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Title: No Shame in My Game : The Working Poor in the Inner City by KATHERINE S. NEWMAN ISBN: 0-375-70379-9 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 25 April, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful book
Comment: This is a progessive yet rigorous look at the working poor in the inner city. Like Elijah Anderson, Elliot Liebow, Mitchell Duneier, and Barbara Erenreich, it demonstrates that the poor are more complex than [traditional types] or ideology. Newman is a very insightful scholar who never lets her scholarship get in the way of great writing or balanced analysis. I especially appreciated the way she debunked the notion that these low skilled jobs have nothing to teach.
Rating: 5
Summary: the truth as told by those who live it
Comment: There are not enough stars for a book of this caliber about a topic this far-reaching. Who among us has not worked for minimum wage at some point? And what was it that either kept us in those jobs or got us out?
Newman follows several workers of Burger Barn -- a pseudonym for a national fast food chain -- and examines their social networks, family life, romantic relationships, and even the decision to work for minimum wage when going on welfare might in fact give them more income per month.
Throughout the book we meet several people of different ages, races, national origins, and family structures. During the 18 months of research, we see them date, break up, have children, graduate, drop out of school, learn English, contribute to their parents' households, and help bring siblings to New York from places like Jamaica, Haiti and the Domincan Republic --- all BECAUSE they chose to work at Burger Barn.
The fact that they work at Burger Barn is as important as the fact that they work for minimum wage. Newman examines what the social stigma is behind fast food, and not at retail stores like the Gap.
This is a great book. I recommend you read it and follow it up with Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed: On NOT Making it in America".
Rating: 5
Summary: No Shame in This Game - Must Read
Comment: This is a hands-on, front line study of America's working poor, a subject so infrequently covered in news media, with gross misunderstandings and negative stereotypes. Katherine Newman and a group of her graduate students from Columbia University spent years learning virtually ALL there is to know about the lives of workers in a fast food burger chain in Harlem in New York City. Through Newman's very accessible language we get to understand who these workers really are, what makes them settle for the lowest of ranks in the American Society, and what motivates them to go and find and keep these jobs.
Newman's very interesting approach is to take us into the lives of her "subjects", we get to know how and with whom do they live, who do they befriend and socialize with, how did they get their jobs and so much more. Relatively early on Newman makes a very clear point; the lives of the welfare poor and the working poor is so intertwined, and changes in welfare laws particularly those related to families with dependent children can make it virtually impossible for the working poor to carry on working. This conclusion emerges so very clearly as we get to know working poor with children whose ONLY possible childcare option is a welfare receiving relative looking after the family's young.
Newman deals very effectively with the cultural misconceptions about the fast food industry, reading this book you can no longer think of hamburger flippers as unskilled underachievers. Often these are brave people who have rejected the easy money drug culture, or people who have had to compete very hard to get low paying low status employment, or have to travel over an hour each way and leave young children behind. And these are jobs that require far more skill in operating equipment, planning and dealing with difficult people on daily basis than many higher paid higher status jobs. When Newman got into the details of the what these jobs really entail, I found myself thinking of much higher status jobs as being lower skilled and these jobs and the people who hold them specially in the inner city, where these are real jobs not pocket money generators, as truly worthy of respect.
Newman work covered a whole range of topics affecting the working poor including a great deal on the values of the working poor, these she found to be so "mainstream" indeed often close to conservative. Those at the bottom of the heap who put up with so much for so little had little tolerance for the do-nothing swindlers, but they did have a high level of tolerance for people otherwise. No Shame in My Game also deals extensively with education, what it means for the working poor and how the employers in the fast food industry encourage it. Indeed we see an alternate culture that encourages achievement is formed around the workplace.
The book also deals with the issues of race, within Harlem along with few examples from the wider world outside of it. We see clear evidence of patterns of discrimination based both on race and on birth place, with foreign born Hispanics fairing best despite of language handicaps and black Americans worst, while mainland US born Hispanics ranked in the middle. Newman also dealt with the prospects for advancement and with the issues of role models at some length.
As I read the book, I often wondered about two issues that appear to a large extent self inflicted, the Teen-age pregnancy was for me an obvious issue. Surely, life would be simpler and potential for advancement would be greater for young women who avoided this trap. Newman dealt with this to some extent by presenting research evidence of young poor women making a conscious decision of avoiding pregnancy when they have a clear path laid ahead of them towards education and attractive employment. Newman also touched on the possibility that teenage pregnancy is related in part to desire to have children at an early enough age to be able to get help from mothers and other relatives; with single parent family being the norm, and with the poor ailing and dying at young age. The second issue was mobility, with so many more jobs available in the suburbs and indeed with unemployment at record lows, why stay in Harlem? As I read on a clearer picture emerges of the society many of the working poor really inhabit. There are, contrary to the popular belief and indeed to mainstream America, there are very strong family links and neighborhood links. These links become vital for the poor with children who need looking after and for immigrants who cluster in apartment ghettos and pool resources in every conceivable way.
The last part of No Shame in My Game presents recommendations for dealing with the urban working poor. There are many interesting new ideas and discussions related to projects tried successfully in other parts of the country. Most of the ideas are presented in a logical and politically neutral fashion that is truly helpful, with significant emphasis being placed on business-school-government programs. A suggestion for raising minimum wage is presented along with the other ideas; it is hard to see how that may help even the sample of the working poor this book focused on, as these working poor live, earn money and spend it mostly in their poor community, and those wonderful employers in the fast food industry, operating on very thin margins, will be forced to either raise prices or reduce labor.
Overall I found No Shame in My Game a wonderful book, full of a great deal of insight, it is so well searched and presented. Newman's language and approach are appealing and the way she builds her arguments and reach conclusion comes across very logical and persuasive. While the recommendations chapter of the book could be extended to a whole book in its own right, and the issues involved are complex and difficult, I felt that additional recommendations on the issues of mobility, teen parenting and race would have been helpful.
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Title: When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson ISBN: 0679724176 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 July, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City by Elijah Anderson ISBN: 0393320782 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work by Kathryn Edin, Laura Lein ISBN: 087154234X Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation Pub. Date: March, 1997 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: The Working Poor : Invisible in America by DAVID K. SHIPLER ISBN: 0375408908 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 03 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier, Ovie Carter ISBN: 0374527253 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 20 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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