Burgess Owens: “I am sure that both of my colleagues know well that phrase that they have heard repeated often, that in slavery…”

“I am sure that both of my colleagues know well that phrase that they have heard repeated often, that in slavery everybody on the plantation had a job, because a job was then defined as work that the master wanted you to do. You did not get paid for it. For 232 years there was free labor. You did not get paid for it, but people had jobs. They were on the plantation and they had jobs. In order to satisfy those who again move out of racist motivations, when you say people should go to work and you create a situation through a bill you call welfare reform that pushes people off welfare and help from the government into situations where there are no jobs, no effort is being made to create those jobs. No effort is being made to create real jobs. So they want to push people into situations where they will work for something that is not a job. They will work for less than minimum wage. They will work under extraordinarily harsh conditions to do something that other workers were being paid to do before. So we are not only not creating jobs for welfare recipients, we are displacing workers who had jobs before. As I said at the beginning, this is happening in no more evident way than it is happening in New York City. We have a large workfare program. The workfare program as it expands, we see the city employees, the municipal payroll, decreasing at the same rate as the workfare program is increasing, a definite correlation.”