The Working Poor: Invisible in America
by David K. Shipler
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Book Summary Information
Author: David K. ShiplerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-01-04
ISBN: 0375708219
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Book Review: The Weight of the World
Summary: 4 Stars
This book, at somewhat of a more superficial level, reminds me of Pierre Bourdieu's 1990 narrative sociology of hard lives in France and Chicago, The Weight of the World.
What's most interesting about the pathologies narrated is that they are shared by the middle and upper middle classes in America, but become much more consequential when the money isn't there.
Of course, each pathology has to be narrated in its own unique context. Tolstoy started the Karenina famously by saying "All happy families are happy alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way".
Both sides of this dictum, which was at best a snappy way of starting a good book, can be interrogated. Part of the Weight of the World on people (such as my fellow students at Roosevelt University in Chicago) who start with silent disadvantages is that they learn not to narrate their lives with any justice.
This is because to do so in a dysfunctional family is often to get whacked.
In drug and alcohol rehab, which we see in Shipler is where welfare to work must often start, language STARTS with the absolute requirement for a true recognition of what Marx described as one's relations to one's fellow man in his purple passage "all that is solid melts into air".
But then, in computer classes and classes in resume writing, the Clintonian compromise with an uncompromising Republican class war changes this, and suddenly, the narrative becomes highly structured.
As Shipler points out, it becomes a narrative entirely concerned with satisfying naturalized employer needs.
Shipler gives a telling example. Physicians, who spot serious childhood illnesses, almost never think to call the mother's supervisor at work to ask that accomodations be made because excessively privatized health care makes the physician "think like a manager and not a physician"...in a society in which members of professional guilds outside the legal profession (and to an extent within it) are increasingly encouraged to subordinate their professional judgement to "thinking like a manager"...a rather unpleasant sort of chap, at the limit: rather something out of Dickens, forever making nasty little calculations.
Thus "thinking like a manager" means the physician will have internalized a mental "block" in which the job arrangements of a poor mother are assumed to be absolutes, and unquestionable. The block of course has a very good reason, and this is the resurgence of the legal doctrine of employment at will, which since the 1980s has been used pretty much without mercy on lower-level employees.
Shipler is a thoughtful supporter of the Great Bubba and his Missouri Compromise with forces that since Reagan are as Uncompromising as the slave-owner South (and whose avatars are generally silent about their spiritual and at times physical inheritances from antebellum arrangements).
The problem for Shipler is that untangling arrangements at once partly benign, partly pathological, and in all cases intertwined is difficult social re-engineering in a society where the Uncomprising forces have greatly benefited from them.
Furthermore, nobody can call a work ethic, the willingness to get up and go, and wage labor an agreement with death and a covenant with hell, as did Garrison refer to the slaveowner's Constitution. Quite the opposite: progressive forces in Abolition times thought precisely as do modern Republican apologists.
They believed in the American dream of salvation through wage labor and saving money, as does Shipler: as does Bill Clinton. But where anti-slavery's simplicity of opposition meant that it escaped being an ideology, support for the eternal verities of work and save is not support for anything simple.
I mean, there is in my experience work like a dog, and blue one's hard earned dollars like a sailor in port: just because you work you don't have to save (although it's impossible to save if you don't work, unless you steal). Many of Shipler's poor remain poor because of odious lending arrangements in a society which has forgot the evils of usury. Others remain poor because they, like Sir John Falstaff, don't think sack and sugar a fault.
But nearly all remain poor because of a Gestalt, in which Shylock, sack and sugar combine. Their personal biographies (as Bourdieu also relates) are saturated with post-modern complexities and puzzlements.
Bourdieu's elder French men and women made decent lives for themselves in France of the 1950s. They joined the Communist party *sans peur*...which then taught them an interesting, but terribly real work ethic: since they were workers, enmeshed in a doomed system, it was their dignity, in nearly all cases, to show up on time, *en masse*, and work hard if only to frighten the bosses with a show of strength.
But as happened in the USA, where Vietnam and the 1960s intervened in the same way in France, where Algeria, Vietnam and the French experience of the 1960s intervened, resistance, for the children and grandchildren became what Eric Hobsbawm called "the anarchism of the lower middle class", a disempowering brew of passive aggression, drug and alcohol abuse, and cynicism.
The result today is that the lower middle, working and lumpen classes can't speak of their own dignity without being immediately suspected, in rehab, computer classes, and resume-writing classes, of a Bad Attitude and a desire to return to the Dreamtime of the 1960s.
The Hobbesianism, this war of all against all, pervades American, and American-influenced, society from top to bottom, and as a result, it's become a strange society of monads who counsel each other to Look Out for Number One.
In this explicit Hobbesianism, we're all Number One, but the trouble is paradoxically that which Orwell saw in Communism. Some of us, like Donald Trump, are more Number One than others and (in a regression to theological barbarism) one gains indulgences in the resulting foofaraw by serving more successful men.
Thus the business book advises a paradoxical, almost Buddhist path, to personal empowerment: the celebration of a successful self who in reality is another, more polished version of one's sweating self.
From top to bottom in American society, this has created mass delusion and the preconditions for reproduction of the same pathologies Shipler describes: anomie, isolation, aliteracy, cynicism and despair.
Capitalist "shock therapy" cured the Communist forms of these pathologies in those countries like Poland and the Czech Republic (for Communism as ideology naturalizes nonsense just as fast, if not faster, than capitalism as ideology). But no exogenous shock seems to be in prospect for capitalism unless Space Monsters from the Planet Zork arrive.
Capitalism, interpreted as the ideological exclusion of solidarity and in signal cases elementary acts of kindness, may be at this point an addiction in the West. In the epistemological crisis described by David Caute (in Critical Psychiatry) characteristic of the lower middle class family, we may need to marketize relations in preference to actually judging ourselves and others: to keep the world at arm's length.
Hopefully, this process has an end point.
While in France, I saw a French review of this book which in French shed new light on what's hidden in America: for the French writer spoke of "single mothers" as "meres celibataires".
To so speak of single mothers illuminates their flat situation with sudden light and shadow, for the Latinate language images them as an order of nuns, "chanting cold hymns to the moon".
It implies that single motherhood is less, as is described by the grim Puritan divine, a product of "choices" in an America in which we're always making choices later used against us, than a guild or a calling, in a Middle Ages unexperienced in America...where the single mother takes upon herself the inability of the patriarch to change a nappy or send a child support check.
But for the same reason the physician doesn't pick up the phone and yell at the uncaring boss, single mothers chant cold hymns to the moon on the bus to Walmart at 3:00 AM, and somewhere else no dinner is ever thrown, with beer and lap dancing, for men who've paid their child support.
The situation is occult in Adorno's naturalized sense, for lucky and successful people in America have been as it were possessed by a daemon. This daemon (whose spelling I make antiquarian to avoid any confusion with theological fantasy) has instructed his adepts never, on pain of exclusion from bien-pensance, to emotionally overtip the help, in the sense of ever recognizing that over and above a paycheck, the working poor are doing us a favor.
We even train ourselves never to think we're doing anyone any favors by working, because in the hegemonic ideology (so there: take that) the equation has to come out to zero: the pay we get is what we deserve, and, it's best to megaconsume (whether in the short term Yuppie sense, or the longer term, whee let's buy more house than we can afford, sense) than to show solidarity with fellow workers or even demand psychic satisfaction.
Well, if even the Shortest American in the World, Robert Reich of Harvard could not even for one minute ask himself WHY Republicans can't compromise, don't compromise and don't have to compromise, why friend Reich and Bubba can't THEORIZE, then even Hilary's 2008 nomination won't work. We'll wake up as in Groundhog Day, to find that the election was stolen from Hilary despite exit polls showing a Hilary landslide.
As antiphilosophical Americans (insert appropriate reference to Tocqueville right here, as soon as I get around to actualy reading that prolix Frog), we don't think there is any such thing as Objective Spirit, and the Germans who used to discuss such nonsense over beer and sausage on Chicago's Lincoln Avenue are now silenced.
But what Objective Spirit MEANS is that we have no control whatsoever over a political Groundhog Day, in which cockroach exterminators drown what's left of any welfare state in the bathtub and in which our voices for peace and economic justice have no air: in which like spacemen we scream in silence.
It was at this point that the late Derrida, in Specters of Marx, had to go around the bend, and start speaking of ghosts. We know a slave when we see one, dodging the ice on the Ohio while we cheer him on in the old play.
But precisely as the static Weight of the World is in fact silently borne, we realize that this World Trade Center is all we have. Materially, like Hamlet in Act One, we tend sadly only to reproduction of intolerable lives. It takes an exogenous, ectomorphic event such as Dad cap a pie on the battlements to make us imagine negative, and positive possibility.
But absent this, we have Bill Murray in Groundhog day, punctured only by what old Tom Eliot heard in The Waste Land: murmurs of maternal lamentation, Erde-Kundry (whom none could call fair) sighing under the cumulative weight.
We'll wake up to find that the American electoral system, superstructure as to its base, in fact is fair in that it transmits not what we know, what we think we want, but our darkest and innermost Fear and Loathing, expressed in the very idea that when we've learned not to cut ourselves a break, we're damned if we'll cut dem welfare queens, dem bums, a break.
The code was tweaked for a Neil Bush win? What else is new? Shipler's working poor fight a rigged system, rigged today using high technology which has become a second nature, and in the next installment, the bien-pensants will learn once and for all that Bush v Gore was only the first shot. They can "vote" for the next multimillionaire Democrat until they are blue in the face, but in their heart they want what's delivered to their mortgaged door by the wretched of the earth.
The Weight of the World, Allen Ginsberg's "Trees! Clocks! Radios! Tons!" is known only to the structural engineer as frozen energy, frozen anger, and bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon. The Working Poor, of course, know that their situation is never absolute, like slavery: my Mom's loyal maid knew instinctively that they were both mistress and servant, and coequal servants to my Dad's absolute need for a quiet, upper middle class, home (as compared to the usual *menage* of screaming wife, hounded husband, and noisy kids).
I conclude (aintcha glad I wrap it up) that we are ALL working poor: like Bob Marley said, we bellyful (maybe) but we hungry. But this should be a call to arms and to the strong compassion of Marianne, or forgotten Molly. When the storm breaks, it will be a mighty storm.
Summary of The Working Poor: Invisible in America
?Nobody who works hard should be poor in America,? writes Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.They perform labor essential to America?s comfort. They are white and black, Latino and Asian--men and women in small towns and city slums trapped near the poverty line, where the margins are so tight that even minor setbacks can cause devastating chain reactions. Shipler shows how liberals and conservatives are both partly right?that practically every life story contains failure by both the society and the individual. Braced by hard fact and personal testimony, he unravels the forces that confine people in the quagmire of low wages. And unlike most works on poverty, this book also offers compelling portraits of employers struggling against razor-thin profits and competition from abroad. With pointed recommendations for change that challenge Republicans and Democrats alike, The Working Poor stands to make a difference.
The Working Poor examines the "forgotten America" where "millions live in the shadow of prosperity, in the twilight between poverty and well-being." These are citizens for whom the American Dream is out of reach despite their willingness to work hard. Struggling to simply survive, they live so close to the edge of poverty that a minor obstacle, such as a car breakdown or a temporary illness, can lead to a downward financial spiral that can prove impossible to reverse. David Shipler interviewed many such working people for this book and his profiles offer an intimate look at what it is like to be trapped in a cycle of dead-end jobs without benefits or opportunities for advancement. He shows how some negotiate a broken welfare system that is designed to help yet often does not, while others proudly refuse any sort of government assistance, even to their detriment. Still others have no idea that help is available at all.
"As a culture, the United States is not quite sure about the causes of poverty, and is therefore uncertain about the solutions," he writes. Though he details many ways in which current assistance programs could be more effective and rational, he does not believe that government alone, nor any other single variable, can solve the problem. Instead, a combination of things are required, beginning with the political will needed to create a relief system "that recognizes both the society's obligation through government and business, and the individual's obligation through labor and family." He does propose some specific steps in the right direction such as altering the current wage structure, creating more vocational programs (in both the public and private sectors), developing a fairer way to distribute school funding, and implementing basic national health care.
Prepare to have any preconceived notions about those living in poverty in America challenged by this affecting book. --Shawn Carkonen
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