No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City
By Katherine S. Newman
The current focus on the jobless poor has created a gap in our understanding of inner-city economies. Fully 69 percent of central Harlem families, for example, have at least one working member. People like these are the working poor, those who toil year-round and either fail to pull above the poverty line or struggle to make ends meet just above it. They are increasingly at risk in today's economy, and this book describes the results of a two-year study of the lives of more than 300 working poor New Yorkers and the forces that have shaped them.
- The labor market has shifted drastically in favor of the well-educated, leaving behind those who attended poor schools or dropped out.
- Racial segregation and increasing concentration of poverty translates into poor schools and high dropout rates, as well as poor health care, poor diet and persistent insecurity.
- The working poor are perpetually at risk for becoming the jobless poor, yet their firm commitment to the work ethic makes them the most promising targets for anti-poverty policy action.
- Improving access to better-paid jobs in the private sector holds the greatest long-term potential for helping the working poor.
Some possible ideas for new approaches include school-to-work apprenticeship programs; summer job programs run by business owners in blighted areas to spot motivated and reliable workers for referral to better jobs; union/management cooperative on-the-job training in languages and skills to increase upward mobility; and "place-based" strategies to create jobs where they are needed most.
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Katherine
S. Newman (katherine_newman@harvard.edu)
is the Wiener Professor of Urban Studies and the Dean
of Social Science at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
University. She has done extensive research on urban poverty and is
the author of several other books, including A Different Shade of Gray:
Mid-Life and Beyond in the Inner City; Declinig Fortunes: The Withering
of the American Dream; and Falling From Grace: Downward Mobility in
the Age of
Affluence.
