Regulating the Poor Quotes

“Any institution that distributes the resources men and women depend upon for survival can exert control over them: the occasion of giving vitally needed assistance can easily become the occasion of inculcating the work ethic, for example, and of enforcing work itself, for those who resist risk the withdrawal of that assistance.”
― Frances Fox Piven, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare

“Many critics of capitalism have argued that the maintenance of a surplus of unemployed workers is not simply a by-product of market fluidity but a deliberately contrived condition, designed to ease the flow of labor and to lessen the bargaining power of workers in market transactions.”
― Frances Fox Piven, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare