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"W-2 is a killer. W-2 is slaughtering the poor single-mother community."

Pat Gowans
Welfare Warriors

We interviewed Pat Gowans at Christmastime 1998, as she and the "Welfare Warriors" were preparing for a "carolling demonstration" at a W-2 official's house. The Warriors are part of a grassroots group of low-income mothers.

Question:
Who are the "Welfare Warriors"?

Pat Gowans:
We're a group of mothers in poverty who came together in 1986. We wanted to fight against, first of all, the stigma and stereotyping of single mothers in poverty, and secondly, we wanted to fight for guaranteed support for our children until they're eighteen years of age. And we want that support to come from the government and let the government chase after the absent parent.

Rather than having the moms who are poor and don't have lawyers and don't have bus fare, much less automobiles, to chase after daddies for support. That's one of our missions; guaranteed support for all dependent minors, whether we're working or at home.

We're also fighting for government and society recognition that mother work is work. The work of caring for all of the people who need to be cared for, whether the dependent minors, the old people, the sick, the dying, even the land, the Earth, the churches, the communities, the mothers traditionally have cared for the people and cared for the Earth. At this point, we're losing the ability to recognize that mother work is work, and that someone needs to do the work of caring for the children.

Welfare Warriors came together to fight for recognition of the work, the intense labor that mothers do, and the recognition that mother work is work. Someday in the far distant future we'll expect, of course, mothers to be compensated for the work that we do. But right now our goal is guaranteed support for the minors so that when we are in the paid workforce, or going to school, or at home, we have guaranteed support for our minors.

Question:
How do you feel about W-2?

Pat Gowans:
W-2 is a killer. W-2 is slaughtering the poor single-mother community. W-2 is literally killing disabled children, whose mothers have not been allowed to stay home and care for them. W-2 is slowly pushing women with disabilities to an early grave. Women with disabilities have been only given $77 per child since W-2 came into existence. A disabled mother is simply a person who, by government decree, is not able to be employed in most situations.

W-2 is very harmful to the working-mother community. Employed single mothers make generally somewhere around $5, $6, $7 an hour. To try and support an entire family of three people the average mom has two children to support a family of three people on $6 an hour is virtually impossible.

Before this, the old welfare system would grant supplementary income to employed mothers. It was a bad system, but it was better than W-2. Right now, we have no supplementary support for all the employed moms. So we've got part-time workers, temporary workers, low-wage workers, minimum-wage workers, all these workers are not being allowed to get any kind of supplementary support for their children.

The Welfare Warriors sees all of these moms suffering. We see our community suffering. W-2 is a failure and a farce. It is very much anti-poor people, and anti-community, and anti-mothers and children.

One of the things that happens with W-2 is that mothers end up having no income whatsoever. A third of the people who have been terminated from W-2 have no income. These are mothers and children. So the mothers are forced are being forced back into the arms of very abusive males who they had left in the first place in order to secure safety and protection of their family and their children

Lives Changed