Rating: 
Summary: Compelling format for a difficult, yet critical message
Review: The life stories of each of these people really tear at your heart. While many have made mistakes in life, they live in a world where there is no recovery from even the slightest event.
Shipler's narrative is a very compelling format. It is similar to the approach that Molly Ivins uses in "Bushwacked". Rather than talking about a problem in an abstract, academic manner, they use real stories about real people to help you understand the impact of these events on others.
The approach here is one that the DNC would do well to pay attention to. When you look at how the country responded to Bill Clinton as opposed to Al Gore and John Kerry, it's clear that telling personal stories works. Ronald Reagan used it equally effectively. If the left is to get its message across, it needs its candidates to become effective storytellers, telling the stories of people like Shipler's Caroline, who did everything right - working overtime, going to college and saving money to buy a house only to find that she had no safety net when she had to make critical decisions to care for her (mildly) retarded daughter.
To the reviewer who complains that Shipler doesn't emphasize religion and private charities as the solution, I answer that the problems described in this book are not solveable by having charities pitch in to provide meals or clothes. These are structural deficiencies in our economic system. These people are not "charity cases". In most instances, they are people who work hard and need to be supported by an infrastructure that rewards their efforts and gives them a path to self-sustenance. Our current system, despite claims of "compassionate conservatism" does neither.
Rating:
Summary: "It is time to be ashamed."
Review: The sentence above is how David K. Shipler ends his heart-rending work on the invisible citizens of America--namely, the working poor. He is absolutely correct.The people he writes about are the ones who sew your clothes, do your gardening, pick your crops, hand you coffee at the local convenience store. They are your neighbors, your fellow citizens, maybe some of them are even your friends and relatives. Shipler addresses the interconnected problems of poverty in a way that is informative and far from impersonal. As you read, you can't help but feel for those he writes about, and you may even find yourself thinking: "There but for the grace of God..." Get it, read it, then do what you can to improve this situation in our great country.
The very first, and simplest, thing you can do is: vote. Reviewer: Linda Painchaud
Rating:
Summary: introspection for Americans; analysis for everyone
Review: The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler is nowhere near as dry as one might expect from the title. It is a very readable analysis of the many complex issues facing the "working poor" in America. The author takes a relatively even-handed approach politically, but he does not fail to let you know what he thinks about various policies, using real life stories from the perspective of employees, employers in the private and public sector to illustrate his points. Rather than being all about how 'America is a land of opportunities if you only try hard enough' or 'the poor are oppressed; there's nothing anyone can do,' Shipler strikes a balance. He recognizes that there is never a one-size-fits-all approach, and that there are many parties with a stake in the policy process. In a society where there is so often a rush to judgment and a desire for simple solutions, Shipler takes the time to explore the different pieces of the puzzles, stripping each back as if peeling an onion... And ironically, the deeper in he takes you, the more of a big picture you see. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone who seeks to understand the class system of the United States.
Rating: 
Summary: The un heard
Review: The Working Poor: Invisible in America gives you a personal outlook on how many Americans live there lives in the lower class. It opens your eyes and shows that every little person counts. This gives you a whole new respect of the people who scan your groceries or the people that let you have it your way at Burger King. David Shipler gives you a real life story and breaks down the struggles and hardships that the lower working class must go through day in and day out just to get by in society where the most important people are over looked. This book deserves to be read not just to here about poor people struggling but to understand how many Americans have to survive in the life of poverty.
Rating:
Summary: A superb investigation of the problem of American poverty
Review: There have been a number of important books recently on the American working poor, notably Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," Shulman's "Betrayal of Work," and now Shipler's "The working poor". In many ways, Shipler's is the most comprehensive of the three. He does a superb job blending ethnographic and interview material with legal and sociological research, and paints a compelling picture of poverty as a web of interlocking causes and effects that is deceptively easy to fall into and difficult to struggle free from. In many ways, the most remarkable thing about the book is Shipler's ability to see and portray the same situation from a variety of perspectives: welfare-to-work employment incentive programs from the eyes of both employer and employee, or drug rehabilitation from the eyes of both addict and rehab center worker. And it's not a partisan book: Shipler shows how there's never just one direction to point the finger of blame, and how the web has to be attacked from more than one direction to truly be cut and free those who are ensnared.
Rating: 
Summary: mostly false innuendo
Review: This book claims to expose how hard and terrible it is to be the 'working poor' but this is a false claim. The working poor aren't 'invisible' in fact they are very visible. Every time one gets gas or goes to a fast food restaurant or goes to a lumber yard they get to witness the working poor in their natural environment. And in fact the term 'working' is improperly addendumed to the word 'poor' in this book. Many poor people, this book ignores them, are not working at all, they are simply sitting around. This is a false analysis and a dry text, not really that insightful, since most of its conclusions are blatantly obvious. Seth J. Frantzman
Rating:
Summary: The Weight of the World
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Spoiled by a Desire for "Balance"
Review: This is one of the best books about poverty to have come out in recent years. Shipler writes beautifully and he is one of the few writers on the subject who has been able to shift almost effortlessly from anecdotal stories to the "big picture".
His basic thesis is entirely free of the sanctimonious BS one usually hears from both right and left: yes, poor people do make a lot of bad decisions, but then again so does everyone else. Rich people, however, are generally insulated from the effects of their bad decisions by their wealth and/or social connections, attributes which also tend to naturally put them in positions where it is easier to make good decisions.
If Shipler had stuck with this basic thesis, I could have given this book 5 stars. But somewhere along the way it seems that Shipler falls prey to the journalistic malady of "finding balance". This, of course, is immediately taken to mean that he, the author, should write something which "challenges both left and right". The above-mentioned thesis thus gets banged around and Shipler ends up with a confused message.
The worst parts of the book are when Shipler interviews supervisors and other non-poor people. Suddenly his BS meter seems not to work anymore. While Shipler is a master of explaining the mistakes and self-deceptions of the poor, he cannot seem to say anything even remotely critical about the actions of the employers with whom he talks. Everything they say gets taken at face value, even patent absurdities such as when a Proctor and Gamble spokesman tells him that the reason the company cannot have more regular working hours is that it would be bad for workers' career prospects not to be able to work with all three shift supervisors! This, mind you, after just explaining at length how the irregular working hours were causing serious havoc with the life of a single mother. Shipler sets aside his good journalistic instincts and feeds us this nonsense as a "reasonable" statement. The author is a bit too worshipful of the dictates of the "free market", accepting the employers' claims of being "helpless" as patently true, even though he knows little or nothing about the industries involved.
If we should expect the poor to take responsibility for their lives and be active moral agents, why not extend that same requirement to those a bit up the income ladder? This is a book about poverty whose main (and pretty much only) fault is that it doesn't examine wealth at all.
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