Memo to the President Elect or The Working Poor

Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America's Reputation and Leadership

Author: Madeleine Albright

and/or stickers showing their discounted price. More about bargain books

New interesting book: Bold Italian or Food for Thought

The Working Poor: Invisible in America

Author: David K Shipler

“Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are usually described, ‘working poor,’ should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America.” —from the Introduction

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Arab and Jew, a new book that presents a searing, intimate portrait of working American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty.

As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology—hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor—white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy.

We meet drifting farmworkers in North Carolina, exploited garment workers in New Hampshire, illegal immigrants trapped in the steaming kitchens of Los Angeles restaurants, addicts who struggle into productive work from the cruel streets of the nation’s capital—each life another aspect of a confounding,far-reaching urgent national crisis. And unlike most works on poverty, this one delves into the calculations of some employers as well—their razor-thin profits, their anxieties about competition from abroad, their frustrations in finding qualified workers.

This impassioned book not only dissects the problems, but makes pointed, informed recommendations for change. It is a book that stands to make a difference.

The New York Times

As a witness Mr. Shipler is indefatigable. Interviewing cashiers and seamstresses, burger flippers and migrant workers a dozen or more times, he has gotten them to open up and share the grim realities of their lives … by exposing the wretched condition of these invisible Americans, he has performed a noble and badly needed service. — Michael Massing

The Washington Post

The Working Poor and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, a book that eloquently covers some of the same ground, should be required reading not just for every member of Congress, but for every eligible voter. Now that this invisible world has been so powerfully brought to light, its consequences can no longer be ignored or denied. — Eric Schlosser

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 hour-80 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." 40,000 first printing. (Feb. 6) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Edna Boardman - KLIATT

When customers are served by associates in a store or restaurant, enter a freshly cleaned hotel room, or choose freshly picked foods at the grocery store, they benefit from the labor of the working poor. Shipler has interviewed persons of many colors and ethnicities to put together a picture of what their lives are like. He notes the effect on their lives of kinship groups, corporations, social attitudes, emergencies, job training programs, family dysfunction, foreign competition, and other impacts. He is chary of theories and ideologies that would put them in neat categories and of judgments that assign blame for their poverty. He looks at the decisions individuals have made (or not made), and the policies and blocks, public and private, that bar access to better living standards. The book is well written, the anecdotes revealing; Shipler does better than most at putting a human face on the statistics that list those who live on the lowest wages in the US. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2004, Random House, Vintage, 329p. notes. index., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal

A book by a Pulitzer Prize winner (Arab and Jew), with an announced first printing of 40,000 copies by a prestigious trade publisher and prepub kudos by Bill Bradley and Robert Reich, is sure to capture a certain amount of media attention. If this happens, it will be well deserved. Shipler is informed and impassioned about the plight of the surprisingly diverse and numerous Americans who work but still walk the official poverty line. This conundrum is complex and rife with interlocking problems, including dead-end jobs that offer little or no healthcare benefits and depressing home and workplace environments. Not the least of these burdens is the widely held belief that poverty is related to indolence. Shipler takes a many-faceted view of this Sisyphean bind, and in his final chapter, "Skill and Will," he offers some thoughts on solutions. His writing style is highly effective and often moving, such as when he notes that our forgotten wage earners engage in "a daily struggle to keep themselves from falling over the cliff." Recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/03.]-Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A damning report on poverty in America. In The Mystery of Capital (2000), economist Hernando de Soto wondered why the Third World's poor lack the fungible assets that their American counterparts hold-assets that keep them from being, well, so poor. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Shipler (A Country of Strangers, 1997) reveals that this may be illusory: for many of the men and women he portrays here, any property of worth has been mortgaged and remortgaged, and when it is sold, often in a hurry and for less than it's worth, any proceeds go to paying down the mountains of debt that the poor accumulate. These American poor-natives and immigrants alike-"suffer in good times and bad," writes Shipler. They are sometimes the victims of addiction, ignorance, and bad choices; in most instances, however, the working poor are single mothers and single wage-earners with several children and few options. The larger culture misunderstands the causes of poverty, Shipler argues, "and is therefore uncertain about the solutions," though the solutions are there: in a surprising moment, a Wal-Mart manager in rural New England reveals that the store could easily afford to pay its employees two dollars an hour more. (One of his interview subjects made $6 an hour in a Vermont factory in the mid-1970s; 25 years later, now a Wal-Mart clerk, she was up to $6.80.) Traveling from big box stores to Los Angeles sweatshops to farms to public-housing projects, Shipler offers memorable portraits of the women and men who figure as afterthoughts in just about every politician's vision of the American future-even though, Shipler notes, had the poor voted, Al Gore would have been swept into office in 2000: "an upsurge inlow-income numbers would have overcome even Florida's biased registration and balloting system." A sobering work of investigation, as incisive-and necessary-as kindred reports by Michael Harrington, Jacob Riis, and Barbara Ehrenreich. First printing of 40,000. Agency: ICM

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Introduction: At the Edge of Poverty	3
Ch. 1	Money and Its Opposite	13
Ch. 2	Work Doesn't Work	39
Ch. 3	Importing the Third World	77
Ch. 4	Harvest of Shame	96
Ch. 5	The Daunting Workplace	121
Ch. 6	Sins of the Fathers	142
Ch. 7	Kinship	174
Ch. 8	Body and Mind	201
Ch. 9	Dreams	231
Ch. 10	Work Works	254
Ch. 11	Skill and Will	285
	Notes	301
	Index	307