(Courtesy of Knopf)

To read ITF’s interview with David Shipler, please click here.

There’s a popular liberal bumper sticker that reads, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Following in the tradition of other canonical anti-poverty works like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Cold New World, David Shipler’s The Working Poor incites a similar sentiment. His investigative journalism delves deep into the seamless nature of poverty by unveiling the poor we are most likely to overlook: those who work.

This investigation is a formidable challenge — partially because poverty isn’t an easy subject to read about, but also because tackling the roots of cyclical poverty in America is like navigating a spider web: Everything is interconnected. In attempting to address the manifold causes and effects of poverty, Shipler bounces between migrant workers and drug-addicted mothers, homeless men and college-educated women. His subject shifts can at times be jarring or feel cursory, but Shipler’s work is ultimately powerful and moving because it is imminently readable. When Ron Suskind reviewed The Working Poor in February 2004 for The New York Times Review of Books, he explained, “This is clearly one of those seminal books that every American should read, and read now.” And this is a book many people can read. Shipler explores his subjects’ lives in an easy narrative, resisting the temptations of dry academic discourse. The book’s strength lies in Shipler’s ability to step aside and give his subjects the floor. His role is that of a guide, not merely a witness.

Budgets, bank accounts, and other enemies of the working poor

The working poor occupy an economic position the middle class typically only know from their summer job experiences in high school, a position we have difficulty acknowledging as anything other than transitory. But the working poor are always floating in our peripheral vision: the man who hands us our coffee, the woman who watches our children, the housekeepers who come through our offices at night while we relax at home, the bank teller who collects food stamps to support her kids. The job opportunities available to those who live on the brink of poverty are, for one reason or another, largely minimum wage. Such work doesn’t pay sufficiently in either salary or benefits to sustain a family. The stories — and struggles — of those Shipler terms “the working poor” poignantly illuminate the gap between what we consider poverty and what it really looks like for millions of men and women.

Why the gap? Americans, it seems, remain largely incapable of reading between the lines when it comes to the reality of the economic crisis. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the American dream doesn’t make room for ambiguities. We want people to climb from poverty to wealth (or at least the middle class) through hard work, to sweat their way off the welfare rolls. The media jumps on success stories as evidence of our socio-economic fantasy. But as Shipler suggests in the aptly titled chapter, “Work Doesn’t Work” — or rather, not all work works. Shipler argues that the American dream positions the poor as scapegoats and allows the middle class to ignore the trauma and hardship that frame their need. The working poor are left balancing their fragile lives against myths of hard work and perseverance.

To demonstrate the tenuous position occupied by the working poor, Shipler asked his subjects to keep budgets. Presented in the same easily navigable storytelling style that characterizes the rest of his work, the budgets, broken into simple numbers, reveal just how little budge room people working for minimum wage have, as they treadwater. Christie, a childcare worker, had a budget that looked like this:

Income:  $37.68Child Support Check
$660.00Monthly take home
$697.68

Expenses$15.00Gas
$6.00Take day care kids to zoo
$3.00Fee to cash paycheck (no checking account)
$172.00Rent (w/ late fee)
$31.47Layaway for Christmas presents
$40.00Shoes for two kids
$5.00Corduroy pants (second hand)
$5.00Shirt
$10.00Bell Bottom Pants
$47.00 x 2Bi-weekly car insurance
$43.00Phone
$34.00Gas (apartment)
$46.00             Electricity
$8.00 to $15.00        Prescriptions
$150.00Car payments
$72.00Medical insurance
$43.00Cable
$784.47

Simply put, it’s expensive to be poor in America. America’s working poor pay a double fee their predecessors never encountered. First, the working poor are required to pay surcharges to cash paychecks, wire money, receive child support, and file their taxes. They also face a marketing establishment that has argued successfully over the last 20 years that all Americans — rich and poor alike — deserve cable TV and the opportunities to dine out and wear name-brand apparel.

As Shipler demonstrates, poverty knows no racial, gender, or language lines — but it does disproportionately affect women. The majority of Shipler’s subjects are female, and many are single mothers. His sample reflects a gendered wage gap where women earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by a male. As the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reveals, this statistic has a devastating effect on women’s long-term earnings.

Poverty’s trail of tears

But budgets and the poverty line alone cannot define poverty. One of the book’s most exciting contributions to the popular discussion on poverty is the causal link it draws between trauma and endemic poverty — a correlation long familiar to academics and anti-poverty workers, but often invisible to those distanced from the front lines. Shipler explores this connection through Sarah’s personal narrative

Unless treated, trauma — particularly childhood trauma — profoundly impairs human beings’ ability to reach their potential. Shipler cites a 1997 study finding evidence that children subjected to stress often continue to display high levels of cortisol that then affect their neurological development. Childhood trauma is frequently linked with adult chemical dependency and exposure to violence. Dr. Sandra L. Bloom’s literature review, The PVS Disaster: Poverty, Violence and Substance in the Lives of Women and Children, reveals that between 50 and 70 percent of women on welfare have been in an abusive relationship at some point, a significantly higher proportion than the general population.

Trauma survivors are marked by a sense of powerlessness, what Shipler calls a “corrosive suspicion of worthlessness.” This feeling is compounded by his subjects’ sense of economic irrelevance. As one of Shipler’s subjects, Ann Brash, observes: “People who don’t call when they can’t come to work probably don’t think they’re important enough … It’s more than low self-esteem. It’s invisibility.”

Partisan politics and nonpartisan money matters

In incorporating this discussion of trauma within his examination of poverty, Shipler blows open partisan dialogue about poverty programs — making The Working Poor an essential read during this election season. Current political dialogue fails to address the endemic nature of poverty when it chooses to see people as either bad or lazy, or to place full blame on insufficient funding. As Shipler indicated when I spoke with him, “Liberals tend not to want to see the families’ individual failures, and conservatives tend to see only those [failures, ignoring] societal issues … only if you define the problem thoroughly can you invent thorough solutions.”

Shipler posits that the solution lies in part with integrated programs, like So Others May Eat (SOME) in Washington, D.C. Anti-poverty initiatives must not only address concrete issues like job training and benefits advocacy, but also what Shipler calls “soft skills” — how to show up for work on time, how to negotiate with peers and employers, and perhaps most importantly, how to heal from emotional injuries.  Dr. Bloom’s work has focused on helping service providers create trauma-informed systems that teach healing skills as a means for growth.

In order to create trauma-informed and integrated services, liberal and conservative social service ideologies must meet. Shipler writes:

Pleas for more money and discussion about trauma aren’t popular issues in election years, and, unsurprisingly, as of this writing, neither candidate has sufficiently addressed an anti-poverty platform capable of effectuating large-scale change. Given President George W. Bush’s history of programmatic cuts and tax reform designed to assist the upper echelons of American society, liberals look to Democratic candidate John Kerry for leadership. While Kerry’s plans to raise the minimum wage to $7 per hour and expand health care coverage for larger percentages of the population demonstrate a desire to reach low income voters by speaking to their concerns, his agenda is at best a superficial attempt at appeasing liberals rather than a genuine attempt to address poverty and mobilize voter turn out. This failure, of course, could hurt the Democrats as much as it hurts the working poor since the vote of the latter is essential to the former’s prospects of electoral success.  As Shipler points out in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, “Historically, the lower a person’s income, the greater his support for the Democrats — but the less likely he is to vote.”

The poor may not vote because, like Ann Brash, they feel invisible or because they don’t have transportation to the polls or child care. But they also don’t vote because they don’t see answers to their everyday problems in the candidates’ rhetoric. Kerry’s claim that the minimum wage raise will positively affect working mothers is accurate, but it still won’t raise them above the poverty level. Most living wage campaigns define a living wage as $8.20 for a family of four (although in urban areas, this rate is correspondingly higher). Raising the minimum wage for a 40-hour per week employee would amount to $3,800 more annually; enough to buy more groceries and jeopardize food stamp and welfare benefits, but not enough to ensure a family’s financial stability.

Focusing on minimum wage and job creation as solutions to poverty neglects the larger picture. As the Center for Law and Social Policy points out, 42 percent of projected job growth over the 20 years will be for workers with post-secondary training. But Bush proposes doubling the number of students trained by the workforce — without increasing the program’s funding. Minimum wage jobs are disappearing, and as Shipler writes in his conclusion, “the minimum wage is a blunt instrument, and the skill to use it is not perfected.” Shipler’s call for increased employment training and the revival of vocational education necessitates that Sen. John Kerry and other Democrats challenge private industries to step forward and bear responsibility for training workers.

But given the tendency of most politicians to consistently place a greater emphasis on middle-class families than on low-income workers, will private industries have any incentive to expend the resources necessary to train lower-income workers? It’s difficult to tell. After all, talking about poverty too much is derided as a liberal malady, the territory of left-wing journalists and activists incapable of seeing the long-term economic future; politicians are reluctant to tackle the issue whole heartedly for fear of alienating those constituents whose votes they rely on.

But perhaps we are moving away from these traditional divides: The poverty crisis in this country is attracting increasing attention from those in the center. Barbara Ehenreich’s bestselling book, Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America, was a fixture on bestseller list and selected as summer reading material for students at the University of North Carolina.

If a dialogue concerning poverty is to move to the center of our nation’s agenda, it will require not just armchair liberals willing to read a book or two, but political participation of all types at  all levels of the economic spectrum. James Agee wrote in 1936, ”Let us then hope better of our children, and of our children’s children; let us know there is a cure, there is to be an end to it, whose beginnings are long begun …”

But if Shipler’s work teaches us anything, it’s that it isn’t enough to merely hope anymore. Incisive investigative journalism has only so much power to effect change As Shipler writes in closing: ”We do know how to do much more than we choose to do. Our insufficient will has not carried us even close to that twilight region where our competence fades.”

Shipler made the working poor visible, but the rest, it seems, is up to us — the readers, the voters, the workers, the employers, the privileged. We’re the ones who have to figure out how to make them feel visible — and powerful.

To read ITF’s interview with David Shipler, please click here.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
A portion of the proceeds from the purchase of these books will go the InTheFray if the following links are used

The Working Poor
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0375408908

Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0805063897

ORGANIZATIONS >

SOME program
URL: http://www.some.org

Center for Law and Social Policy
URL: http://www.clasp.org

America’s Second Harvest
URL: http://www.secondharvest.org

U.S. Census Bureau’s Poverty Measurements
URL: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty.html

ACORN’s Living Wage Campaign
URL: http://www.livingwagecampaign.org

National Low Income Housing Coalition’s Voter Registration Project
URL: http://www.nlihc.org/vrem/

National Coalition Against Homelessness’ Voter Rights Manual
URL: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/vote2004/

Jobs with Justice
URL: http://www.jwj.org

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Agee and Walker’s Great Experiment
URL: http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/hhr93_5.html

Dr. Sandra Bloom’s work
URL: http://www.sanctuaryweb.com

“

llouison