibility workers are a much larger occupation group at this agency. So I said 14,000 total. About a thousand are welfare to work workers. 6,000, almost half are classified as eligibility workers. And eligibility workers are doing the work of, again, testing and retesting means for a variety of benefit programs. Like, they are the ones that are doing really the sort of people processing work. And they're not doing this intensive paternalistic stuff to determine, you know, to try to transform people's subjectivities into being welfare, from welfare dependent into self sufficient. They're not engaged in those kind of political projects. They are really engaged in terms of determining and redetermining benefits. And it's a different kind of work, by and large.
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C
Plugging numbers into a computer system.
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B
Yes, yes, very good. So that's what I mean. Much of their job is. I mean, some of it involves interviewing people for a variety of benefit programs. But even when they're interviewing them, it's highly scripted and standardized in terms of the types of questions they're asking. And also, a lot of what they're doing is entering in information that's in their computer program that comes from clients submitting scans of their photo IDs or scans of their pay stubs. A lot of it is the work of sort of going through that material, putting it into this system, calsaws, and then determining eligibility. And I just think that that kind of work, that eligibility determination work, is not really accounted for in the sociology literature on frontline welfare workers. Since 1996, much of the scholarly work on work inside welfare offices has been about these welfare to work operations. But that is a minority of operations at dpss.
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C
So talk to us a little bit about the kind of people who are doing this work and how they think about the work that they're doing.
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B
Yeah, very good. So the work is, as you would probably imagine, is disproportionately feminized. So about 75% of the employees at DPSS are women. Most of the workers are black and brown at dpss. So the, the sort of profile of workers at DPSS are, you know, it's typically black and Brown women on the front lines. Of course, that's not historically always been the case. This is not just an ethnographic study, and it's not just a study based off interviews. It's also a study that does a deep dive into the archives, going all the way back to the emergence of this agency in Los Angeles in 1966. And in 1966, it was disproportionately white women who were on the front lines of these agencies, classified at the time as social workers. So I actually go all the way back to the mid-60s and trace the shift in the labor process in these occupational categories moving forward. And with that comes a shift in the demographic composition of workers. So it is a book that's not just about how the contemporary work is proletarianized. It's also a book about how over the past 50 and 60 years, that work has become increasingly proletarianized. So there's a proletarianization thesis that is developed throughout the book as well. And as the work has become more proletarianized, in other words, as workers have increasingly lost control over both the products and processes of their labor, we've seen a demographic shift in the work. And I don't think that that is a coincidence. That as we see this sort of loss of reduction or this loss of control over the products and processes of work, we see the demographic shift from disproportionately white women to disproportionately black and brown women during that period. What's interesting to me is that many of the workers that I interviewed, including a lot of workers that I've interviewed who were veteran workers who have been at the agency since the early 2000s. I think the person who had the longest tenure at the time I interviewed was somebody in 1998, started at the agency. So this is all a bunch of employees, even the veteran ones, sort of post1996 welfare reform. I certainly found workers who are frustrated with what I'm calling proletarianization. Like they're frustrated with the increased use of surveillance, the increased emphasis on timing. And there's this new task based system. So we've moved away from casework in these district offices to task based work I'm happy to talk about. And a lot of that is as deeply frustrated workers. And workers have taken to the picket line and have protested outside DPSS headquarters. What I'm calling the proletarianization of the work. So they're not, you know, this isn't a case of people being generally ignorant of these transformations in their work. They're conscious of this, they recognize it, they discuss it. It's in their daily conversations. It's in their union conversations. They're showing up to the LA County Board of Supervisors to articulate their complaints and frustrations with what I'm calling an increased proletarianization of their work. That said, I still mostly met workers who were tolerant of this proletarianization. I mostly met workers who still consider DPSS to be a good job. Like this was a repeated theme throughout the ethnographic and interview components of this study, repeatedly emphasizing to me that like, yeah, it sucks that like they're increasing micromanagement. It sucks that there's this shift from casework to task work, which is coming with a clear erosion of their sort of control over the types of things that they can work on and the heads of autonomy that they have. But it's still considered to be a good job. And it's a good job in two senses. There's a relative material security to the job. So workers describe it like, you know, the schedule is good. I mean, it's a 9 to 5 job for the most part, Monday through Friday. The benefits are pretty good and the pay is decent. And it's all in relative terms, relative to these workers lived experiences in the private sector. So I don't want to, you know, exaggerates like how materially secure these jobs are. I make a case in the book that there's a lot to be improved here in terms of material security for these workers. But as many of them describe it to me, like, this is better than the kinds of work that they were doing at Home Depot, better than the kinds of work they had at Ikea at Ralph's grocery store. And so there's this constant reference point to their previous jobs in the private sector and how the scheduling is better. There's more material security overall at the job. There are real opportunities for upward mobility in this agency. Like there are real promotional opportunities. And this is also wrapped up with a relative moral security at the job as well. It's not just about the material security. It's also about this sort of sense of mission, a sense of vocation and purpose, that again, in reference to their previous experiences in the private sector working at DBSS is seen as meaningful for many of these workers. It's seen as a real job to alleviate suffering and a real job to alleviate poverty in their communities. And so it's not so much that their previous private sector jobs are just seen as materially dead End jobs, they're often seen as morally dead end jobs. And so the current job at DPSS has this material and moral security. And this is not lost on workers. And I think, you know, one of the ways in which I phrase it in the book is that DPSS functions or operates a little bit like a Fordist shelter in a post fortis Los Angeles labor market. And this, again, this isn't lost on workers. And I think that this helps explain, among other things, why workers are generally so tolerant, kind of surprisingly tolerant of the proletarianization that they experience at the job.
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C
So I wonder if you might dig into that a little bit more, talk to us a little bit more about the regime. What does that work actually look like? And I'm particularly interested, interested in you talking about what you describe as part of the job being to make people legible to the systems and what that looks like and how they go about that. And maybe as part of that, talk to us a little bit about what you call sharing the runaround as we get back to sort of spaces where there may be a little discretion.
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B
Yeah, okay, very good. So I will say one thing to keep in mind that's happening in the book is I'm detailing, especially in these district offices, when it comes to the eligibility workers. I enter ethnographically in these field sites across these five off or across these three district offices for the eligibility workers, five offices total because two for the welfare workers. But when I entered the district offices in late 2021, there had been this recent shift from a casework system to a task based system. And what this means is that eligibility workers are no longer caseworkers at dpss, which disrupts a long history of that occupational group. They have mostly been case possessing frontline workers, where they would have a caseload, sort of the measure of their productivity would be based off of how many cases they held and so on. And workers would show up, they'd log into work, they'd confront a caseload. Now, the managers of this bureaucracy, they have not eliminated cases because I don't think a bureaucracy like this can function without cases. In other words, documents, documented constructions of individuals and families. That's still necessary. But what they've done is they've taken those cases and then they've sliced them up into discrete tasks, and then they distribute those tasks across an array of workers. This means that when eligibility workers show up to work today, they don't log in to confront a caseload. Instead they log in to confront a task list. This might mean manning the hotline of people that are calling for a variety of questions about their. About their cal works, their CalFresh or their medical, in which a series of tasks are going to hit them through their headset, in which case those are not their cases that are calling them. It's whoever's available to answer the phone at that particular time. Or it might be working in the office and confronting an actual task list generated by supervisors that tell them to complete the same sort of mundane tasks across a whole series of cases. This helps generate or helps materialize what I call in the book a customer service state. So we confront. Or these workers are. Sorry, let me back up. So this is a customer service state, not just a workfare state. So I do think the workfare state is real. But I think what's much more important here, dpss, is the materialization of what I'm calling a customer service state. So welfare recipients in Los Angeles are not framed as. And that's kind of considered to be IP bad word to call them recipients. They're generally framed as customers, as consumer citizens, which sounds very strange because it's not as if people are purchasing these benefits, and it's not as if they have other options in a marketplace of benefits. Like, if you're an LA county resident, like, and you want food stamps or you want CalFresh, like, you have to go through this agency. But they're still framed as, like, consumers of these benefits. And they consume food stamps, they consume Medicaid benefits, and so on. And as consumers, they are assumed to bear particular responsibilities in navigating a sort of marketplace of benefits. And in the past, they might have had caseworkers to help them with this navigation process. But as it shifted to task work sort of intensified the responsibility, what we might call the administrative burdens for these recipients now deemed and labeled as customers. And so eligibility work at dpss, the sort of specialized tasks of testing and retesting the means. I argue in the book that actually much of that work is probably better framed as legibility work rather than eligibility work, because the workers are not making people eligible for benefits in terms of, like, what it is they're doing, what are they producing? And the fact that language making people eligible for benefits is language used in the field and in these offices to describe sort of fraudulent behavior. Like you're not supposed to make people eligible for that would be considered potentially engaging in fraud by cooking the numbers or doing something sort of potentially fraudulent. So actually, that language of making people eligible is seen as sort of like workplace sin or something like that. And so I argue that really, like, if we're thinking about what it is they're doing. Like, what is their productive activity amounting to. I think that they could better be classified as sort of legibility workers. So drawing on the work of Scott and others. And thinking about legibility projects in State. I argue that that's really what these workers are doing. They are there to ask a series of questions. To make people legible to the administrative machinery of the welfare office. And their productivity is not dependent on how many people get benefits. Or even how many people get denied benefits. Their productivity is measured by how many people are deemed legible. And therefore testable, according. So you have to first measure their means. And then you can test whether or not those means justify eligibility to these. To these various benefit programs. So it is maybe a subtle distinction between eligibility and legibility. But I think that's ultimately what they're doing in their work Is determining legibility for programs. And then in terms of the sharing of the runaround and the other side of the runarounds. We have a growth of literature and sociology. That is emphasizing the administrative burdens. That a variety of clients and citizens face. Across a number of public bureaucracies. And much of this is emphasizing the kind of runaround that people face. And so when we talk about the runaround in sociology. We're usually referring to poor and disadvantaged people. Confronting a sort of administrative maze. Of various bureaucracies and services. And they're getting, as we know, that sort of run around between different departments, different workers, sometimes different agencies, and so on. And much of that literature is very good. I like it very much. I teach it to my students quite frequently. I think some of it ignores. Is that there's also another side to the runaround. That there's people on the other side of the desk. That are either making that run around possible. Either issuing out commands to worker. To clients who do certain paperwork, do certain errands, go to this other office, and so on. So there's a sort of labor behind even materializing that runaround. There has to be workers to issue out these errands and demands. But they're also on the other side of the runaround cases. Where people are not just giving the runaround, as I say in the book. But also, at times, sharing the runaround. There are moments that I detail in the field work. Where workers will slow down production. And they will do this with their own agency and their own discretion. They will find cases that they will see as especially Important, and they'll slow down production a little bit and work a little bit extra to help guide a applicant or a customer in how to handle their runaround. And I call that sharing the runaround. And I argue in the book that that is the exception to the rule. It's an important exception, but it's generally an exception to the rule because workers cannot reasonably do this for every single task that they confront, because as they confront these different tasks, they have this pressure from management and the sort of larger administrative pressure to push people through the administrative machinery of the welfare bureaucracy. And they can't slow down for every single case, but they will slow down occasionally. And when they slow down, they will do so in a way that will make the runaround easier for recipients. And then I note in the book how there are different categories of deservingness that they will emphasize in terms of who is more likely to get the sort of additional special treatment. Again, they can't do it for everybody, but I see workers that will do it disproportionately for people that they see as visibly homeless, because they see it as, like, I think, in many ways, tying into their mission of poverty alleviation. And when it says somebody who's visibly homeless and extremely disadvantaged, from their point of view, they see this as, like, a great target population that they want to serve. I also see them do it for college students, because college students are also seen as exceptionally deserving, and they face really difficult paperwork challenges with things like food stamps or snap. I also see them doing with, like, extremely old people, which they see as struggling in unique ways with the bureaucracy. But again, they can't do this for everybody. So this run around because they are
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C
under surveillance too, right?
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B
Yes, that's right. That's right. So workers sort of feel like, at least the workers I was trying to
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C
felt like they could probably do this
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B
for maybe like, one or two tasks throughout the shift. But if they were doing this too many times, they would slow down because they're timed on how long they're spending, not just on the task, the time they're spending between tasks. And so management will make an intervention and start asking questions, especially supervisors start asking questions about why it is that they are so slow to push through their tasks throughout the day. So they can't do it for everybody, but there's a sort of unwritten expectation that they can do it, you know, maybe once or twice in a shift.
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C
Final question for you, Josh. So you. You early on pointed out that that part of what this routinization of these tasks makes possible is distributing small amounts of money, by and large, to extraordinarily large numbers of people with a relatively small workforce. So how then do you evaluate. Right. If we were to sort of put this on a continuum of, in incredibly simplistic terms, good, bad, positive, negative, how do we. The shift of this system over time in the form that it currently takes.
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B
Yeah, that's a. That's a great question. I think one way we could think about dpss, and I don't mean this in a. I hope doesn't come across as too demeaning. I think we think of DPSS and many of these county welfare agencies, not just in California, but throughout the country. Many of them would be state administered as operating as massive bureaucracies of crumbs. So they give out lots of aid to lots of people. But at any individual level or any level of the household or the family, the kind of aid that they're receiving is very meager. So they're giving out lots of little bits of aid to lots of people. So that suggests to me that we don't live in this post welfare society, but I don't think we live in a society that has a very robust social safety net for poor people. And so much of what this book is doing is emphasizing the contradictions. And I think that that is one sort of key contradiction, is that they are giving aid to a lot of people. So the infrastructure is set up in such a way that they are actually giving aid to a lot of people, but they're just not giving much aid to them. And at the individual level and the level of households, that I think suggests an opportunity to. If we wanted to increase the amount of aid we gave to poor people, the infrastructure is already established. Even when we think about means, there's always this conversation about means testing being so administratively difficult and burdensome. And there's some truth to that. But the infrastructure is set up. We are already sort of having a welfare system that has its tentacles into the lives of a whole range of. Of poor people. Certainly could have more people caught up in that system would be great, but certainly a lot of people are connected to these kinds of social services. And so I think that this is promising. You consider that it really. Maybe this doesn't seem promising given the current political climate, but it does seem promising to me that the way in which we could really reduce and alleviate a lot of suffering in this country is by increasing federal funding for a variety of these programs. Like it's really an issue of, like, just turning the knob up in terms of the kinds of benefits that we give out to these populations. Because we're already connected to them through these agencies. Now, I think the other question is, like, is the welfare assembly line what I'm calling the welfare assembly line, which is this particular regime of benefit distribution. Marked by high divisions of labor and significant uses of automation and machinery. Like, is this something worth embracing? Is it something worth condoning? Or is it something that we should throw away? And I think that really this is just a deeply contradictory system. I think there are reasons to embrace the welfare assembly line. I do think it has increased efficiency. It has increased the speed at which benefits are determined and the speed in which they're actually distributed. But I think it's also that kind of efficiency has come especially for workers with increased estrangement, increased exhaustion. And I think that there are these contradictions that are worth sort of wrestling with. And I don't think there's one clear and obvious answer to this. I think the best thing to do is to imagine ways in which we could sort of reclaim the welfare assembly line or sort of appropriate it. And by we, I mean I'm sort of imagining a coalition of not only welfare recipient coalitions, and I'm thinking of, like, in the past, you know, a sort of welfare rights movement organization, but also the Labor Union at DPSS, which in the past, in the 1960s, there was a tight connection between the welfare rights movement and the labor union at DPSS because they had a shared material interest in expanding benefits that has since withered away, as I detail in the book, for a number of reasons. And I think returning to that sort of form, where it's a combination of the labor unions, certainly also administrators, because I think the county administrators, these agencies, like, they want to see benefits increase generally, too. And they're constrained by these larger federal constraints. And then, of course, welfare recipients, or what are now referred to as welfare customers more generally, some type of coalition. To imagine how we can have this welfare assembly line operate in a way that is not so demeaning to workers and is not so cold to customers, but it's still operating efficiently and effectively. And part of that means just increasing the amount of benefits that are put on that conveyor belt as well.
- [37:27]
C
You're listening to the New Books Network, and we've been speaking with Josh Syme, who's the author of the Welfare Assembly Line, Public Servants in the Suffering City from the University of California Press Press. Thank you for joining us today. Much appreciated.
- [37:42]
B
Thank you.