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.
Chapters 3-5 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Importing the Third World”
Shipler describes the plight of immigrants: “Where immigrants have come seeking lives of plenty, they bring their deprivation with them, creating islands of hardship amid the surging tides of prosperity. For a paltry wage […] they feed and clothe and comfort the Americans they wish to emulate” (77). This accurately describes the fate of a Mexican, Los Angeles-based garment worker, Candalaria, who makes “three-quarters of a cent for each fly she sewed with a machine onto a pair of jeans” (78).Employers consistently find ways to pay workers as little as possible and when the state raises the minimum wage, the employer raises the speed of production. Those who can’t keep up are fired. One reason for this is that LA-based manufacturing is in competition with global manufacturing in developing countries; therefore, low wages and standards set in developing countries have been imported into the United States.
While acknowledging that capitalist free trade is a better system than communism, Shipler emphasizes its ruthlessness. Whereas the American ideal embraces equality of opportunity, free enterprise “thrives on difference—the difference between the owner and the worker, the educated and the less educated, the skilled and the less skilled […] and ultimately the rich and the poor” (89). Employees’ interests, with regard to health and well-being, are in sharp competition with the needs of private business, which needs to grow and compete in a globalized marketplace.
Wage-differentiation has widened the gap between rich and poor, something that Shipler, writing in the early 2000s, sees as an “ominous harbinger of a troubled future” (90). Shipler reflects on the story of his first-generation Polish grandfather—who dropped out of school in eighth grade, worked on the Jersey City docks for eight cents an hour, and rose to become president of Bethlehem Steel’s steamship lines—and determines that a similar career trajectory would be near impossible today. A young person today with limited skills and education “will start on the bottom rung only to discover that the higher rungs are beyond his grasp” (91).
This inability to move especially affects the “ethnic enclaves […] of Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Hondurans, Ethiopians and others who populate the ranks of low-paid workers" (91). Lacking fluency in English or proper immigration papers, they are “imprisoned in an archipelago of scattered zones of cheap labor that promote the country’s interests” (91). As an essential part of America, they sustain the garment, food, agricultural, and construction industries, amongst others.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Harvest of Shame”
The chapter begins by describing the squalid barracks where migrant agricultural workers lived while working in North Carolina. Shipler is horrified by the efficient functionality of the dorms and the dehumanization that belies them, as it seems like workers are “kept, warehoused, stored like seed and fertilizer” (99). He goes on to describe how migrant agricultural workers move from North Carolina to Florida to Pennsylvania throughout the year, according to where the work is. Directly addressing the reader, Shipler maintains the importance of these disenfranchised workers: “You can hardly go through a day, much less observe a holiday, without the fruit of their labor in your life” (97).
While those working in the North Carolina fields were originally African Americans, after the Great Migration North in the middle of the 20thcentury, “most field hands are Mexican and Central American, the bulk of them here illegally” (114). Less than 2 percent arrive through a program called H2A, whose red tape is formidable, and the remaining 98 percent come illegally without visas. The life of an undocumented immigrant is precarious because faced with the threat of deportation, most cannot stand up for their right to a fair wage and working conditions.
The life experience of illegal immigrant agricultural workers is confined and miserable, a constant game of hide and seek with immigration. “Truthfully it’s like prison,” one of them says, describing how he and his camp-mates cannot go anywhere because of the fear that “immigration will take you away” (109).
Shipler goes on to describe the activities of FLOC (Farm Labor Organizing Committee), a fledgling union for farm workers that handles wages and contracts as well as the management of pesticides. The latter have severely damaged the health of agricultural workers because employers have not provided adequate protection.
The main goal of migrant workers, such as one interviewee Abel, is to send money to impoverished families back home. The focus is “on the immediacy of however many dollars they can earn today, not on some elusive career ladder” (114). They do not seek to integrate into the United States and with a sufficient number of dollars, would go home immediately.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Daunting Workplace”
The chapter opens with a Washington, D.C.-based support group of young black men who had been through addiction, homelessness, and prison. However, their biggest and most daunting challenge is finding a job when they were “burdened by their personal histories of repeated failure: failure to finish school, failure to resist drugs, failure to maintain loving relationships, failure to hold jobs” (122). Most of all, they fear rejection if they even try.
Once in the workplace, a lack of self-worth and fear of judgment in people with a repeated history of failure masks itself as poor work-ethic and a negative attitude. Importantly, such soft skills are the most important in many workplaces, but they are not innate: “The soft skills should have been taught in the family, but in many cases, the family has forfeited that role to the school. In turn, the school has forfeited the role to the employer” (126). It is only the most compassionate and incentivized employers who are willing to be patient and teach the skills needed.
Globalization presents a challenge to investing time and resources in Americans with deficiencies because they cannot compete with Cambodians and Filipinos, who will do the same low-skilled work for a significantly lower wage: “Unless there is a geographic necessity that the job be done here in the United States, it will rush out of the country down to the lower wage level as inexorably as a river flows to the sea” (140).
Shipler argues that while employers emphasize soft skills such as punctuality and a positive attitude, these are not diametrically opposed to hard skills, such as literacy and numeracy: "The ‘soft skill’ of persistence […]is produced by the ‘hard skills’ supposedly learned in school and in training on the job” (139). It is also difficult for illiterate or innumerate workers to gain promotion, no matter how self-possessed they may be. Moreover, employees who benefit most from employers’ tuition programs are those who already have the most education. Shipler analogizes: “It’s as if education were like capital; the more you have, the more you get” (140).
Chapters 3-5 Analysis
In these chapters, Shipler discusses the fortunes of migrant workers and low-skilled Americans in a globalized marketplace. He shows that in order to be competitive on a global scale, the garment, agricultural and manufacturing industries need to hire laborers as cheaply as they can get away with. In both his chapters on the garment and food industries, Shipler emphasizes the American reader’s personal involvement with the labor of low-waged migrants—it is as near to them as the clothes they wear against their skin or the food they ingest. This elicits a feeling of sympathy as well as complicity in the reader, as Shipler encourages them to question how they might be implicated in this cycle of low-waged poverty.
Given that a vast percentage of migrant workers are in the United States illegally, they endure low wages and exportation without much protest so as to be invisible to immigration authorities that might deport them. Shipler’s exposition of how industries that are essential to America’s well-being and comfort rely upon illegal immigration and exploitation serves to counter to the American ideology of equal opportunity and a fair wage for hard work.
For American migrant workers, a lack of education contributes to exploitation and professional stagnation. For undocumented immigrants, their lack of education and professional guidance means that they often make short-sighted decisions about their employment, prioritizing the relief of immediate payments that can be sent home to assist their families over long-term career decisions.
In short, Shipler makes a point that adequate literacy and numeracy have overarching benefits. Some of these benefits are direct, in the sense that workers are higher skilled and less likely to be exploited; while others are indirect, because focused activities lend workers a discipline and appetite for improvement that is essential in work. For some poor Americans, skills that should have been learned in the family or at school have to be learned in adulthood at the employment stage. Shipler argues that when employees are not in the habit of learning and are unconcerned with gaining new skills, they become stuck in a poverty trap of low expectation, low attainment, and the inability to rise.
