As long as I’ve been living in Lycoming County, which is now a very long time, I’ve only heard negative words about people on welfare—as well as the whole idea of welfare—especially from working class people. Back in the late 1960s, I worked as a caseworker for two years for the New York City Department of Social Services. (The agency had just changed its title from the Department of Welfare to the less controversial name; social services has always been more acceptable to Americans than welfare, which smacks of “the welfare state and socialism,” which is one step removed from the “communism” of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro.) My job consisted of visiting my entire caseload of clients, about sixty at any time, once every four weeks, processing grant requests, and overseeing their cases, mainly to determine whether there was any (illegal) duplication of services. New York City had just adopted the “declaration system.” That meant fewer, if any, investigations of claims for public assistance; the potential client would be taken at his or her word. (Research on the system, while I was employed by the Department, demonstrated, in fact, that taking the word of the client worked. The vast majority of people applying for welfare were honest about their financial needs. If anything, they underestimated their economic situation, so much of my job involved making sure the system was working for them, even though my official title was “investigator.”)In my entire tenure as a welfare worker, I observed only one serious case of cheating. The anti-welfare argument is that so many people on assistance simply cheat and are too lazy to work or even look for a job. In other words, they don’t really need the money. But I never worried about how my clients acquired additional money, since it really didn’t make much difference. They weren’t exactly going to rival the wealthiest people in the country, not even the income of a middle-class family.

I grew up in a typically middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, far removed from the inner city, the ghettos of the borough. Actually, my first experience of the ghettos was after I was employed by the Department. My attitude toward welfare prior to my caseworker job was fairly characteristic of the average American. Either I was indifferent to the problems and challenges of the underclass or I thought they needed policing while they were on assistance, that they were most likely milking the system for all it was worth. But my perspective was soon transformed by the realities I was exposed to each workday, either in the field (visiting my clients in their homes) or in the intake section of the social service center. My fellow caseworkers, I began to notice, still had the typically conservative views they carried with them to the job: “these people” needed to be strongly advised that they couldn’t have everything they asked for and, furthermore, that welfare was a privilege, not a “right.” As my days on the job turned into weeks and months, I began to see that I wasn’t sharing my colleagues’ anti-welfare position. The turning point came as a result of two experiences I had while—to borrow a phrase from the NYPD—I was “on the job.” One of my clients was a Mrs. Parker. During a field visit to her home, I asked her how she was able to manage nine children. Her reply was, “You know, Mr. Sahn, if people like me didn’t have children, people like you wouldn’t have a job.” It was a socioeconomic lesson I would never forget. My second epiphany came when I was in the social service center’s intake booth, having been called down from my third-floor office—actually a series of five aligned desks where we caseworkers did our paperwork and made or answered phone calls—to respond to several clients who were complaining about no longer receiving special household grants. When I informed the clients that my hands were tied, they blockaded me as I attempted to leave the booth. The only way out was to shove them aside, prompting a complaint the next day to the center’s Director. The Director was on my side, but I realized my clients had done the right thing in their minor act of civil disobedience. I didn’t press charges against them for temporarily holding me hostage. I understood where they were coming from.

I have always subscribed to the belief that a society which is truly civilized is a society that takes good care of those who are unfortunate— the poor, the people in prison, the handicapped, the outcasts. Welfare should be a right, not a privilege. The idea that people on welfare are getting something for nothing, just leeching off hard-working people, is really inaccurate. The welfare mothers, I discovered from my experience as a caseworker, worked much harder raising their families than I did as their caseworker. Motherhood or fatherhood, especially if the mother or father is single, is a full-time job. And then there are so many people in any given population who simply can’t work, can’t hold down a regular job, for psychological or emotional reasons. Employers would never want to hire them.

If you measure a person by his or her productive capacity, who is to say that nonworking people are not contributing to society, are not being productive, by just being themselves, by their interactions with others? In fact, being on welfare gives people a chance to be creative and helpful in their communities, as well as a resource for their children since they’re not burdened with the pressures and requirements of a regular job. In fact, are not many jobs counterproductive? Don’t some working people, because of the nature of the product or service for which they’re responsible, ultimately harm society rather than promote social progress? (For instance, do we really need so many gun manufacturers—or any gun manufacturers?) I for one have no trouble seeing my tax dollars going to support welfare systems. Actually, the problem is not welfare for the poor but welfare for the rich, namely, the tax breaks, subsidies, and bailouts of mega corporations.

Richard Sahn is currently a professor at the School of Integrated Studies, The Pennsylvania College of Technology.