Given bailouts that went to companies that regularly grant huge executive perks, it’s understandable that there’s much talk in America today of reducing government spending, but when actual cuts take place, social services, money spent on infrastructure, and money used to enforce regulations against abusive business practices take the hit, while money to fund foreign wars and corporate perks always seems to continue to flow.
David K. Shipler’s book The Working Poor: Invisible in America is a strong reminder of why funds need to continue supporting programs that benefit the working poor in America. Published in 2004, very little in this book has become dated. If anything the situation has become more dire as the gap between wealthy and poor Americans widens. This book came out about just after Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: on (Not) Getting by in America, a more personal look at how hard it is to get by in a low wage job. Ehrenreich’s book is interesting and received a great deal of attention, but Shipler’s book is a more thorough, less subjective study of the dilemmas of the working poor.
Shipler looks at the dilemmas of the poor from many vantages: the dead-end, hard-to-find jobs; the challenges in obtaining reasonable health care, child care, education, and housing; industries like check cashing services, payday loans, banking fees, and tax return preparation; familial cycles of physical and sexual abuse; and hostility and red tape from the social workers and programs that are in place to serve them. He shows how quickly a family on the verge of getting by can fall into financial disaster. It’s a distressing picture, one that will help you empathize and perhaps identify some of your own attitudes and behaviors that contribute to the problem.
This isn’t a one-sided account. Shipler acknowledges mistakes that some of the poor make that aggravate their difficulties, such as bad parenting, bad nutritional choices, and foolish spending choices when cash does become available. He talks to managers and employers in sweat shops and migrant farms and learns that most of them are barely above the poverty line themselves, only one step ahead of the workers they sometimes abuse.
This is a highly readable account: Shipler balances anecdotal accounts with more advanced analysis. He suggests a few solutions, but for the most part acknowledges that this is a problem beyond easy answers. If you can find it in yourself to read one book about the position of the poor in America, this would be a good choice.
Check the WRL catalog for The Working Poor: Invisible in America
[...] the blog Blogging for a Good Book, another book about American workers and how their corporate masters are pretty much giving them the short end of the stick. The book is [...]
Thank you for writing such a book