Work and poverty

Public Interest, Fall, 2004 by Joel Schwartz

MORE than a decade ago, the political scientist Lawrence Mead predicted that the passage of workfare legislation would move American politics to the left, because mainstream Americans would be more receptive to easing the lot of "a poor population working at higher levels." To the extent that welfare reform transformed the idle poor into the working poor, the poor would be viewed with greater sympathy. The publication of David Shipler's study The Working Poor: Invisible in America ([dagger]) shows Mead's prescience. In the book, Shipler tells the stories of "working people who ha[ve] been left behind" while American prosperity soared--people whose "wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives." The premise underlying his book is that the term working poor "should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America."

Previously a New York Times reporter for more than 20 years, Shipler is the author of three earlier books (on Soviet Russia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and American race relations), the second of which won a Pulitzer Prize. Thus he comes to the book not as a poverty expert but as a journalist. His book chiefly recounts the stories of many impoverished workers--among them a child-care worker in Akron, Ohio, a Korean waitress in Los Angeles, a Mexican agricultural laborer in North Carolina and an ex-drug addict who learned to service photocopiers in Washington, D.C.--whom he came to know and befriend over the course of several years. By telling their stories, Shipler seeks to make middle-class Americans aware of the living conditions of these "invisible" Americans, and hence more receptive to aiding them.

The book has many virtues. First, as one would expect of a Pulitzer Prize winner, Shipler is an excellent reporter. He clearly won the confidence of many of the poor people whose lives he recounts. Furthermore, Shipler's discussion of poverty is refreshingly honest, often incorporating observations that cut against the grain of his thesis. Thus Shipler admits that "by global or historical standards, much of what Americans consider poverty is luxury.... Most impoverished people in the world would be dazzled by the apartments, telephones, television sets, running water, clothing, and other amenities that surround the poor in America." Finally, Shipler's book is in many ways commendably even-handed. He writes in the expectation that both "devout conservatives and impassioned liberals will be bothered" by his depiction of the poor, because he invokes both "personal and societal responsibility" as causes of poverty: "It is difficult to find someone whose poverty is not somehow related to his or her unwise behavior.... And it is difficult to find behavior that is not somehow related to the inherited conditions of being poorly parented, poorly educated, and poorly housed in neighborhoods from which no distant horizon of possibility can be seen."

SHIPLER'S argument is governed by two overarching ideas. The first is that poverty is holistic, which is to say, it cannot be successfully tackled on any single front. For example,

  a run-down apartment can exacerbate a child's asthma, which leads to a
  call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill that cannot be
  paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the interest rate on an
  auto loan, which forces the purchase of an unreliable used car, which
  jeopardizes a mother's punctuality at work, which limits her
  promotions and earning capacity, which confines her to poor housing.

Since all of these problems must somehow be addressed at once, Shipler hopes--somewhat implausibly--that unifying services under one roof could help the poor. Several anecdotes that Shipler recounts suggest why this reform would be unlikely to accomplish very much: His book is replete with stories of workers eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) who fail to take advantage of it, parents who ignore or misunderstand their doctors' instructions about administering medication to their children, and job seekers whose "corrosive suspicions of [their own] worthlessness" make them unemployable, because they cannot master "the 'soft skills' of punctuality, diligence, and a can-do attitude." Making the bureaucracy easier to navigate might do some good at the margins. But it would chiefly benefit poor people who already act and think like members of the middle class-in other words, those who in any case are the most likely to make their way out of poverty. And as Shipler's narrative makes abundantly clear, that group incorporates some, but hardly all, of the working poor.

Shipler's other main point is that wages at the bottom end of the pay scale are lower than they should be. Shipler concedes that at least "in a booming economy, practically anyone who wants to work can get a job." The trouble is that it is "usually at a low wage without much prospect of promotion," so "the entry-level job often turns out to be the dead-end job." As a result, "a young person with limited skills and education arriving on these shores--or entering the workforce from a background of poverty--will start on the bottom rung only to discover that the higher rungs are beyond his grasp." Shipler's broader conclusion is that "work works at the low end of the pay scale only when everything else works."