The Trials of Low-Wage Earners
COTTLE, THOMAS J.
The Trials of Low-Wage Earners No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City By Katherine S. Newman Knopf. 394 pp. $27.95. Reviewed by Thomas J. Cottle Professor of education,...
...But how many of us who saw Coming to America were entertained because we knew that Eddie Murphy's tenure at a Burger Barn type of establishment would last only a few weeks before he returned to princely privilege in his African kingdom...
...Now one can avoid seeing the millions living under comparable conditions, and it is possible to believe stereotypes about the poor are essentially accurate...
...For the working poor, this offsets the outright harassment they endure because of their low level jobs...
...That brings us to the essence of what is America's class struggle...
...Once, when train travel was the rule, affluent Americans could not help catching a glimpse of the filth and palpable decay of the infamous tenements, and the shacks "on the other side of the tracks...
...We should listen to those who sought work at Burger Barn yet were continually turned down...
...But for endless decades an overwhelming number of African Americans (not to mention Latinos and Hispanics) have understandably been wondering whether this dream is truly meant for whites only...
...As Newman puts it: "Personal responsibility isnot supposed to be aticket to separation: It is an instrument of moral and social inclusion, the chief weapon in the fight to overcome unfairness...
...they want to be in the middle of the action...
...Focusing her anthropological background on a small chunk of the neighborhood, the author and a cadre of graduate students explored the universe of people with an intense desire to achieve, despite all the odds stacked against them...
...What propels them...
...They labor while worrying about their children's safety, paying medical bills, and just how long their present employment will last before younger workers willing to accept a couple of cents less take their jobs...
...Harlemites from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico appear to be more successful at locating jobs than African Americans, many of whom go without employment for years, although the majority do work...
...Newman's final chapter concerns work and training programs throughout the United States that give cause for optimism...
...they simply want decent jobs...
...How much, one wonders, did that sweet gentleman earn for driving Miss Daisy...
...They work, as Newman (corroborating the findings of Herbert Gans and William Julius Wilson) points out, because it is a social activity that affords relationships, attachments, definitions, plus a sense of morality and purpose...
...Firsthand, she has observed parents who have literally no financial means imbue their children with values...
...But 65 per cent of these so-called "rejects" lived in homes supported by wage earners, not welfare recipients...
...It may be difficult to imagine this, given the pitifully little we know about our poor families...
...They work, too, because jobs provide income, status and a tangible means of justifying one's existence...
...Everyone living in poverty, though, is aware of the American dream, the prizes presumably awarded to the diligent uncomplaining worker, the responsible citizen...
...Most are hidden away, sequestered in ghettos, housing projects, and what some sociologists call "death zones" because of their sheer danger...
...From their nevertheless continuing to pound the pavement it is clear that most Americans want what work could provide, and are ready to do virtually anything for wages, however low...
...The next time they hear of someone complaining about the boredom or outright indignity of flipping hamburgers for a living, they will think of Newman's investigation of the workers in Harlem's Burger Barn (an alias for a national fast food chain...
...Newman also studied a group of Harlem residents who could not find any employment...
...How many families do we know where children are raised, meals are prepared, homes are cleaned by people earning the minimum wage...
...Steady employment offers them, as it does all of us, a structure of constancy, responsibility, predictability—what Max Weber called calculability—and an ethical existence...
...They [the working poor] do not want to sit in some ghetto sideline...
...She tells us how many long for government positions, and try desperately to gain the sort of skills that might land them the best work with the best perks...
...She takes heart in business improvement districts, and the National Youth Apprenticeship Program...
...They capture what may be the most powerful tale this country has to tell—and would do well to heed...
...We do not know how to grow exceptional personalities," Newman observes, "we can merely stand back and marvel at their existence...
...And how many of these "domestics," "maids," "help," travel for hours every day, clinging to their jobs with all their strength...
...Such American buzzwords or catch phrases as "self-sufficiency," "independence," "making it on one's own" are, in large part, fantasies...
...Newman's research further reveals the support that family members among the poor proffer, the sacrifices they make for one another, and the type of interdependent social arrangements they have to rely on in order to experience even ataste of the American pie...
...She sees value in schools and businesses joining forces so that young people can expect jobs upon completion of their education...
...She hopes the unions will regain some of their earlier muscle, and she explains why, to resolve the present class struggle, we must finally confront the basic questions of day care, health insurance, proper housing, and adequate education...
...Some who are in school, it turns out, actually do better because of the need to work— leaving one amazed at how exhausted youngsters can do any homework after hours of mindless physical labor...
...It consists, as John Dewey noted years ago, of millions of common men and women with the most uncommon stories...
...Seventy-three per cent of them were still unemployed one year after Newman began tracking them...
...In many instances relatives live together in small apartments to save rent money...
...A host of these uncommon stories are presented here by a sensitive, disciplined, thoughtful scholar...
...They don't want to cheat anyone of anything...
...Readers of Katherine Newman's impressive, ultimately humbling volume, No Shame in My Game, however, will begin to feel very differently about that world...
...Newman introduces us to people forced to commute miles because local employers, in a case of the ghetto known versus the ghetto unknown, do not trust neighborhood workers...
...It may even sound romantic and cloying...
...There is no other way to manage...
...Newman admires the people she writes about...
...Living amid drug lords, illness, noise, accidents, and murders, the poor are thus to some extent lifted out of their destructive and debilitating settings by their work...
...Unemployment, underemployment and minimum wage jobs represent a continuing social injustice...
...Perhaps more important, No Shame in My Game demonstrates that issues of social capital aside, the critical ingredient of the equation for making society work is in place...
...Almost every aspect of their lives is a source of surprise for the rest of us...
...And we learn that contrary to the conventional wisdom, most poor people eschew the idea of a welfare handout...
...author, "Children's Secrets, and forthcoming, "Hardest Times: Portraits of Long-Term Unemployed Men" The United States has never fully come to grips with the fact that a very significant number of its citizens live in poverty...
...Meanwhile, a majority of whites feel the government has steadily been tilting the playing field in favor of African Americans...
...Those with babies sometimes succeed where their childless friends do not because parenting makes them more responsible...
...Reviewed by Thomas J. Cottle Professor of education, Boston University...
...Earning only a few bucks an hour— $40 a day gross—Rosa, Ianna, Jamal, Carmen, and Kyesha seek to improve themselves and, in the case of those who have children, to make things better for them...
...They share a phone or cable television, or food...
Vol. 82 • July 1999 • No. 8
