42 pages • 1 hour read
David K. ShiplerThe Working Poor: Invisible in America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Preface-Introduction Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
Shipler introduces the subject of his study: the lives and experiences of America’s “working poor” (ix). He explains how people from all parts of America and from every ethnicity fare badly, regardless of the market’s performance, suffering “in good times and bad” (x).
He describes how he followed his subjects from 1997 onwards, for six years, through major life events. He has purposely sought out case studies of people who live a little above or below the government’s official poverty line to illustrate the obstacles these marginalized people face as they attempt to escape poverty.
For Shipler, the term “poverty” is unsatisfying and cannot be delineated by the government’s limits on annual income because “more people than those officially designated as ‘poor’ are, in fact, weighed down with the troubles associated with poverty” (xi). Shipler’s definition of “poor” is deliberately imprecise, so as to encompass the lowest level of economic attainment and all of its accompanying problems.
While Shipler has tried to be demographically representative, he notes that most of working poor in the country are unmarried women with children. Importantly, there are no “composite characters” (xi) in the text; every person is real and is either introduced on a first name basis or given a pseudonym.
Introduction Summary: “At the Edge of Poverty”
Shipler begins by introducing “forgotten America,” all the people who "live in […] the twilight between poverty and well-being" (3). He points out that regardless of the reader’s class background, his or her daily life is facilitated by the working poor, who sew their clothes, cook and serve their food, or clean their offices. These workers are afflicted by their low income in every area of their lives, wrestling with issues such as homelessness, sexual abuse, and malnutrition.
The experiences of low-waged employees challenge the American doctrine that “hard work cures poverty” (4). This is not the case for many of Shipler’s case studies, who find that their demanding low-waged jobs do not help them escape the poverty trap.
Breaking away from poverty requires a skillset, a good starting wage, and a job where promotion is likely, as it does a functional family, supportive community, and freedom from illness and addiction. If there are any gaps in this array, it is likely that poverty will continue. Crucially, Shipler says that it is the “exception” who breaks the cycle of poverty and achieves the American dream that any “individual from the humblest origins can climb to well-being” (5).
The American Dream has its advantages and drawbacks. More positively, it is a standard-setter for movements such as the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty. However, linked in with the Puritan idea of hard work as a moral value, the American Dream can also be a means of laying blame and judging people who are out of work regardless of their circumstances.
Countering the American Dream, Shipler also references Michael Harrington’s 1962 articulation of The Other America, which blames society and not individuals for the plight of poverty. However, Shipler stands to take a middle ground, where the poor are “neither helpless, nor omnipotent” (6) but rather on a spectrum between personal and social responsibility.
Poverty is relative and means different things to different people. Poverty in America is different to that in other parts of the world, where people feel less badly off for not having luxuries such as central heating and the “skills” (9) of living in poverty have not been lost.
To conclude, poverty is felt materially as well as spiritually, as states of hopelessness and helplessness. Shipler’s intention is to make the unseen lives of the working poor visible.
Preface and Introduction Analysis
Shipler’s goal is to familiarize the reader with “the working poor” of the book’s title. Shipler emphasizes that despite their crucial function in enabling the country to run, the working poor and their hardships are invisible to more affluent Americans, who take them for granted or assume that they are all alike.
Shipler challenges stereotyping by showing that poverty has many colors and ethnicities and is present in all parts of the country. In his style, he references people by name and uses the singular rather than the plural: “The man who washes cars does not own one” (3). This enables concrete characters to form in the reader’s mind, especially as Shipler shows the experiences of real individuals by incorporating their distinct voices and stories. In documenting the nuances and idiosyncrasies of his interviewees’ speech, Shipler brings them to life for the reader. As the book’s first-person narrator, Shipler illustrates his interactions with his interviewees without explicitly passing judgment on their responses. Therefore, Shipler appears both humane and objective.
Shipler states that poverty cannot be measured according to federal poverty guidelines because the flow of expenditure is more complex than an assessment of annual income. Instead, he hopes to present poverty as a more fluid and wide-reaching phenomenon with both material and spiritual consequences. There are some definite shocking statistics, such as higher infant mortality in the United States than in other developed nations, as well as variation in what each person considers to be poverty. Well-being lies somewhere between the ability to pay bills and having access to the "luxuries" middle-class Americans enjoy. In emphasizing variations in his subjects’ experiences of poverty, Shipler illustrates the complexity of the problems they face.
Shipler asserts that “being poor means being unprotected” (5), referencing how much more vulnerable the poor are to life’s curveballs. Throughout the first pages of his book, he shows how precarious the living situations of the working poor are. An unexpected crisis in an area such as family dynamic, child’s health, or housing can lead to all sorts of unforeseen costs, which plunge the poor into further hardship. A family can go from just about managing to keep up with bills into homelessness or a dangerously squeezed food budget when an unforeseen circumstance occurs. This serves to emphasize Shipler’s argument that due to a lack of financial buffering, the troubles of the poor have further-reaching consequences than those of the wealthy.
