An Interview with Katherine S. Newman

An Interview with Katherine S. Newman, author of No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City

Katherine S. Newman, Ford Foundation Professor of Urban Studies at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, talks about her book and her ongoing work among the working poor in Harlem.

RSF: Your book examines the experience of people living in a world very different from your own. I wonder if you could tell us about your motivations for taking up this study.

Newman: I really wanted to reshape the way Americans think about poverty. Theyhave heard so much - from journalists, from scholars - about people who don't want to work, who are deliberately irresponsible, that they could be forgiven for thinking that bad values are at the root of poverty. But the vast majority of poor people do work. They just don't earn enough to pull themselves out of poverty. I wanted to look at those working poor people as a way of recasting the whole image of the inner city. It was also important to me to show how qualitative research could give us a deeper understanding of the daily lives and real values of inner city workers. Most of the information we have on labor markets and the workforce naturally comes from economists or sociologists who work with large data sets. That research is crucial, especially for explaining the big picture. But it doesn't help us understand how ordinary people in poor communities view their lives, their options, or how they put the resources together to survive, to raise their kids, to balance going to school and keeping a job. You need a different approach for that and it seemed to me that anthropology has something important to add to the picture. Besides, a good anthropologist can communicate with a larger audience that won't sit still for statistical arguments, but will listen to a well-crafted account of real lives.

RSF: Your book raises the critical question about whether the people you studied face a lifetime of dead-end jobs. The Russell Sage Foundation is supporting your follow-up study which will track the experiences of these people since the original research was concluded. What have you discovered so far?

Newman: No Shame in My Game followed two hundred people - some more intensely than others - for about eighteen months. That's too short a time to draw any hard conclusions about whether low-wage workers in Harlem get stuck in poverty-level jobs or graduate from them. I wrote about people who made efforts to find better jobs, but only found a few examples in that time period of people who succeeded. Most people did seem stuck. The Russell Sage Foundation has made it possible for me to go back to the well and find out what has happened. I recently completed what I hope will be the first of a two-wave follow-up study of about one hundred of the original participants in the study, half of whom were workers and half of whom were looking for work, but hadn't found it. The follow-up took place about four years after the first contact I had with these people. Here's what we've found out so far: about one-third of this sample is doing very well. They are earning $10 an hour or more, which is more than double their earnings of four years before. Among these people, I found mainly people who had been promoted internally or people who were able to get semi-skilled jobs that were unionized (e.g., as porters in apartment buildings). Another third was in something of a steady state: they were earning less than $10 an hour, usually in the same kind of job where I found them (fast food, low-end retail, security). The final third were in trouble: unemployed, earnings at or below the minimum wage, episodic reliance on welfare, and so on. I have a lot of analysis left to do to understand what happened to these people in terms of education, family formation patterns, household organization, and so on. It's a data set rich with numbers and interviews, so it will take some time to mine.

RSF: Yours was a local study, confined to central and west Harlem. Like any particular place in time, there were undoubtedly a set of circumstances that applied there and perhaps only there. Is Harlem unique? Do you think we can usefully generalize about this large national population of the urban working poor based on your findings from the Harlem research?

Newman: I suppose every city is unique, and for the same reasons that we can't extrapolate a nation-wide reality from a single city, we probably shouldn't make wild leaps from Harlem to the rest of the country. Still, I think the differences are more of degree than of an absolute nature. In all of the big cities, inner-city communities have far worse labor market profiles than the suburbs that surround them or their booming downtown financial districts. Harlem is the mecca of Black America. It has a historic status that is important to its residents and has been important as a magnet for internal migration and immigration from the Caribbean islands. But it is also in the middle of a city whose economic growth has lagged behind many other U.S. cities. Unemployment in New York is still around 7 percent when the rest of the country is around 4 percent. Add to that the usual problems of minority unemployment (which are often double the rates of the majority, especially for young black men) and you do see problems in New York that are more egregious than in Milwaukee or Los Angeles.

RSF: When it comes to offering solutions to the problems of the working poor, you tend to downplay the public sector and rely heavily on answers emerging from the private sector. Why do you adopt that approach? Can the private sector really do what's necessary?

Newman: This really was a strategic choice. I wish the political will for public employment on a large scale was there, but I just don't see it. Besides, I think researchers interested in employment have always thought first about government possibilities and that we have a responsibility to turn more attention to the private sector, since it will always be the employer of first resort. I suppose I also became enamored of what the inner-city business people were trying to do and the limitations they faced in providing good employment. Most of them are in industries that are low margin, and they aren't in a position to raise wages unless all their competitors do the same. That's why raising the minimum wage is so important. These owners are in it for the profit, of course, but they are looking to make those profits in tough neighborhoods because they believe in providing employment for these communities. I devoted the last chapter of the book to thinking about how we could capitalize on the social links that either exist or could be built between employers that might recreate the job ladders that have disappeared. Or expand some of the most creative school-to-work programs so that kids would have a better chance of getting a foot in the door. Employers are there to make a profit, but they are also a social resource that makes a difference in the inner city. I really think some of these things can be done with a modest amount of government help that might generate a bit more coordination in the private sector to the benefit of employers and low wage workers. Until the spirit of FDR comes back, this seems to me, at the very least, a good parallel strategy to pursue.