Challenging Conventional Wisdom About the Inner-City Poor

In her new book, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (copublished by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and the Russell Sage Foundation, April 1999), Professor Katherine Newman of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, dismantles prevailing stereotypes about work and family life in the inner city. Social scientists, along with everybody else, have focused their attention almost exclusively on the jobless poor. Professor Newman argues that this has blinded us to the very different workaday reality of life in the ghetto, a reality embracing far greater numbers than the world of the welfare-dependent and the unemployed. Widely disseminated images of idleness, dependency, and family disintegration encourage a punitive response to urban poverty. Newman's book corrects these misimpressions. She examines the plight of this invisible population of the working poor, a population she views as at increasing risk in an economy that tends to reward only the highly educated and highly skilled.

With support from the Foundation's Poverty and Future of Work Programs, Professor Newman and her fellow researchers spent a year closely following the lives of two hundred workers in four large fast food restaurants in central and west Harlem. They also tracked the experience of one hundred unsuccessful job-seekers. Research strategies included extensive interviews with the workers and their family members, managers, teachers, store-keepers, and clergy; four month stints of on-site work experience in these same fast food eateries; visits to homes, churches, and schools; and detailed diaries compiled by the subjects of the study. What emerges is a finely grained picture of the lives of young black and Latino workers – an anthropological "up-close-and-personal" insight into a world normally viewed through the lens of statistical generalization.

No Shame in My Game addresses a series of key questions: How do these young men and women find jobs? How do their prospective employers respond to them? How do these young workers cope with the stigma of taking low-level jobs disdained by their peers? Who sticks out the regimen of hard work for low pay? Who falls by the wayside and why? Do these jobs enhance the human capital of these workers or do they consign them to a life of dead-end, poverty-level jobs? How does this experience affect their families? And finally, what practical steps can we take to make the most of their determined commitment, made in the teeth of the most discouraging circumstances and almost universal public misunderstanding, to the value of work?

Professor Newman's most profound discovery was the remarkable durability of the work ethic even in this beleaguered setting, where simply sustaining a belief in the value of work is an astonishing accomplishment. Newman's book, however, is by no means a one-sided tale of heroic success. It confronts the discouraging experience of those who fail to find work, as well as those workers who end up defeated by the impoverished circumstances of their lives. No Shame in My Game also shows how the boundaries between the world of the working poor and the welfare-dependent world of the unemployed and unemployable is a porous one. For example, Kyesha, a young African-American woman, has worked at "Burger Barn" since she was fourteen, managing at the same time to secure her high school degree and raise a child as a single mother. She deserves much credit for her tenacity, but her work life could not have happened without the help of her mother, Dana. Thanks to AFDC payments and a rent subsidy, Dana is able to care for Kyesha's young son, Anthony, allowing Kyesha not only to work and finish school but to contribute part of her earnings to the up-keep of this extended family. Moreover, Anthony's father, Juan, is able to remain an active presence in Anthony's life and hold down his own job at "Burger Barn" because his own mother is also able to help care for Anthony on weekends thanks to the welfare payments she too receives.

Such examples illustrate that without the help of extended family members – themselves often on welfare – without the support of food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and other strands of the social safety net, the working poor could scarcely survive. Indeed, Newman reports that Dana may soon lose her welfare benefits under new workfare regulations; if that happens the whole fragile network sustaining Kyesha's difficult but rewarding struggle may disintegrate. No Shame in My Game forces us to jettison the currently fashionable conception of poverty linked to unemployment and dependency. Instead, Newman provides a long, hard look at this vast population of low-paid workers in the retail and service sectors who comprise the fastest growing population of the poor in the late 1990s.

While it is true that these low-paying jobs seemed designed for high-school age workers, in fact in Harlem, because of racial discrimination and high rates of unemployment, older African-Americans hold these jobs in disproportionate numbers. Once believed to act as disincentives to further education, these jobs often turn out to inspire young men and women to pursue their education even as they cope with the demands of work. This is not so surprising as it might seem since even the act of securing one of these otherwise despised jobs requires exceptional stamina and the assiduous cultivation of networks of family and friends. Moreover, the resources of these young people and their families are so limited, that without such employment school becomes financially infeasible. Often depicted as regimented work of the most mindless sort, these jobs provide a great deal of informal learning and skill development as workers cope with the frenzied pace, learn to track and control inventory flow, deal with irate, multilingual customers, repair malfunctioning machinery, and solve many unanticipated problems on the fly.

Despite the cardinal value assigned to work by mainstream American culture, despite the great moral canyon separating the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor, these jobs bear a heavy stigma and can become exercises in humiliation, inflicted in many cases by other Harlem residents left out in the jobless cold. In reaction, these young men and women often develop a fierce pride in their work, even while acknowledging its demeaning aspects. Newman's stories about this sense of dignity nurtured among fellow workers in the back of the store, a work culture of honor and independence, make it clear that these psychic rewards are often more important than the meager financial payoff. Tiffany Wilson, a four-year veteran of "Burger Barn" is part of a tightly knit group of fellow workers who manage to find hidden virtues in jobs that customers, the media, and even old friends hold up to ridicule. "It's a lot more to it than flipping burgers. It's a real system of business. That's where I go to see a big corporation at play. Cashiers. The store, how its run. Production of food, crew workers, service. Things of that nature." Tiffany, and others just like her, anchor their core social identity in these work groups. Through them they establish a psychic and cultural distance from past neighborhood friends and acquaintances still adrift in the worlds of welfare, underground hustling, and outright illegality.

Newman shows how the "family values," so frequently invoked in suburban America are also fervently cherished by the working poor, who endure the trials and tribulations of hard, unremunerative work precisely to preserve their families. It's become a commonplace to imagine the inner city as composed of multi-generational families sunk in dependency, fissioning into criminal fathers, dissolute mothers, delinquent teenagers, and abandoned children. The families in Newman's book, however, hardly conform to that stereotype. Instead, Keysha, for example, can look back, with pride and frustration, two generations to a grandmother who worked for the postal service, who left Harlem for a black suburb, who retired in modest comfort with a pension and social security in a house of her own. It was only Kyesha's mother, Dana, who descended into welfare dependency. Reproducing family trees like Kyesha's, Newman concludes that what we are confronted with is not a static, intergenerational portrait of failure and despair, but a moving picture of downward mobility that evolved in reponse to an imploding public sector, persistent racial discrimination, and an economy skewed against the less skilled. Despite all the effort and the accumulation of important skills, there is no denying the fact that job mobility for Kyesha and her co-workers is extremely limited. No one, it seems, is prepared to recognize what these workers have accomplished and learned. This is the greatest frustration for Newman's subjects as they face the prospect of a lifetime of referred indignity, insecurity, and material want. (Please see the following interview for Professsor Newman's account of her follow-up RSF study of what's become of her subjects since she completed the original research.)

Professor Newman is not sanguine about the future. The job market, bleak in Harlem in the early 1990s, has improved only moderately during the long economic recovery since then. Meanwhile, all the integuments of the social safety net -- welfare, child care, health care, access to higher education, food stamps, to name only some -- are weakening. Newman calls for improving existing public support, including the minimum wage, the earned income tax credit, empowerment zones offering tax breaks and grants for businesses willing to relocate in the inner city, and similar forms of government help. Given the prevailing climate of opinion and balance of political power, however, Newman is more inclined to look to the private sector for tangible help. She describes various "school-to-work" programs that coordinate the needs of local employers with school curricula. She strongly recommends the creation of consortia of regional employers who together might work to open up pathways of upward job mobility. She also favors working with owners and managers of retail and service sector firms, many of whom are black and Latino themselves and concerned about their workers, to figure out ways of accelerating internal job mobility.

The working poor number ten million. Together with their families they add up to thirty million people. In so many ways they embrace the core values of mainstream America. No Shame in My Game provides a compelling, in-depth look at the way the working poor live and the problems they face. Their experience fundamentally challenges prevailing conceptions of poverty and challenges us to devise new ways of ensuring that all working people earn enough to maintain a decent standard of living.

An interview with Katherine S. Newman, author of No Shame in My Game.

No Shame in My Game is copublished by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and the Russell Sage Foundation. To place an order please visit your local bookstore or call Knopf at (800) 733-3000.