Who Put the ‘Welfare’ in ‘Corporate Welfare’? Race, Gender, and the Critique of Business Subsidies

Political forces on both the left and right have, with increasing frequency, defined public subsidies for business as ‘corporate welfare.’ While the concept has its origins in the New Left, it was discovered by the political mainstream only in the 1990s. As a result, the dominant definitions of the problem presented in political debate have been those associated with conservatives. The power of ‘corporate welfare’ as a symbol in mainstream political debates today lies in its equation of government subsidies for business with social welfare received by the poor. As with social welfare, corporate welfare is said to create a culture of dependency that must be eliminated. I argue that this critique makes use of longstanding racial and gender constructions of worthiness that are central to the US welfare state. If the term is to reclaim its earlier radical meaning, greater effort must be made to changing the context in which ‘welfare’ is defined.