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From:David K. Shipler , Knopf ,
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#133109 |
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4 of 5 customers found the following review helpful:
 Must reading for managers of minimum wage people, 2005-12-14
The author presents an even handed (neither bleeding heart liberal nor heartless conservative) view of the issues that confront and trap people in the minimum wage and low hourly rate jobs. He illuminates the complex relationship between low wages, health, life choices, family structure, and work habits that thwart the "American Dream" for these people. I came to understand why "single shot" private and public sector initiatives fail to make a material dent on the problem of "near poverty" level workers.
4 of 11 customers found the following review helpful:
Once again we are shown the defects of capitalism, 2005-12-02
Once again we are shown painfully, capitalisms inherent defects which everyone "hears" but keeps turning the blind idealogical eye too because they benefit from opressing the poor: The desire for cheap labour so that the middle class and rich can have more money to increase their already well off standard of living, and capitalisms inherent conflict between enriching one class through oppressing and devaluing the work of other classes. This inherent class conflict as the result of competition, the profit motive and the devaluation of certain types of work when there are fixed, unalterable costs of living is the most abhorrent feature of the capitalist free market systems. There is no way out of poverty for these people unless you redistribute the wealth using government or come up with a new tiered socio-economic system completely that's not based on pure free market principles. We all desire that people live in enough economic security while working so they don't have to turn to crime, or disturb the peace because they have played by the rules and gotten screwed over by businesses. Private corporations and most big businesses want only one thing: Cheap labour to enrich the skilled workers the depend on and the already wealthy elite, if they could they would repeal most of the worker protection laws in their home countries to farm people as wage slaves for cheap labour to enrich themselves.
All that wealth comes from displacing the wealth of others it doesn't magically come out of thin air and the fact that people blindly follow their idealogy wherever it leads without thinking through the capitalistic profit motive and controlling costs (read: The catch-22 of opressing workers by keeping their wages stagnant as inflation rises, while increasing prises and gaining profits).
3 of 11 customers found the following review helpful:
Substancial, 2005-10-31
This book has the ability to help me understand and empathize to the struggles of humanity. The Working Poor is insightful and achieves sensitivity.
12 of 12 customers found the following review helpful:
 The American Nightmare, 2005-10-24
David Shipler takes up where Barbara Ehrenreich left off in Nickel and Dimed. However, where Ehrenreich examined the working poor with a microscope, Shipler uses a wide-angle lens.
Shipler interviews the working poor as well as poor people who are out of work, employers, case workers, and teachers of poor children. The title is a little misleading, in that this book takes on American poverty, not just those who are working.
While Ehrenreich got involved personally by becoming one of the working poor, Shipler observes and sympathizes. His sympathy is understandable, but at times I wondered just how much it was affecting his journalistic objectivity. Many times he relates events, apparently told to him by the people he interviewed. He doesn't qualify these stories in any way and they are told as if he was telling them first hand. His chapter on Leary Brock, an inner city woman who eventually became successful, overcoming great odds, tells her story from the time she was in high school to her fiftieth birthday. Shipler narrates, apparently using Brock's version as she recalls it, as if he were there. He doesn't cite notes or corroborating sources.
In any case, these are compelling stories, about migrant fruit pickers living in squalor, about malnourished infants whose parents don't know how to care for them, about teachers who keep a supply of granola bars on hand to feed hungry children so they will be able to concentrate on the lesson, about a maze-like system that keeps poor people from getting the tools they need to break out of poverty.
The Working Poor is a passionate book that sees democracy as the solution to poverty. Those who want the system to change to meet their needs will have to vote, he says, and vote in large enough numbers so that legislators will have to listen to them. Maybe that will work, but even Shipler expresses doubts, as he acknowledges that people tend to vote their aspirations rather than their complaints.
3 of 42 customers found the following review helpful:
 Working Poor, 2005-10-19
We all must see and understand the "other" america......Why are
they hidden from our view. We can't correct an evil if we deny
its existence/...read..read..read..write..write..write..vote !!
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