The Welfare Assembly Line draws our attention to the labor that makes both the state and low-wage workers, under ever-increasing pressures towards efficiency and ever-stingier budgets. A joy to read. Josh Seim is masterful at conveying ethnographic detail and bringing the reader along on his journey through the welfare offices in which he was embedded.--Robin Bartram, author of Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality An eye-opening look at what's really happening inside welfare offices. Seim shows us the 'assembly line' of welfare provision and reveals the tensions inherent in this transformation. In a time of increasingly automated work and a safety net stretched ever thinner, his analysis is urgent and illuminating.--Kelley Fong, author of Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services The question of how governments can help people who need help is intimately tied to the question of who is doing the helping and under what conditions. The Welfare Assembly Line addresses these questions, showing how frontline welfare workers increasingly find themselves operating in 'policy factories' characterized by standardization and automation. Seim's analysis is eminently readable, providing an accessible and nuanced insider account of how workers operate within this new welfare machinery. Anyone wishing to understand the safety net in America today should read this book.--Donald Moynihan, Professor, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan