When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Daryl Michael Scott

Reviewed by

Daryl Michael Scott Columbia University

Since the Great Depression social scientists have believed that long-term unemployment results in tragedies for individuals and families. When work disappears, social disorganization and perhaps personal disorganization are thought to follow. Policy makers have assumed that most Americans will not tolerate high unemployment and that social and political upheaval would ensue as people struggle to hold their lives together. Decades of relative prosperity have meant that the government has not feared political instability arising from unemployment, but in recent years job creation has replaced higher wages as a central political issue.

The consequences of long-term unemployment are so well understood that William J. Wilson's When Work Disappears hardly seems necessary. Yet it has ever been the case that experts must submit special evidence to demonstrate that general sociological theories and findings apply to blacks as well as whites. While conservatives have never convinced white Americans that their problems are personal rather than social, they have convinced them and other groups that the problems in black life are caused by black folks themselves - if not by too much state assistance.

For over thirty years, ever since the urban crisis of the 1960s, Wilson has shouldered the special burden of showing how sociological processes apply to blacks. Laboring in the post-Moynihan era when liberals eschewed black pathology arguments and conservatives promoted them, he has sought to discuss social disorganization without stigmatizing the poor. In The Declining Significance of Race, he skirted the question of pathology altogether and focused on the rising class divide. In The Truly Disadvantaged, the issue of social disorganization loomed in the background as he highlighted the structural causes of the urban poor's condition. In this newer work he attempts to explain how high rates of unemployment create social disorganization and problems in the inner city.

The inheritor of the Chicago School's tradition of urban ecology and empirical research, Wilson offers an understanding of social disorganization that varies widely from that of his predecessors. For the Chicago School, social disorganization was an attendant aspect of migrations, not of joblessness. Despite employment, immigrants and black migrants lived in social environments that reflected the fact that they had been uprooted. Traditional social control mechanisms did not function properly and individuals had to scramble to restore order to their lives and communities. Individually, the immigrants escaped socially disorganized communities when they experienced social and geographical mobility. Throughout the interwar years, E. Franklin Frazier, the leading urban ecologist who studied blacks, believed economic opportunity would also lift the black masses from the disorganizing forces of migration. During the 1950s, Frazier began to doubt that: the poorest blacks would be saved. Unfortunately, he died before he could undertake his last study of the black family in urban America.

The new urban poverty - or the disorganized inner-city neighborhoods of our time is not a consequence of migration, but of joblessness in the inner city, Wilson maintains. He views postwar black communities as institutional ghettos, a term he borrows from the historian Alan Spear. Prior to the 1970s, the institutional ghettos, Wilson believes, were not idyllic zones devoid of poverty and crime. Yet they had a high degree of social organization. He argues that the institutional ghettos provided jobs and had institutions that served as foundations of social health. It was not until changes in the economy shrank the employment opportunities for inner-city blacks, particularly black men, that social organization began to break down. To make matters worse, working- and middle-class blacks moved away, leaving in their wake high levels of social disorganization. Developments in the 1970s, he believes, led to the social chaos that reached unfathomable levels in the mid-1980s.

For Wilson, the truly disadvantaged who inhabit the disorganized, jobless ghettos face dim prospects. Public transportation often fails to provide access to many job locations, and employers of all races harbor stereotypes about poor blacks, especially black men, and often refuse them work. Contrary to what many think, Wilson does not depict inner-city residents as having a culture of poverty or damaged personalities. Instead he writes of "ghetto-related behaviors." In the tradition of the Chicago School, he subscribes to the belief that people do not need to be overhauled; they simply need opportunity and a new social environment. Recognizing the limits of individual agency, Wilson believes that the state must intervene with social programs, especially job creation.

Wilson concedes that his policy proposals are not politically viable, but he has taken pains to keep them in sync with the average American's view of how social policy should work. Recognizing that most Americans do not support many special programs for the poor or blacks, he advocates universal programs that will disproportionately aid the needy. Universal health care will serve all but would be a boon to low-wage workers, and most Americans might endorse tax credits rather' than direct assistance for the poor. At the heart of his recommendations is a return to a New Deal-style employment program that will provide employment for temporarily displaced workers as well as the poor.