Agencies design waiting policy as if poor clients’ time costs were nonexistent.

Evidence

Poor people often suffer in such a system. Not only may clients who appear more affluent get served first because it is thought that the costs of waiting are higher for them, but agencies often paternalistically develop policy as if the costs to the poor were nonexistent. A visit to the waiting room of a welfare office in any inner-city neighborhood is likely to convey the impression that the Welfare Department assumes recipients have nothing else to do with their time. Recipients learn the lesson of people who must seek service from a single source. Like the telephone company, the welfare department is able to pass on to the customer the costs of linking people with service. This system also benefits the average client to the disadvantage of people with extraordinary needs, since initially it has no mechanism for differentiating among clients. However, where the injury to people with extraordinary needs is likely to be severe, as in police work or medical emergencies, the ordering of services is often deliberately structured to search for and respond to this information. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 696

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the welfare waiting room as a built statement of assumptions about recipients’ time — how mundane administrative design encodes and reproduces class contempt.
• SHARE: Nerdily specific for one reader working on administrative burden or welfare-office ethnography: the waiting room itself as evidence of paternalistic policy assumptions.
• XREF: connects to: Waiting time is a cost of service extracted almost entirely from clients — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 657