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: #140016 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-04
• Released on: 2005-01-04
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x .75" w x 5.18" l, .56 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

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 Booklist
Shipler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Arab and Jew (1986), examines the complex issues behind poverty and changes in policy and ideology regarding the poor. Shipler fleshes out statistics and social policy with compelling portraits of people who struggle to maintain lives for themselves and their families with low-paying jobs and little social support. Looking at workers from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, from illegal immigrants working on farms in California to factory workers in New Hampshire, Shipler vividly portrays the plight of people living on the very brink of economic disaster, some of whom are only one paycheck away from homelessness. He examines schools, job-training programs, and health-care services aimed at low-income people that often fall woefully short of actually helping their clients. Finally, Shipler ties together the micro and macro factors that condemn the working poor to a marginalized existence. This is a compelling, insightful book for those interested in issues of poverty and social justice. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"This is clearly one of those seminal books that every American should read and read now." --The New York Times Book Review

" An essential book. . . . It should be required reading not just for every member of Congress, but for every eligible voter." --The Washington Post Book World

“Sensitive, sometimes heart-rending . . . . A vivid portrait of the struggle of the working poor to acquire steady, decently paid employment.” –Commentary

"Insightful and moving. . . . Shipler writes with enormous grace [and] he captures the immense frustration endured by the working poor as few others have." --The Nation

"Welcome and important. . . . Shipler manages to see all aspects of poverty--psychological, personal, societal--and examine how they're related. . . . There is much here to ponder for conservatives and liberals alike." —The Seattle Times