Americans have long valued work. It makes us honest, responsible, and worthy citizens. It’s considered so essential to a productive adulthood that work has become the solution for the poor in an era of welfare reform. Yet six years after sweeping changes to federal and state welfare programs went into effect, one new study has revealed that work doesn’t necessarily work for low-income families.

Last Tuesday, Harvard University’s Radcliffe Public Policy Center (RPPC) and 9to5 National Association of Working Women released their report, "Keeping Jobs and Raising Families in Low-Income America: It Just Doesn’t Work." In the course of a two-year study, researchers found an "intractable conflict" for poor people trying to care for kids while succeeding on the job. That has taken a huge toll not only on low-income women, but also on their children.

"The major message is that the system isn’t working for anyone," says Lisa Dodson, a senior research associate at RPPC. In 2000, she and her fellow researchers set out to examine what it’s like to live poor by asking people who know best — low-wage-earning parents, as well as their employers and children’s teachers. Until then, statistical information like employment and welfare rates was plentiful. But while such data provides a crucial "macro-level" picture, Dodson explains, her study aimed for more: "We wanted to know how people on the ground are coping."

For 18 months, she and her colleagues interviewed 350 people in three cities: Boston, Milwaukee, and Denver. Half of the parents, mostly single mothers with children, had just gotten off welfare. The other half either had never received benefits or had received them years ago. All, however, fall into what Dodson calls the "bottom third" of the economic spectrum. While toiling in low-wage industries like retail, food service, and manufacturing, they earn $17,000 to $30,000 per year for a family of three — or less than 200 percent of the federal poverty guideline of $15,020 for such families.

Remarkably, the study found that the parents, teachers, and employers all agreed that the system is stacked against poor working parents. Even employers were able to recognize how difficult it is to juggle family life and keep low-wage jobs, which often entail mandatory overtime, night shifts, and inflexible hours. "A lot of employers said, ‘I don’t know how they do it,’" Dodson says. "We never expected that."

Even more unexpected, if no less compelling, were parents’ revelations of anguish over their inability to be, as Dodson says, "a good worker and mother." Parents often relied on patchwork child care — a neighbor one day, a family member the next — because they couldn’t afford anything else. When emergencies arose, they were torn between their kids and their paychecks. Most parents reported that they had suffered job sanctions, including lost wages and terminations, simply because they had chosen to tend to their sick child’s needs first. "Women are told to be a good citizen, they must get a job," Dodson observes. "But there’s another voice that tells them to be a good mother, they must be there for their child."

The RPPC report comes out just in time, as Congress gears up to debate its welfare-reform policies later this year. Already, Dodson and her fellow researchers have traveled to Capitol Hill to present their findings to legislators. People, she says, haven’t necessarily challenged the findings, because they know current low wages don’t cover what most families need to get by. But whether legislators see the report as proof that welfare reform has failed is an open question. After all, if your idea of what working should accomplish is a dramatic decline in caseload numbers, then the changes are brilliant. If what you seek is quality family life for former welfare recipients and their children, the results look much less favorable. As Dodson puts it, "People may have left welfare, but they haven’t left poverty. In the process, they’ve had to leave their children behind, without anyone to care for them."