The federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) imposes a three-month time limit on “Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents” (ABAWDs) participating in the Food Stamp Program, which was renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2008, unless they work or participate in job training for at least 20 hours a week — even if they are doing their best to find a job. These work requirements, which are rooted in racist stereotypes that have long been debunked, disproportionately harm people of color. This is because, among other reasons, many ABAWDs of color face systemic barriers to finding stable, full-time employment that others in the state do not encounter.
As a safeguard to protect people when jobs are scarce, federal law allows states to ask the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to temporarily waive SNAP ABAWD work requirements in geographical areas without sufficient jobs or in regions where unemployment is more than 10 percent. Because of Florida’s high unemployment during the Great Recession and its aftermath, the Department of Children and Families (DCF) obtained waivers from USDA for ABAWDs from 2009 to 2015 to ensure that Floridians otherwise subject to this work requirement would not lose their food assistance due to the unavailability of jobs in their communities.
However, in 2015, the Florida Legislature enacted a law prohibiting DCF from asking USDA for waivers from SNAP work requirements in the future without legislative permission — even when high unemployment makes it unlikely that SNAP participants will be able to comply with the 20-hour-a-week ABAWD work requirement. The following year, DCF began to impose time limits statewide, putting the food assistance of almost 1 million Floridians at risk.
At the time that lawmakers passed the 2015 law to tie DCF’s hands, many households in Florida were stuck in low-paying, part-time work due to factors such as inadequate education to compete in a global economy, lack of growth in higher paying jobs at the local level, and the reliance of certain industries, such as grocery stores and amusement parks, on part-time workers who did not qualify for health insurance and other employer-paid benefits. This was especially true for Black and Latina/o Floridians in 2015 who, because of racial disparities in employment, experienced higher than average unemployment rates, with Black people being more than twice as likely to face unemployment than white people.