Word: shipler
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...What Shipler aims to do in The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf; 319 pages) is to produce a picture of all of those dominoes at once, the multitude of obstacles that keep the working poor on the edge--and sometimes beyond the edge--of household-finance disaster. As the gap between the highest-and lowest-paid workers steadily worsens, he writes, "low wage employees have been testing the American doctrine that hard work cures poverty...
...Pulitzer-prizewinning former reporter for the New York Times, Shipler interviewed scores of people for this book--waitresses, shelf stockers, farm laborers, plus the social workers, union organizers and job trainers around them and the employers who take them on, not all of whom are crocodiles. His book lacks the first-person focus and angry wit of Nickel and Dimed, TIME contributor Barbara Ehrenreich's account of her attempts to get by on $6 or $7 an hour. But poverty is in the details, and he lays those out in abundance...
...essence of Shipler's message is that working poverty is a seamless web of challenges, some personal, some erected by a society content to let the federal minimum wage languish at $5.15 an hour. And that's for those who can avoid the unscrupulous bosses who make workers falsify their time sheets so they work longer hours for the same pay. Then there are the fruit pickers who have exorbitant housing costs deducted by labor contractors who warehouse the workers in filthy barracks. As for garment workers, they can be paid at piece rates--try three-fourths of a cent...
...Shipler doesn't place all the blame on society. The people he meets often lack the soft skills that employers require, like showing up on time, following directions, even knowing how to comb their hair. To be sure, they need better schools and reliable medical insurance, but they also need to know better than to use their precious tax-refund checks to get tattoos. Sometimes they clip coupons and turn up faithfully at job training. Sometimes they get drunk and disorderly. They go in for ill-advised sex and foolish spending sprees. In other words, the working poor...
...that makes all the difference. When they stumble, low-wage earners have nothing to fall back on. "They spend everything and save nothing," Shipler writes. "They are always behind on their bills. They have minuscule bank accounts or none at all." Bad judgment, bad habits, bad luck--among the middle classes, any of those can lead to setbacks. Among the working poor, they lead to disaster...