The Charity Organization Bulletins were printed for the confidential use of charity organization societies by the Charity Department of the Russell Sage Foundation. The bulletins for December 1917 through November 1918 cover topics such as charity organization in wartime, disaster relief, a Red Cross training course, household management, and a conference on educational work.

The Charity Organization Bulletins were printed for the confidential use of charity organization societies by the Charity Department of the Russell Sage Foundation. The bulletins for December 1913 through November 1914 cover topics such as the culture of family life, fundraising, large families with small wages, and vacations and office hours at charity organizations.

The Charity Organization Bulletins were printed for the confidential use of charity organization societies by the Charity Department of the Russell Sage Foundation. The bulletins for December 1912 through November 1913 cover topics such as training in casework, financial appeals, salaries in charity organization societies, and the training of volunteers.  

This booklet covers the development in the United States of schools for the training of guards and other prison officers modeled on one in England. Topics include the U.S. Training School at 427 West Street in New York City, the Keepers’ Training School on New York’s Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island), and the British Training School in Wakefield, England. The booklet also contains forms relating to candidates for prison service in England and Wales.

HASTINGS H. HART was a consultant in delinquency and penology at the Russell Sage Foundation.

This article, from the Woman’s Medical Journal of January 2013, is a reprint of a 1912 report by the Russell Sage Foundation. It deals with infant mortality and the means of combating it by the instruction and care of expectant mothers. It provides a summary of characteristic features of certain cities personally investigated by the author.   

ELLEN C. BABBITT worked in the Child-Helping Department of the Russell Sage Foundation.

This booklet provides guidance on setting up a program of work relief. Topics include underlying work relief, finances, advanced planning, personnel, the office system, registration of applicants, determination of need, choice of work projects, work assignments, transfer and dismissal, reassignments, wage rates and hours, method of payment, and protection against injury.

JOANNA C. COLCORD was the director of the Charity Organization Department at the Russell Sage Foundation.

A form listing people and places—including churches, employers, medical agencies, and public officials—that social agencies might have visited with columns for noting the number of visits to each. An explanation following the list notes that agencies using the largest number of outside sources of information will be seen as having made the best investigation into the cases they are treating.

This illustrated booklet focuses on the causes of poverty and ways to alleviate it. It asks such questions as which is better: helping the poor in their poverty or helping the poor out of their poverty and is it money alone that the poor need?

“Legalized Inequalities makes a critical contribution to our understanding of how the state, legal system, and current regulatory structures make employment so uncertain for many vulnerable workers. It’s a powerfully written, accessible must-read for anyone interested in immigration, work, and race.”
—ADIA HARVEY WINGFIELD, assistant vice provost, professor of sociology, and Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts and Sciences, Washington University

“Legalized Inequalities is a landmark contribution to the study of law, labor, and migration—an unflinching exposé of how US legal regimes actively construct and sustain racialized precarity in the low-wage workplace. Drawing on over three hundred in-depth interviews with immigrant workers and fifty advocates across the New York metropolitan area, Kati L. Griffith, Shannon Gleeson, Darlène Dubuisson, and Patricia Campos-Medina reveal how labor and employment law, immigration policy, and the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism converge to produce and legitimize workplace precarity. With interdisciplinary rigor and moral clarity, the authors illuminate the state’s central role—not as a passive bystander but as an architect of inequality—while foregrounding the quiet, creative, and sometimes collective ways workers assert dignity and resistance. This book is essential reading for scholars of labor, immigration, race, and social inequality, and for anyone committed to understanding how power operates in the contemporary American political economy.”
—DANIEL J. GALVIN, professor of political science, Northwestern University

Beyond unlivable wages and a lack of upward mobility, low-wage work in the United States is rife with danger and degrading treatment. Immigrants and people of color are overrepresented in these “bad jobs” and often feel as though they are unable to change their working conditions. In Legalized Inequalities, law scholar Kati L. Griffith, sociologist Shannon Gleeson, anthropologist Darlène Dubuisson, and political scientist Patricia Campos-Medina investigate the government’s role in perpetuating poor and dangerous work environments for low-wage immigrant workers of color.

Drawing on interviews with over three hundred low-wage Haitian and Central American workers and worker advocates, the authors reveal how U.S. policies produce and sustain job instability and insecurity. Contemporary U.S. labor and employment law, immigration policy, and enduring racial inequality work in tandem to keep workers’ wages low, lock them into substandard working conditions, and minimize opportunities for change. Regulations meant to protect workers are weak and underenforced, privileging employers over workers. At-will employment policies, which allow employers to terminate employees without cause, discourage workers from bargaining for better jobs or holding employers accountable for even the most egregious mistreatment. Federal immigration policy further disempowers workers by deputizing employers to act as immigration enforcement agents leading undocumented workers to believe they must endure maltreatment or risk deportation. Anti-immigrant sentiment—encouraged by U.S. policy—impacts workers across all status groups. Additionally, despite a proliferation of civil rights legislation, racial disparities remain in the workplace. Workers of color are often paid less, forced to complete more dangerous and demeaning tasks, and subjected to racial harassment.

While these workers face formidable barriers to fighting for their rights, they are not entirely powerless. Some low-wage workers filed formal complaints with government agencies. Others, on their own or collectively, confronted their employers to demand fair and dignified treatment. Some even quit in protest of their poor working conditions. The authors argue that reforming labor and employment law, immigration law, and civil rights law is necessary to reshape the low-wage workplace. They suggest increasing funding for workers’ rights enforcement agencies, removing the mandate for employers to verify a worker’s immigration status, and making it easier to prove that employment discrimination has occurred to help empower and protect low-wage immigrant workers of color.

Legalized Inequalities not only highlights the crushing consequences of U.S. policy on low-wage immigrant workers of color but showcases their resilience in the face of these obstacles.

"Conservatives in other countries have long supported universal child benefits as an important tool for tackling child poverty while encouraging work and family stability. American conservatives have been more skeptical, but, as Jane Waldfogel demonstrates with wide-ranging evidence, child benefits are one pro-family policy that deserves support across the political spectrum."
-JOSH McCABE, director of social policy, Niskanen Center

"In this well-researched and informative book, Jane Waldfogel examines the case for child benefits in the United States. Woven with evidence and history, and tackling head-on the trade-offs embedded in the policy debate, Child Benefits is exactly what we need for this moment."
-HILARY HOYNES, Chancellor's Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

"If you're interested in child poverty and in issues and challenges that government benefits and programs for children now face, do not miss Child Benefits. It is full of keen insights, thoughtful and deeply informative discussions, and wisdom about where we as a nation should go from here. And it's written in a clear, nontechnical, and highly readable manner that should appeal to a broad audience, which the book very much deserves."
-ROBERT GREENSTEIN, visiting fellow in economic studies, The Brookings Institution, and founder and president emeritus, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

The United States has one of the highest child poverty rates among wealthy countries and stands out among its peers as the only country that does not offer a child benefit – regular payments from the government to most or all families with children, not conditioned on parental employment. During the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in 2021, the CTC functioned as a child benefit, and the child poverty rate fell to the lowest level ever recorded in the United States. Despite this decrease, the CTC expansion was not renewed. Concerns about enacting a child benefit include the cost, the possibility of misuse of money by parents, and how it might affect parental employment and fertility. In Child Benefits, social policy scholar Jane Waldfogel details the history and origins of child benefits around the world and comprehensively assesses how child benefits affect family spending, fertility, employment, child poverty, and child wellbeing to address such concerns and to determine the benefits of enacting such a policy permanently.

Drawing on research from peer countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as well as the United States, Waldfogel shows that a child benefit would prevent poverty and hardship and protect children from deep poverty and income instability. The research is clear that families would spend the money from a child benefit on food, clothing, and other items for their children and that a child benefit would not have large negative impacts on parental employment or family decisions about fertility. It also shows that a child benefit would promote short- and longer-term child and family wellbeing. Child benefits have been shown to enhance opportunity and benefit society through healthier and better-educated young adults and stronger and more stable families. And rigorous benefit-cost analyses indicate that a child benefit, while costly, would more than pay for itself, yielding a large return on investment.

Waldfogel evaluates four current, major proposals for a child benefit and provides recommendations for a policy that would deliver the best outcomes for children and families and the best return on investment. She argues that such a policy would be more generous, not tied to parental employment or earnings, available to all parents but phased out for higher-income families, delivered in monthly payments through the tax system, and provided in addition to existing social programs.

Child Benefits provides fascinating insights on the history and impacts of child benefits and makes a clear and definitive argument for the establishment of a child benefit in the United States.