The Working Poor

An intimate portrait of poverty-level working families from a range of ethnic backgrounds in America reveals their legacy of low-paying, dead-end jobs, dysfunctional parenting, and substance abuse and charges the government with failing to provide adequate housing, health care, and education.

Informationen zum Autor DAVID K. SHIPLER reported for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988 in New York, Saigon, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Washington, D.C. He is the author of six previous books, including the best sellers Russia and The Working Poor, as well as Arab and Jew, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and has taught at Princeton, American University, and Dartmouth. He writes online at The Shipler Report . Klappentext From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Arab and Jew, an intimate portrait unfolds 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. 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis Preface Introduction At the Edge of Poverty Chapter One Money and Its Opposite Chapter Two Work Doesn't Work Chapter Three Importing the Third World Chapter Four Harvest of Shame Chapter Five The Daunting Workplace Chapter Six Sins of the Fathers Chapter Seven Kinship Chapter Eight Body and Mind Chapter Nine Dreams Chapter Ten Work Works Chapter Eleven Skill and Will Epilogue Notes Index ...

Autorentext

DAVID K. SHIPLER reported for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988 in New York, Saigon, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Washington, D.C. He is the author of six previous books, including the best sellers Russia and The Working Poor, as well as Arab and Jew, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and has taught at Princeton, American University, and Dartmouth. He writes online at The Shipler Report.

Klappentext

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Arab and Jew, an intimate portrait unfolds 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. 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.

Zusammenfassung
"This is clearly one of those seminal books that every American should read and read now." *The New York Times Book Review

• " An essential book.... It should be required reading not just for every member of Congress, but for every eligible voter." The Washington Post Book World

  Sensitive, sometimes heart-rending ... A vivid portrait of the struggle of the working poor to acquire steady, decently paid employment. Commentary

  "Insightful and moving.... Shipler writes with enormous grace [and] he captures the immense frustration endured by the working poor as few others have." The Nation

  "Welcome and important.... Shipler manages to see all aspects of poverty psychological, personal, societal and examine how they're related.... There is much here to ponder for conservatives and liberals alike." *The Seattle Times

Leseprobe
Chapter One
Money and Its Opposite
You know, Mom, being poor is very expensive. Sandy Brash, at age twelve

Tax time in poor neighborhoods is not April. It is January. And income tax isn t what you pay; it s what you receive. As soon as the W-2s arrive, working folks eager for their checks from the Internal Revenue Service hurry to the tax preparers, who have flourished and gouged impoverished laborers since the welfare time limits enacted by Congress in 1996. The checks that come from Washington include not only a refund of taxes withheld, but an additional payment known as the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is designed to subsidize low-wage working families. The refunds and subsidies are sometimes banked for savings toward a car, a house, an education; but they are often needed immediately for overdue bills and large purchases that can t be funded from the trickle of wages throughout the year.

Christie, a child-care worker in Akron, earned too little to owe taxes but got $1,700 as an Earned Income Credit one year, which enabled her to avoid the Salvation Army s used-furniture store and instead buy a new matching set of comfortable black couches and loveseats for her living room in public housing.

Caroline Payne s check went for a down payment on her house in New Hampshire. I used my income tax and paid a thousand down, she said proudly. When she sold it five and a half years later and her daughter lent her money to rent a truck for her move, she planned to pay her back when I get my taxes.

I m waitin for my income tax to come in so I can pay my real estate taxes, said Tom King, a single father and lumberjack who lived in a trailer on his own land.

Debra Hall, who had started at a Cleveland bakery, was keen with anticipation after filing her first tax return. I ll get $3,079 back! What am I gonna do with it? Pay all my bills off, she declared, and I haven t had anything new in the house. Do some good with it, that s for sure. Minor repairs on my car. The bills are first, for my credit [rating], to get all my back debts paid. It will be well spent.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of those rare anti-poverty programs that appeal both to liberals and conservatives, invoking the virtue of both government help and self-help. You don t get it unless you have some earned income, and since its payments are linked to your tax return, you don t get it unless you file one. That leaves out low-wage workers especially undocumented immigrants who get paid under the table in cash and think they re better off avoiding the IRS. By filing, however, they would end up ahead, because they d get to keep everything they earned and would receive a payment on top of that. The benefits kick in at fairly high levels at earnings of less than $33,692, for example, for a worker who supported more than one child in 2003. At the lower income levels, the Earned Income Tax Credit can add the equivalent of a dollar or two an hour to a worker s wage.

Enacted in 1975, the program was expanded under Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, and in 2003 paid more than $32 billion …