Our book, Both Hands Tied, addresses these issues through
an analysis of the intersection of welfare and work in the
lives of 42 women in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin,
where welfare reform was launched in its earliest and starkest
form and where deindustrialization and the growth of the
service economy present challenges for low-wage workers.3
We conducted extensive interviews with these women in
2004 during which we asked them to talk about the kinds of
jobs they had held and how they moved through them, what
crises at work or at home led them to turn to welfare, how
they used its programs, and what impact welfare had on their
work lives afterwards.