In the 1930’s, the economic devastation of the Great Depression forced the federal government to take a more direct role in social welfare. Under the leadership of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet), the Social Security Act of 1935 established critical relief programs including unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and public assistance programs including the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the precursor to AFDC and today’s TANF program. In its early years, much of the day-to-day labor of managing ADC - tasks such as home visits, reviewing family budgets, and evaluating whether applicants qualified for help - were done by women who were employed under broad titles such as social worker, benefit worker, or welfare worker. Most welfare employees performed a combination of case-management and budget-maintenance tasks, though the work remained highly gendered.
The lack of recognition did not detract from the complexity of the labor required to maintain ever growing caseloads. Workers had to interpret program rules, assess household budgets, document an individual’s need, and determine eligibility for programs that often had contradictory rules and regulations. Yet because the work was associated with women and outwardly resembled clerical or domestic tasks, it was often dismissed by policymakers and the public as nothing more than secretarial work - code for women’s work. This perception had long-term consequences for how welfare work was structured and funded.
In the late 1960s, amid rising caseloads, federal reforms, and a growing push to streamline welfare administration (and reduce the number of individuals on the welfare rolls) led to the creation of a new job class - the Eligibility Technician - which effectively separated welfare case management from benefit computation and fundamentally reshaped the public welfare workforce. This bifurcation created a hierarchy where benefit workers were paid less and portrayed as performing mostly clerical duties, despite the fact that benefit computation required mastery of complex federal and state regulations.
By the 1990s, as demands to “end welfare as we know it” reached a fever pitch, policymakers increasingly viewed eligibility work as easily replicated and primed for automation. Technology was championed as a cost-saving tool that would eliminate errors, even as it failed to fully capture the nuance and complexity of the individual lives in need of help. This push to automate welfare administration reinforced the longstanding misconception that welfare work - in this case eligibility benefit work - was simple, clerical, and devoid of professional expertise.