Product Description

“Nobody who works hard should be poor in America,” writes Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

They perform labor essential to America’s comfort. They are white and black, Latino and Asian--men and women in small towns and city slums trapped near the poverty line, where the margins are so tight that even minor setbacks can cause devastating chain reactions. Shipler shows how liberals and conservatives are both partly right–that practically every life story contains failure by both the society and the individual. Braced by hard fact and personal testimony, he unravels the forces that confine people in the quagmire of low wages. And unlike most works on poverty, this book also offers compelling portraits of employers struggling against razor-thin profits and competition from abroad. With pointed recommendations for change that challenge Republicans and Democrats alike, The Working Poor stands to make a difference.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8737 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-04
• Released on: 2005-01-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.com Review
The Working Poor examines the "forgotten America" where "millions live in the shadow of prosperity, in the twilight between poverty and well-being." These are citizens for whom the American Dream is out of reach despite their willingness to work hard. Struggling to simply survive, they live so close to the edge of poverty that a minor obstacle, such as a car breakdown or a temporary illness, can lead to a downward financial spiral that can prove impossible to reverse. David Shipler interviewed many such working people for this book and his profiles offer an intimate look at what it is like to be trapped in a cycle of dead-end jobs without benefits or opportunities for advancement. He shows how some negotiate a broken welfare system that is designed to help yet often does not, while others proudly refuse any sort of government assistance, even to their detriment. Still others have no idea that help is available at all.

"As a culture, the United States is not quite sure about the causes of poverty, and is therefore uncertain about the solutions," he writes. Though he details many ways in which current assistance programs could be more effective and rational, he does not believe that government alone, nor any other single variable, can solve the problem. Instead, a combination of things are required, beginning with the political will needed to create a relief system "that recognizes both the society's obligation through government and business, and the individual's obligation through labor and family." He does propose some specific steps in the right direction such as altering the current wage structure, creating more vocational programs (in both the public and private sectors), developing a fairer way to distribute school funding, and implementing basic national health care.

Prepare to have any preconceived notions about those living in poverty in America challenged by this affecting book. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
This guided and very personal tour through the lives of the working poor shatters the myth that America is a country in which prosperity and security are the inevitable rewards of gainful employment. Armed with an encyclopedic collection of artfully deployed statistics and individual stories, Shipler, former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer winner for Arab and Jew, identifies and describes the interconnecting obstacles that keep poor workers and those trying to enter the work force after a lifetime on welfare from achieving economic stability. This America is populated by people of all races and ethnicities, whose lives, Shipler effectively shows, are Sisyphean, and that includes the teachers and other professionals who deal with the realities facing the working poor. Dr. Barry Zuckerman, a Boston pediatrician, discovers that landlords do nothing when he calls to tell them that unsafe housing is a factor in his young patients' illnesses; he adds lawyers to his staff, and they get a better response. In seeking out those who employ subsistence wage earners, such as garment-industry shop owners and farmers, Shipler identifies the holes in the social safety net. "The system needs to be straightened out," says one worker who, in 1999, was making $6.80 an hour80 cents more than when she started factory work in 1970. "They need more resources to be able to help these people who are trying to help themselves." Attention needs to be paid, because Shipler's subjects are too busy working for substandard wages to call attention to themselves. They do not, he writes, "have the luxury of rage."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

"The millions who are poor in the United States tend to become increasingly invisible," Michael Harrington wrote in The Other America (1962). "Here is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them." Harrington, a prominent democratic socialist, revealed that not all Americans were sharing in the prosperity of the Eisenhower era. The Other America brought the poor out of the shadows, appealed to the conscience of the educated middle class, became a bestseller and helped to inspire the War on Poverty. For a decade or so the existence of poor housing and poor health in the world's wealthiest country was regarded as a national disgrace, a social problem addressed with the sort of fervor later directed at illegal drug use and the graduated income tax. Compassion for the poor dwindled amid the stagflation of the late 1970s. It was ridiculed during Reagan revolution, whose old-fashioned belief in self-reliance reached its peak in 1996, when President Bill Clinton backed legislation to replace federal welfare with hard work.

Now poverty seems once again to have been forgotten. For the past 20 years the mainstream media have been obsessed with the lifestyles of the rich and famous -- not those of the poor and dispossessed. In The Working Poor, David K. Shipler directs our gaze to the people we encounter every day, yet hardly seem to notice, the low-wage workers who flip burgers at McDonald's, stock the shelves at Wal-Mart and sew the hems of designer clothes. Their misery hides in plain sight. Like Harrington's work of a generation ago, The Working Poor delivers an unsettling message for the comfortably well-off and complacent: "It is time to be ashamed."

Shipler's focus is not the lazy, the homeless, the seriously mentally ill -- the sort of people whom you might expect to be poor. Instead he chronicles the plight of those Americans who have jobs but still live in poverty. It is remarkable how many people fit that description. A conservative estimate would be between 35 and 40 million. "Poverty" is not easy to define, and regional differences in the cost of living make nationwide measurements particularly difficult. According to the federal government, in 2002 a family of four -- one adult, three children -- that earned $18,500 had an annual income above the poverty level. An adult in such a household, working forty hours a week, five days a week, would have to earn more than $8.80 an hour to remain above the official poverty line. That is an hourly wage 70 percent higher than the current federal minimum wage. However you measure poverty, it has been growing in recent years, along with disparities in wealth. One-fifth of the American population, those at the very bottom of the income scale, have a median net worth of $7,900.

I've spent a fair amount of time among the working poor, and Shipler conveys the stress and anxiety and chaos of their lives with extraordinary skill. There is nothing simple about the poverty he depicts. Shipler spent five years investigating the subject, and the depth of his reporting conveys a reality too complex to fit neatly into any liberal or conservative scheme. Poverty emerges in these pages not as the inevitable result of an unjust society or as a reflection of individual failings, but as a mixture of both. "Liberals don't want to see the dysfunctional family," Shipler argues, "and conservatives want to see nothing else." He supplies a haunting portrait of a woman whose upward mobility in the service industry is blocked, in large part, by the fact that she has no teeth. Poverty was responsible for her losing the teeth -- and lacking the sort of smile assistant managers like to see behind the counter, she became trapped in poverty. We meet victims of sexual abuse trying to recover from the trauma, migrant workers sleeping 12 to a room, sweatshop workers exploited by greedy employers, teachers and social workers struggling to lift children from the lower depths.

The sort of problems that are merely inconvenient for an upper-middle-class family -- a flat tire, a baby sitter who fails to show up, a bout of the flu -- can prove disastrous for the working poor. They live precariously near the edge, without job security, health insurance or money in the bank. A boss at Wal-Mart expects workers to come whenever needed, morning, noon or night. A labor contractor deducts a smuggler's fee, along with room and board, from a migrant worker's weekly paycheck. The owner of a sweatshop suddenly closes the business, then reopens at a new location, leaving workers with weeks of unpaid wages. And it's not just unscrupulous employers who prey on the poor. Financial institutions that offer easy credit can plunge them into debt. The annual interest charged by some check-cashing outfits -- where the poor must often do their banking -- can reach 521 percent.

No matter how close to the bottom a family may fall, there is always a relentless, downward pull. "Poverty leads to health and housing problems," Shipler explains. "Poor health and housing lead to cognitive deficiencies and school problems. Educational failure leads to poverty." There is no simple way out of such vicious circles, and Shipler advocates remedies that are as complex as the social problems he addresses. A more responsive network of social services could simultaneously offer legal, medical, educational and even parenting support. A higher minimum wage and health insurance for all Americans would help, too. Shipler's proposals defy ideological labels; they are guided by a pragmatic appreciation of what might actually get results.

The Working Poor is not an easy read, and the darkness of the subject is only partly to blame. Shipler's hard work deserved a better editor. The structure of the book is sometimes confusing, and it would have benefited from a tighter focus, with fewer individual portraits and digressions. But this is an essential book. Even those who lack pity and compassion should be concerned about what is now happening to the poor. One of the great achievements of postwar America was the creation of a stable middle-class society. That achievement is unraveling. At the moment, the dispossessed are politically apathetic, distracted by video games and cable television, the modern equivalent of bread and circuses. Yet throughout our history, poverty and great inequalities of wealth have led to political extremism and social unrest. The Working Poor and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, a book that eloquently covers some of the same ground, should be required reading not just for every member of Congress, but for every eligible voter. Now that this invisible world has been so powerfully brought to light, its consequences can no longer be ignored or denied.

Reviewed by Eric Schlosser

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A Valuable and Affecting Learning Experience
The poor are very visible in our society. What's far less visible is "The Working Poor", people who have jobs, but who face consistent problems of lower health,low income,no benefits,little education and training, single parenthood,and so on. Pulitzer Prize winning author David Shipler has done a marvelous research job giving flesh to problems many of us may think we have some handle on. After reading his outstanding book, I found that I hardly had a clue. Dozens of interviews have produced a truly heartrending, and sometimes hopeful tableau, of what it means to live on the edge.

This is an important book. I read segments of it to my college students --the parts that emphasize how easy it is to fall into the crevasses of the working poor by either not obtaining a college degree or by not getting training in a field with demand. I recommend this book highly to anyone and as a must read for anyone thinking about dropping out of school or a training program.

What happened?
I never received the book, so I don't know how I can review it. Do you have any logical suggestions?

The Working Poor
The book was excellent. It gave me an intelligent insight of the struggles of so many Americans who can't deal with the American Dream.