Take This Job and Starve

By Richard Lacayo

Early in his tour around the bleak world of low-paying jobs, David Shipler describes a kind of domino model of a downward economic spiral. "A rundown apartment can exacerbate a child's asthma, which leads to a call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill that cannot be paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the interest rate on an auto loan, which forces the purchase of an unreliable used car, which jeopardizes a mother's punctuality at work, which limits her promotions and earning capacity, which confines her to poor housing." Which exacerbates the asthma, and so on.

What Shipler aims to do in The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf; 319 pages) is to produce a picture of all of those dominoes at once, the multitude of obstacles that keep the working poor on the edge--and sometimes beyond the edge--of household-finance disaster. As the gap between the highest-and lowest-paid workers steadily worsens, he writes, "low wage employees have been testing the American doctrine that hard work cures poverty."

A Pulitzer-prizewinning former reporter for the New York Times, Shipler interviewed scores of people for this book--waitresses, shelf stockers, farm laborers, plus the social workers, union organizers and job trainers around them and the employers who take them on, not all of whom are crocodiles. His book lacks the first-person focus and angry wit of Nickel and Dimed, TIME contributor Barbara Ehrenreich's account of her attempts to get by on $6 or $7 an hour. But poverty is in the details, and he lays those out in abundance.

Just consider his dissection of the extortionate loan fees that are a staple of life for anybody who doesn't quite make it from paycheck to paycheck. Convenience stores in poor neighborhoods routinely advance cash to their customers at interest rates of about 20% for a two-week loan. If the debt can't be repaid, it's gladly rolled over--for another 20%. One study in Illinois found that the average customer had 10 renewals of that kind, which meant that in the space of a few months, he or she owed twice as much in interest as the amount that had been borrowed.

The essence of Shipler's message is that working poverty is a seamless web of challenges, some personal, some erected by a society content to let the federal minimum wage languish at $5.15 an hour. And that's for those who can avoid the unscrupulous bosses who make workers falsify their time sheets so they work longer hours for the same pay. Then there are the fruit pickers who have exorbitant housing costs deducted by labor contractors who warehouse the workers in filthy barracks. As for garment workers, they can be paid at piece rates--try three-fourths of a cent per piece to sew in a zipper on jeans--that make it nearly impossible to earn the minimum.

Shipler doesn't place all the blame on society. The people he meets often lack the soft skills that employers require, like showing up on time, following directions, even knowing how to comb their hair. To be sure, they need better schools and reliable medical insurance, but they also need to know better than to use their precious tax-refund checks to get tattoos. Sometimes they clip coupons and turn up faithfully at job training. Sometimes they get drunk and disorderly. They go in for ill-advised sex and foolish spending sprees. In other words, the working poor are not so different from Paris Hilton, except that they have less money.

And that makes all the difference. When they stumble, low-wage earners have nothing to fall back on. "They spend everything and save nothing," Shipler writes. "They are always behind on their bills. They have minuscule bank accounts or none at all." Bad judgment, bad habits, bad luck--among the middle classes, any of those can lead to setbacks. Among the working poor, they lead to disaster.

Shipler's solutions are the expected ones--a higher minimum wage, better job training, medical coverage for the almost 44 million who have none. Will any of it happen? The working poor don't vote in anything like the numbers of their more affluent neighbors, so even in election years they carry no real weight. But the economic boom of the '90s is behind us, job creation is feeble, and the time limits on welfare are kicking in. Expect those dominoes to start falling faster than ever.