The Working Poor

"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 rightthat 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.

David K. Shipler worked for the New York Times from 1966 to 1988, reporting from New York, Saigon, Moscow, and Jerusalem before serving as chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C. He has also written for The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of three other books—Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams; Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (which won the Pulitzer Prize); and A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. Mr. Shipler, who has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has taught at Princeton University, at American University in Washington, D.C., and at Dartmouth College. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland. From the Hardcover edition.

Preface	ix
Introduction At the Edge of Poverty	3	(10)
Chapter One Money and Its Opposite	13	(26)
Chapter Two Work Doesn't Work	39	(38)
Chapter Three Importing the Third World	77	(19)
Chapter Four Harvest of Shame	96	(25)
Chapter Five The Daunting Workplace	121	(21)
Chapter Six Sins of the Fathers	142	(32)
Chapter Seven Kinship	174	(27)
Chapter Eight Body and Mind	201	(30)
Chapter Nine Dreams	231	(23)
Chapter Ten Work Works	254	(31)
Chapter Eleven Skill and Will	285	(16)
Epilogue	301	(10)
Notes	311	(6)
Index	317

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Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials