February 15, 2004
'The Working Poor': Can't Win for Losing
By RON SUSKIND
THE WORKING POOR
Invisible in America.
By David K. Shipler.
319 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $25.
The phrase ''working poor'' doesn't carry much weight in this fractious
political season. It slips by in a campaign speech, with nothing much
to grab onto as it passes. It suffers from a kind of blunt-edged
simplicity -- a collision of enormous, rounded terms that, by the
lights of American exceptionalism, should not be joined. Both political
parties quietly agree that it is an ugly, unsettling combination --
that any American who works steadily should not have to suffer the
barbed indignities of poverty. But Americans do -- millions of them.
There are 35 million people in the country living in poverty. Most of
the adults in that group work nowadays; many of them work full time.
And while there are heavy concentrations of African-Americans and white
single women in the mix, the group is every bit as diverse, and
diffuse, as the nation is.
Which presents a central problem for David Shipler in his powerful new
book, ''The Working Poor: Invisible in America'': how do you write a
treatise on something as vast and many-hued as an ocean, a forest, the
sky? Shipler knows this and, somehow, proceeds undaunted. A former New
York Times reporter, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book ''Arab and
Jew,'' and then managed to wrap his arms around the classically
obstreperous topic of race in America with ''A Country of Strangers:
Blacks and Whites in America.'' This is what he's become known for:
tackling the unwieldy.
Of course, Shipler has plenty of company in writing about fault-line
issues of the American experiment, like race, class and the nature of
opportunity. But it is an area populated in the past decade or two by
writers -- like Alex Kotlowitz in ''There Are No Children Here'' or,
more recently, Barbara Ehrenreich, who chronicled her personal journey
as a low-wage worker in ''Nickel and Dimed'' -- who incline toward the
power of personal narrative. In the first few chapters of ''The Working
Poor,'' Shipler shows, inadvertently, why so many journalists have made
that choice. He lunges forward at the book's start with some sweeping
judgments, like ''the rising and falling fortunes of the nation's
economy have not had much impact on these folks'' and ''the skills for
surviving in poverty have largely been lost in America'' -- both
debatable issues -- and introduces a racially diverse, thinly connected
army of poor workers, some appearing for just a paragraph or two. Parts
of an early chapter titled ''Importing the Third World'' read like a
dissertation on sweatshop cash flows.
I suggest that readers -- and this is clearly one of those seminal
books that every American should read and read now -- stick with it.
Shipler, like the man who pays to wrestle a behemoth at the county
fair, is just trying to get leverage on an indomitable opponent. By the
fourth chapter, just a third of the way, his strategy takes shape: he's
wearing down the giant. Shipler's subjects, many of whom he spent
nearly seven years following with meticulous empathy, begin to reappear
in the text. Their stories start to deepen, mixed with complex insights
that Shipler interweaves judiciously. In the chapter ''Harvest of
Shame,'' he deftly shows how government crackdown on illegal immigrants
creates ''migration within the migration,'' as an army of immigrant
workers races from strict-enforcement states like Ohio to more lenient
ones like North Carolina, and notes that ''when a migrant stops moving
. . . he starts to enter America.'' There are employers like Jimmy
Burch -- a North Carolina farm owner -- who co-signs loans for new
trailers for his workers. He has an interest. His workers do, too. He
says he's ''never been burned'' with a default -- not yet. Shipler
never shies away from noting the employer's power, but by embracing
complexity, and trusting the reader to be up to the task, he burns off
the easy illusions of hero versus villain that so often addle
journalism.
Doing that frees the writer to ask a set of questions off limits to
many practitioners of what is called ''poverty literature.'' Kevin
Fields, a beefy 280-pound African-American man, with a shaved head,
gold earring and a felony conviction for effectively fighting off a
street gang, is virtually unemployable. Men with a similar arrest
record, but different profiles, have less difficulty. ''Violence,''
Shipler points out, ''has a longstanding place in many whites' images
of blacks. So, if you are black, if you are a man, if you are large and
strong, or if you have a prison record, you are likely to be perceived
as a person with a temper, a vein of rage.''
Half of all poor families are headed by single women, and, in a chapter
titled ''Sins of the Fathers,'' Shipler doesn't flinch from delving
into how many struggling women were sexually abused as children. The
evolving estimates show the outlines of an epidemic. Kara King, a white
New Hampshire mother, was molested by her father, who told her ''that's
the way a father and a daughter are.'' The effects -- ''a paralyzing
powerlessness'' that ''mixes corrosively with other adversities that
deprive those in or near poverty of the ability to effect change'' --
are visible each time Kara and her family appear in the book.
The same goes for other subjects whose jumbled lives serve to
illuminate various elements of this enormous topic. The reader learns
the issues; knows the aching heart. What takes shape is an ensemble
play that weaves together traditional feature reporting, digressions
about ''best evidence'' and a few passionate expository arias to
display ''the constellation of difficulties,'' as Shipler puts it, that
defines working poverty. It defines the lives of millions of Americans.
Toward the book's finish, Shipler tries to harness the outrage provoked
by his characters' stories to examine the question of what can be done.
He shifts his focus to programs for job training, early childhood care
and remedial education (that alone meriting a domestic Marshall Plan,
considering that 14 percent of American adults can't find an
intersection on a map, total a deposit slip or determine the correct
dose of a medication). The author's efforts, here, are uneven.
Programmatic solutions, after all, are the hard, ungainly work of hours
and inches. Shipler's frustration seems to get the best of him when he
is talking about unenthusiastic students, bad teaching and the way
dreams of future success are little more than ''a notion carried on a
breeze of impulse.''
But alongside these broad, imperfect efforts, Shipler threads a glowing
filament: the telling acts of kindness, so often just small offerings,
that lift both giver and receiver. It's the little traps and trips that
foil those at the bottom. When you have no bank account, no car, no
health insurance, it inverts the slogan of that best-selling self-help
book: You have to sweat the small stuff. A modest mishap to someone who
can land on a cushion of nominal security can land a poor person on the
pavement, often literally. Caroline Payne, with a two-year associate's
degree and no teeth, can't afford dentures. No one wants to hire her.
When she finally gets a job in a Procter & Gamble factory, all is
almost lost when the plant's rotating shift policy leaves her unable to
care for her daughter one week every month. A friend steps up; her job
is saved. In the book's last section, Kara King is fighting cancer. Her
husband, Tom, has no car to the drive the two hours to a Boston
hospital for visits. It's crushing to read. When a local car dealer
gives him a loaner it feels like the healing of the world. The working
poor -- that enormous cohort -- are easily outnumbered by America's
broad middle class. Most experts agree: lifting a poor worker to the
uplands of self-sufficiency takes a concerted, many-pronged effort. In
that mix, invariably, must be someone willing to lend a hand, to make
even a little sacrifice.
Shipler's underlying mission, no doubt, is identical to that of the
narrative stylists who toil among America's underclass: to press
readers beyond appraising poverty's causes and effects, so often
inventoried for swift, harsh judgment, to the deeper understanding that
the working poor are really us. ''I hope this book,'' Shipler writes,
''will help them to be seen.'' In short, he wants to give readers
something to hold onto.
Then, the questions tend to be about the ''hows'' -- how we, as a
country, might now act. Readers, by the last page, can scarcely avoid
that question, or the larger algorithm that Shipler offers: ''To
appraise a society, examine its ability to be self-correcting. When
grievous wrongs are done or endemic suffering exposed, when injustice
is discovered or opportunity denied, watch the institutions of
government and business and charity. Their response is an index of a
nation's health and of a people's strength.''
Ron Suskind's latest book is ''The Price of Loyalty.'' He is
the author of ''A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey From the
Inner City to the Ivy League.''
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