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.
Chapter 9-Epilogue Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Dreams”
The chapter opens in the poor neighborhood of Anacostia in Washington, D.C. where elementary school children dream of becoming doctors and lawyers and helping their families. However, these same children often struggle with the rigors of study and have behavioral problems:
“Children can be trapped in corrosive relationships between home and school” (234).As they act out in class to desperately compensate for the attention they miss at home or following the example of jaded parents, the children inadvertently dismiss the whole enterprise of getting an education. Some parents react aggressively themselves, threatening teachers when they question why their child is absent or behaving in an abnormal way. Sometimes lack of parental support is more passive, when parents are unable to meet teachers after school because they cannot get the time off work.
Teachers do their best to bridge the divide between the school and the parents, sometimes making extraordinary involvements in the community, as in the case of the Teach for America program, where participants have dinner with the children’s families and hand out their personal numbers.
However, children often arrive in school in an unfit state to receive an education. Sometimes they are hungry or cannot afford the eyeglasses they need to see the board. Some older children cannot see why they need an education. One teacher, Judith Jacob, describes how her students “only see tomorrow and they don’t see that if they do get an education they’ll be better off in the long run.[…] It’s all about survival” (239). The tragedy of this misunderstanding is that doing well at school could be the exact ticket to getting students out of the poverty trap. As time goes on, students’ imagination about what their career path could be diminishes.
Underpaid and low in status, teachers also believe they qualify as the working poor. On a professional level, they vary in competence and enthusiasm, although many of them begin their careers with the dream of doing good. Nevertheless, they are ill-equipped to discipline unruly and discouraged children and in the poorest schools, they often lack essential materials such as paper and relevant equipment. Some of the children feel a barrier between themselves and their middle-class teachers; they feel self-conscious about asking questions when they do not understand.
Shipler cites Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities, to conclude that the reality of the situation in American schools goes against the national ideal of equal opportunities and a child’s ability to have his or her innate abilities honed through education.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Work Works”
Chapter 10 shows how employment training initiatives are beneficial in preparing impoverished, traumatized people for the workplace. An African American woman called "Peaches" enrolls at the Center for Employment Training in Washington, D.C. after a tough past of childhood abuse, adulthood prostitution, and homelessness, all of which left her feeling worthless and powerless. With her peers at CET, Peaches learns the soft skills of punctuality and making conversation, as well as basic hard skills such as IT and therapeutic self-esteem training sessions.
Gaining employable skills builds confidence and with that comes a sense of optimism. Peaches still feels poor when she first begins working for Xerox but gains a new lease of life from having a purpose and participating in the economy. Work has even given her the license to dream of going on holiday and having an ordinary life, free from violence and addiction.
Leary Brock, who has a background of sexual abuse, prostitution, drug addiction, and homelessness, also gains a job at Xerox as a result of her time in the Center for Employment Training. Assertive and bright, Leary rises quickly and enjoys becoming a participant in life rather than an outsider. Nevertheless, she has some regrets about how she “trashed” (279) her children’s lives and is trying to atone for it by paying close attention to her grandchildren. According to Shipler, this is part of the “pattern of failure and redemption—a failed mother whose children also fail as parents, and thereby give her a second chance as a grandmother” (279).
Richard Blackmon, the training director of Chicago’s Options for People initiative, lets participants know that they have to be self-motivated and rally to their own cause: “This program is about change. It’s about changing your life for the better, and if you don’t want that, this is not for you. […] We can’t help you because we have nothing to give you. Everything you need you already got. We just here to help you recognize that” (266). This tough love approach breeds confidence as well as self-love and discipline.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Skill and Will”
Shipler concludes that his studies have shown that “working poverty is a constellation of difficulties that magnify one another” (285). Therefore, low wages and insufficient education are related and in a fragmented, dysfunctional family, perpetuate from one generation to the next. This means that all the problems must be “attacked at once” (285), otherwise what remedies one problem will not alleviate the others or improve quality of life.
Shipler considers that the best way to tackle poverty is to establish gateways that address handicaps faced by the poor and position them at the intersections which they are most likely to travel through. Schools, housing authorities, police departments, and welfare offices, if they were well enough financed, could far exceed their mandate. It is also important to encourage low-income people to vote and get involved in politics so that they can have more influence over laws that govern their working conditions. Studies show that the lower their income and education, the less Americans believe that their vote will make a difference: “Consumed with the trials of their personal lives and cynical about the power structure, most tell pollsters that they find elections uninteresting and politicians untrustworthy” (288).
Shipler maintains that while the government fundamentally has the ability to raise the minimum wage, it “lacks the political will, largely because most low-income Americans don’t vote their interests or don’t vote at all and can’t compete with private industry’s sophisticated lobbying and campaign contributions” (290).
Also, while American high schools are sending up to 60 percent of students to college, those who do not take that route do not acquire the skills needed to succeed in industry. Shipley argues that this “notion of funneling certain teenagers into vocational school rubs against the American ethic of egalitarianism, which touts the ideal of equal opportunity without actually providing it” (293). Much more can be done to improve opportunities for more young people, if their different requirements and life circumstances are considered.
Relief and solutions to poverty will come through an “amalgam that recognizes both the society’s obligation through government and business, and the individual’s obligation through labor and family—and the commitment of both society and individual through education” (300). Ultimately, the well-being of the poor is intimately tied in with the rest of America, given that the services they provide keep the country running.
Epilogue Summary
In the gap between the hardcover publication of his book and its paperback version, Shipler caught up with some of his interviewees to see how they were doing.
Ann Brash is still working as a low-paid book editor but has received some financial relief from her son Sandy’s earnings as a computer specialist. She was, however, devastated by her daughter Sally’s decision to drop out of college and work in a flower shop. She worries about Sally not having health insurance and repeating the cycle of poverty.
Leary Brock is flourishing in her work at Xerox, where the company is sending her on a technician’s course that would teach her to repair complex machines and triple her salary. Xerox was also paying for online business courses that would enable Leary to eventually get her degree.
Tom King lost his job when LaCrosse, a boot factory, shut down two or three of its shifts. He had to find piecemeal construction work and began a routine of collecting scrap iron and selling it to a recycling plant to make ends meet. Zach, his oldest adopted son, is training to be a mechanic in the Air Force and is thriving.
When Caroline Payne quit her job at the convenience store after a disagreement about carding a minor, she was without work. People in the New York Times Magazine who had read about her during the publicity campaign for Shipler’s book offered money, but she still struggles to find a full-time paying job.
Peaches is prospering as she runs a mail room for one of Xerox’s clients, a private firm in Washington, while her silk flower arrangements have caught on for baby showers. She has found “a nice young gentleman, not hateful at all” (309) who she is looking to marry and move in with.
Chapter 9-Epilogue Analysis
Throughout the final chapters of his book, Shipler emphasizes that a solid education, which gives people employable hard skills, is the best way of breaking the poverty cycle. This is possible at different stages of a person’s life—initially, in schools or in work rehabilitation problems such as Washington, D.C.’s Center for Employment Training.
Good intentions, however, are not enough and often the discipline and rigor required for learning clash with other lifestyle aspects, such as demanding parental work schedules, unstable home-lives, poor health, or even the attitude that surviving the day is more important than building a secure future. Where an individual has been able to change his or her life, it is due to a combination of intense personal will and a strong support network, such as through family or social workers.
Shipler considers the debate about whether the individual or society is most responsible for relieving poverty. Whereas conservatives tend to place the onus more on the individual and family, liberals believe that policy makes a greater difference. Crucially, at the time that Shipler is writing, the working poor tend to abstain from voting in elections due to a mixture of more immediate concerns in their personal lives and the belief that politicians are self-important and out of touch with their needs. Rather than settle on one side of the debate over the other, Shipler conceives that the best way to help the poor is through special programs at intersections through which they pass—for example, at hospitals, schools, and welfare services. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that in its current state, America is failing to live up to its ideal that anyone, regardless of the circumstances of his or her birth, will be able to attain a decent living standard.
