David K. Shipler

David K. Shipler reported for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988 in New York, Saigon, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Washington, D.C. He is the author of seven previous books, including the bestsellers Russia and The Working Poor, as well as Arab and Jew, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and has taught at Princeton University, American University, and Dartmouth College. He writes online at The Shipler Report.

shiplerreport.blogspot.com

ALSO BY DAVID K. SHIPLER

Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America

The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties

The Working Poor: Invisible in America

A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America

Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land

Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams

Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword

Work Doesn’t Work

from The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

A Vintage Short

Vintage Books

A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

New York

Copyright © 2004, 2005 by David K. Shipler

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form as part of The Working Poor in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2004, and subsequently published by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2005.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

A portion of this work previously appeared in The New York Times Magazine.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for The Working Poor is available from the Library of Congress.

Ebook ISBN 9780525566465

Cover design by Adalis Martinez

www.vintagebooks.com

v5.3.2

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Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by David K. Shipler

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Work Doesn’t Work

Notes

Introduction

AT THE EDGE OF POVERTY

Tired of wishes,

Empty of dreams

—Carl Sandburg

The man who washes cars does not own one. The clerk who files cancelled checks at the bank has $2.02 in her own account. The woman who copy-edits medical textbooks has not been to a dentist in a decade.

This is the forgotten America. At the bottom of its working world, millions live in the shadow of prosperity, in the twilight between poverty and well-being. Whether you’re rich, poor, or middle-class, you encounter them every day. They serve you Big Macs and help you find merchandise at Wal-Mart. They harvest your food, clean your offices, and sew your clothes. In a California factory, they package lights for your kids’ bikes. In a New Hampshire plant, they assemble books of wallpaper samples to help you redecorate.

They are shaped by their invisible hardships. Some are climbing out of welfare, drug addiction, or homelessness. Others have been trapped for life in a perilous zone of low-wage work. Some of their children are malnourished. Some have been sexually abused. Some live in crumbling housing that contributes to their children’s asthma, which means days absent from school. Some of their youngsters do not even have the eyeglasses they need to see the chalkboard clearly.

This book is about a few of these people, their families, their dreams, their personal failings, and the larger failings of their country. While the United States has enjoyed unprecedented affluence, low-wage employees have been testing the American doctrine that hard work cures poverty. Some have found that work works. Others have learned that it doesn’t. Moving in and out of jobs that demand much and pay little, many people tread just above the official poverty line, dangerously close to the edge of destitution. An inconvenience to an affluent family—minor car trouble, a brief illness, disrupted child care—is a crisis to them, for it can threaten their ability to stay employed. They spend everything and save nothing. They are always behind on their bills. They have minuscule bank accounts or none at all, and so pay more fees and higher interest rates than more secure Americans. Even when the economy is robust, many wander through a borderland of struggle, never getting very far from where they started. When the economy weakens, they slip back toward the precipice.

Millions have been pushed into a region of adversity by federal welfare reform’s time limits and work mandates. Enacted in 1996 during an economic boom, the reform is credited by many welfare recipients for inducing them to travel beyond the stifling world of dependence into the active, challenging, hopeful culture of the workplace. They have gained self-confidence, some say, and have acquired new respect from their children. Those with luck or talent step onto career ladders toward better and better positions at higher and higher pay. Many more, however, are stuck at such low wages that their living standards are unchanged. They still cannot save, cannot get decent health care, cannot move to better neighborhoods, and cannot send their children to schools that offer a promise for a successful future. These are the forgotten Americans, who are noticed and counted as they leave welfare, but who disappear from the nation’s radar as they struggle in their working lives.

Breaking away and moving a comfortable distance from poverty seems to require a perfect lineup of favorable conditions. A set of skills, a good starting wage, and a job with the likelihood of promotion are prerequisites. But so are clarity of purpose, courageous self-esteem, a lack of substantial debt, the freedom from illness or addiction, a functional family, a network of upstanding friends, and the right help from private or governmental agencies. Any gap in that array is an entry point for trouble, because being poor means being unprotected. You might as well try playing quarterback with no helmet, no padding, no training, and no experience, behind a line of hundred-pound weaklings. With no cushion of money, no training in the ways of the wider world, and too little defense against the threats and temptations of decaying communities, a poor man or woman gets sacked again and again—buffeted and bruised and defeated. When an exception breaks this cycle of failure, it is called the fulfillment of the American Dream.

As a culture, the United States is not quite sure about the causes of poverty, and is therefore uncertain about the solutions. The American Myth still supposes that any individual from the humblest origins can climb to well-being. We wish that to be true, and we delight in examples that make it seem so, whether fictional or real. The name of Horatio Alger, the nineteenth-century writer we no longer read, is embedded in our language as a synonym for the rise from rags to riches that his characters achieve through virtuous hard work. The classic immigrant story still stirs the American heart, despite the country’s longstanding aversion to the arrival of “the wretched refuse” at “the golden door,” in the words etched on the Statue of Liberty.[1] Even while resenting the influx of immigrants, we revel in the nobility of tireless labor and scrupulous thrift that can transform a destitute refugee into a successful entrepreneur. George W. Bush gave voice to the myth when he was asked whether he meant to send a message with the inclusion of two blacks, a Hispanic, and two women in the first senior appointments to his incoming administration. “You bet,” the president-elect replied: “that people who work hard and make the right decisions in life can achieve anything they want in America.”[2]

The myth has its value. It sets a demanding standard, both for the nation and for every resident. The nation has to strive to make itself the fabled land of opportunity; the resident must strive to use that opportunity. The ideal has inspired a Civil Rights Movement, a War on Poverty, and a continuing search for ways to ease the distress that persists in the midst of plenty.

But the American Myth also provides a means of laying blame. In the Puritan legacy, hard work is not merely practical but also moral; its absence suggests an ethical lapse. A harsh logic dictates a hard judgment: If a person’s diligent work leads to prosperity, if work is a moral virtue, and if anyone in the society can attain prosperity through work, then the failure to do so is a fall from righteousness. The marketplace is the fair and final judge; a low wage is somehow the worker’s fault, for it simply reflects the low value of his labor. In the American atmosphere, poverty has always carried a whiff of sinfulness. Thus, when Judy Woodruff of CNN moderated a debate among Republican presidential candidates in March 2000, she asked Alan Keyes why he thought morality was worsening when certain indicators of morality were improving: Crime was down, out-of-wedlock births were down, and welfare was down, she noted. Evidently, welfare was an index of immorality.

There is an opposite extreme, the American Anti-Myth, which holds the society largely responsible for the individual’s poverty. The hierarchy of racial discrimination and economic power creates a syndrome of impoverished communities with bad schools and closed options. The children of the poor are funneled into delinquency, drugs, or jobs with meager pay and little future. The individual is a victim of great forces beyond his control, including profit-hungry corporations that exploit his labor.

In 1962, Michael Harrington’s eloquent articulation of the Anti-Myth in his book The Other America heightened awareness; to a nation blinded by affluence at the time, the portrait of a vast “invisible land” of the poor came as a staggering revelation. It helped generate Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. But Johnson’s war never truly mobilized the country, nor was it ever fought to victory.

More than fifty years later, after all our economic achievements, the gap between rich and poor has only widened, with a mean net worth of $4,024,800 among the top 10 percent and minus $13,400 for the bottom 25 percent, meaning that they owe more than they own.[3] Life expectancy in the United States is lower, and infant mortality higher, than in Japan, Hong Kong, Israel, Canada, and all the major nations of Western Europe.[4] Yet after all that has been written, discussed, and left unresolved, it is harder to surprise and shock and outrage. So it is harder to generate action.

In reality, people do not fit easily into myths or anti-myths, of course. The working individuals in this book are neither helpless nor omnipotent, but stand on various points along the spectrum between the polar opposites of personal and societal responsibility. Each person’s life is the mixed product of bad choices and bad fortune, of roads not taken and roads cut off by the accident of birth or circumstance. It is difficult to find someone whose poverty is not somehow related to his or her unwise behavior—to drop out of school, to have a baby out of wedlock, to do drugs, to be chronically late to work. And it is difficult to find behavior that is not somehow related to the inherited conditions of being poorly parented, poorly educated, poorly housed in neighborhoods from which no distant horizon of possibility can be seen.

How to define the individual’s role in her own poverty is a question that has shaped the debate about welfare and other social policies, but it can rarely be answered with certainty, even in a specific case. The poor have less control than the affluent over their private decisions, less insulation from the cold machinery of government, less agility to navigate around the pitfalls of a frenetic world driven by technology and competition. Their personal mistakes have larger consequences, and their personal achievements yield smaller returns. The interaction between the personal and the public is so intricate that for assistance such as job training to make a difference, for example, it has to be tailored to each individual’s needs, which include not only such “hard skills” as using a computer or running a lathe, but also “soft skills” such as interacting with peers, following orders willingly, and managing the deep anger that may have developed during years of adversity. Job trainers are discovering that people who have repeatedly failed—in school, in love, in work—cannot succeed until they learn that they are capable of success. To get out of poverty, they have to acquire dexterity with their emotions as well as their hands.

An exit from poverty is not like showing your passport and crossing a frontier. There is a broad strip of contested territory between destitution and comfort, and the passage is not the same distance for everyone. “Comfortable is when I can pay my rent with one paycheck—I don’t have to save for two weeks to pay one month’s rent,” said Tyrone Pixley, a slender man of fifty in Washington, D.C. He was especially undemanding, having emerged from a tough life as a day laborer and a heroin user. “I don’t want to have to scuffle,” he said simply. “I want to be able to live comfortable, even if it’s in a ten-by-ten room. And in the course of a month I can pay all my bills out of my pay. I don’t have to have anything saved. For me to be comfortable, I don’t have to have a savings account.”

In such a rich country, most people have more appetite than Tyrone Pixley. Surrounded by constant advertising from television sets that are almost always turned on, many Americans acquire wants that turn into needs. “You’re living in the projects, your mom’s on welfare, so if you got six kids or five or seven, eight kids growing up, you be wantin’ things all your life, and you can’t have,” explained Frank Dickerson, a janitor who dealt drugs in Washington to get things he didn’t have. “You got kids want to have the nice tennis shoes, the jackets; they can’t get that with a mom with six, seven kids on welfare. How they gonna get it? They may be getting older, growing up, they want to have nice stuff, so the only way to get that is turn to drugs. That’s right. You go out there, you deal, and you get the things that you need. Car, apartments, clothes.” Frank Dickerson spent three years in prison, but he and his wife also bought a house in the Maryland suburbs with the money he made from drugs.

Poverty, then, does not lend itself to easy definition. It may be absolute—an inability to buy basic necessities. It may be relative—an inability to buy the lifestyle that prevails at a certain time and place. It can be measured by a universal yardstick or by an index of disparity. Even dictionaries cannot agree. “Want or scarcity of means of subsistence,” one says categorically.[5] “Lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts,” says another.[6] “The state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions,” says a third (emphases added).[7]

By global or historical standards, much of what Americans consider poverty is luxury. A rural Russian is not considered poor if he cannot afford a car and his home has no central heating; a rural American is. A Vietnamese farmer is not seen as poor because he plows with water buffalo, irrigates by hand, and lives in a thatched house; a North Carolina farmworker is, because he picks cucumbers by hand, gets paid a dollar a box, and lives in a run-down trailer. Most impoverished people in the world would be dazzled by the apartments, telephones, television sets, running water, clothing, and other amenities that surround the poor in America. But that does not mean that the poor are not poor, or that those on the edge of poverty are not truly on the edge of a cliff.

“The American poor are not poor in Hong Kong or in the sixteenth century; they are poor here and now, in the United States,” Michael Harrington wrote before Hong Kong’s prosperity soared. “They are dispossessed in terms of what the rest of the nation enjoys, in terms of what the society could provide if it had the will. They live on the fringe, the margin. They watch the movies and read the magazines of affluent America, and these tell them that they are internal exiles….To have one bowl of rice in a society where all other people have half a bowl may well be a sign of achievement and intelligence; it may spur a person to act and to fulfill his human potential. To have five bowls of rice in a society where the majority have a decent, balanced diet is a tragedy.”[8]

Indeed, being poor in a rich country may be more difficult to endure than being poor in a poor country, for the skills of surviving in poverty have largely been lost in America. Visit a slum in Hanoi and you will find children inventing games with bottles and sticks and the rusty rims of bicycle wheels. Go to a slum in Los Angeles and you will find children dependent on plastic toys and video games. Living in Cambodia, my son Michael marveled at the ingenuity bred by necessity, the capacity to repair what would be thrown away at home; when his television remote stopped working in Phnom Penh, he got it fixed at the corner for a dollar.

In the United States, the federal government defines poverty very simply: an annual income, for a family of four, of less than $24,250 in 2015. To earn that, the single adults who head most poor households would need $11.66 an hour, or $4.41 above the federal minimum wage, assuming that they can get a full forty hours of work a week for all fifty-two weeks of the year, or 2,080 working hours annually.[9] During the economic expansion of the 1990s, the incidence of official poverty declined, beginning the new decade at 11.3 percent of the population, down from 15.1 percent in 1993. Then it rose in the ensuing recessions to 12.5 percent by 2003 and 15.2 percent in 2011, before falling to 13.5 percent in 2015.

But the figures are misleading. The federal poverty line cuts far below the amount needed for a decent living, because the Census Bureau still uses the basic formula designed in 1964 by the Social Security Administration, with four modest revisions in subsequent years. That sets the poverty level at approximately three times the cost of a “thrifty food basket.” The calculation was derived from spending patterns in 1955, when the average family used about one-third of its income for food. It is no longer valid today, when the average family spends only about one-tenth of its budget for food, but the government continues to multiply the cost of a “thrifty food basket” by three, adjusting for inflation only and overlooking nearly half a century of dramatically changing lifestyles.[10]

The result burnishes reality by underestimating the numbers whose lives can reasonably be considered impoverished. More accurate formulas, being tested by the Census Bureau and the National Academy of Sciences, would rely on actual costs of food, clothing, shelter, utilities, and the like. Under those calculations, income would include benefits not currently counted, such as food stamps, subsidized housing, fuel assistance, and school lunches; living costs would include expenditures now ignored, such as child care, doctor’s bills, health insurance premiums, and Social Security payroll taxes. When the various formulas were run in 1998, they increased by about three percentage points the proportion of the population in poverty, from the official 34.5 million to a high of 42.4 million people.[11] The Supplemental Poverty Measure, introduced in 2011, raised the poverty rate from 15.2 to 16 percent.[12] Such a change would presumably make more families eligible for benefits that are linked to the poverty level; some programs, including health insurance subsidies, already cover households with incomes up to 150 or 200 percent of the poverty threshold, depending on the state.

Even if revised methods of figuring poverty were adopted, however, they would provide only a still photograph of a family’s momentary situation. In that snapshot, the ebb and flow of the moving picture is lost. By measuring only income and expenses during a current year and not assets and debts, the formulas ignore the past, and the past is frequently an overwhelming burden on the present. Plenty of people have moved into jobs that put them above the threshold of poverty, only to discover that their student loans, their car payments, and the exorbitant interest charged on old credit card balances consume so much of their cash that they live no better than before.

When the poor or the nearly poor are asked to define poverty, however, they talk not only about what’s in the wallet but what’s in the mind or the heart. “Hopelessness,” said a fifteen-year-old girl in New Hampshire.

“Not hopelessness—helplessness,” said a man in Los Angeles. “Why should I get up? Nobody’s gonna ever hire me because look at the way I’m dressed, and look at the fact that I never finished high school, look at the fact that I’m black, I’m brown, I’m yellow, or I grew up in the trailer.”

“The state of mind,” said a man in Washington, D.C. “I believe that spirituality is way more important than physical.”

“I am so rich,” said a woman whose new job running Xerox machines was lifting her out of poverty, “because—not only material things—because I know who I am, I know where I’m going now.”

Another woman, who fell into poverty after growing up middle class, celebrated her “cultural capital,” which meant her love of books, music, ideas, and her close relationships with her children. “In some senses, we are not at all poor; we have a great richness,” she said. “We don’t feel very poor. We feel poor when we can’t go to the doctor or fix the car.”

For practically every family, then, the ingredients of poverty are part financial and part psychological, part personal and part societal, part past and part present. Every problem magnifies the impact of the others, and all are so tightly interlocked that one reversal can produce a chain reaction with results far distant from the original cause. A run-down apartment can exacerbate a child’s asthma, which leads to a call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill that cannot be paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the interest rate on an auto loan, which forces the purchase of an unreliable used car, which jeopardizes a mother’s punctuality at work, which limits her promotions and earning capacity, which confines her to poor housing. You will meet such a woman in Chapter One. If she or any other impoverished working parent added up all of her individual problems, the whole would be equal to more than the sum of its parts.

Consequently, most issues confronting the working poor are laced into most chapters of this book, even while each chapter throws a spotlight on one or another element of deprivation. In the chapter on work you will find stories of parenting; in the discussion of health you will see the matter of housing. Isolating the individual problems, as a laboratory would extract specific toxins, would be artificial and pointless. They exist largely because of one another, and the chemical reaction among them worsens the overall effect.

If problems are interlocking, then so must solutions be. A job alone is not enough. Medical insurance alone is not enough. Good housing alone is not enough. Reliable transportation, careful family budgeting, effective parenting, effective schooling are not enough when each is achieved in isolation from the rest. There is no single variable that can be altered to help working people move away from the edge of poverty. Only where the full array of factors is attacked can America fulfill its promise.

The first step is to see the problems, and the first problem is the failure to see the people. Those who work but live impoverished lives blend into familiar landscapes and are therefore overlooked. They make up the invisible, silent America that analysts casually ignore. “We all live in the suburbs now, not in the inner cities,” proclaimed Professor Michael Goldstein of the University of Colorado, explaining on PBS why Woolworth’s had been replaced by Wal-Mart in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.[13]

Tim Brookes, a commentator on National Public Radio, once did a witty screed against overpriced popcorn in movie theaters. Indignant at having been charged $5 for a small bag, he conducted research on the actual expenses. He calculated that the 5 ¼ ounces of popcorn he received cost 23.71875 cents in a supermarket but only 16.5 cents at prices theater managers paid for fifty-pound sacks. He generously figured 5 cents in electricity to cook the popcorn and 1 cent for the bag. Total cost: 22.5 cents. Subtracting sales tax, that left a profit of $4.075, or 1,811 percent.[14]

Evidently, the theater had the remarkable sense not to hire any workers, for Brookes gave no hint of having noticed any people behind the counter. Their paltry wages, which wouldn’t have undermined the excessive profits, were absent from his calculation. The folks who popped the corn, filled the bag, handed the bag to him, and took his money must have been shrouded in an invisibility cloak. No NPR editor seemed to notice.

I hope that this book will help them to be seen.

WORK DOESN’T WORK

It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.

—Juvenal, Satires

Christie did a job that this labor-hungry economy could not do without. Every morning she drove her battered ’86 Volkswagen from her apartment in public housing to the YWCA’s child-care center in Akron, Ohio, where she spent the day watching over little children so their parents could go to work. Without her and thousands like her across the country, there would have been fewer people able to fill the jobs that fueled America’s prosperity. Without her patience and warmth, children could have been harmed as well, for she was more than a baby-sitter. She gave the youngsters an emotionally safe place, taught and mothered them, and sometimes even rescued them from abuse at home.

For those valuable services, she received a check for about $330 every two weeks. She could not afford to put her own two children in the day-care center where she worked.

Christie was a hefty woman who laughed more readily than her predicament should have allowed. She suffered from stress and high blood pressure. She had no bank account because she could not keep enough money long enough. Try as she might to shop carefully, she always fell behind on her bills and was peppered with late fees. Her low income entitled her to food stamps and a rental subsidy, but whenever she got a little pay raise, government agencies reduced the benefits, and she felt punished for working. She was trapped on the treadmill of welfare reform, running her life according to the rules of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The title left no doubt about what Congress and the White House saw as poverty’s cause and solution.

Initially the new law combined with the good economy to send welfare caseloads plummeting. As states were granted flexibility in administering time limits and work requirements, some created innovative consortiums of government, industry, and charity to guide people into effective job training and employment. But most available jobs had three unhappy traits: They paid low wages, offered no benefits, and led nowhere. “Many who do find jobs,” the Urban Institute concluded in a 2002 report, “lose other supports designed to help them, such as food stamps and health insurance, leaving them no better off—and sometimes worse off—than when they were not working.”[1]

Christie considered herself such a case. The only thing in her wallet resembling a credit card was a blue-green piece of plastic labeled “Ohio” and decorated with a drawing of a lighthouse projecting a beam into the night. Inside the “O” was a gold square—a computer chip. On the second working day of every month, she slipped the card into a special machine at Walgreen’s, Save-A-Lot, or Apple’s, and punched in her identification number. A credit of $136 was loaded into her chip. This was the form in which her “food stamps” were now issued—less easy to steal or to sell, and less obvious and degrading in the checkout line.

The card contained her first bit of income in every month and permitted her first expenditure. It could be used for food only, and not for cooked food or pet food. It occupied the top line in the balance sheet she kept for me during a typical October.

“2nd Spent 136.00 food stamps,” she wrote. So the benefit was all gone the day she got it. Three days later she had to come up with an additional $25 in cash for groceries, another $54 on October 10, and $15 more on the twelfth. Poor families typically find that food stamps cover only one-half to three-quarters of their grocery costs.

Even the opening balance on the card was chipped away as Christie inched up in salary. It makes sense that the benefit is based on income: the less you need, the less you get. That’s the economic side. On the psychological side, however, it produces hellish experiences for the beneficiaries. Every three months Christie had to take half a day off from work (losing half a day’s wages) and carry an envelope full of pay stubs, utility bills, and rent receipts to be pawed over by her ill-tempered caseworker, who applied a state-mandated formula to figure her food stamp allotment and her children’s eligibility for health insurance. When Christie completed a training course and earned a raise of 10 cents an hour, her food stamps dropped by $10 a month.

That left her $6 a month ahead, which was not nothing but felt like it. Many former welfare recipients who go to work just say good riddance to the bureaucracies that would provide food stamps, medical coverage, and housing. Some think wrongly that they’re no longer eligible once they’re off welfare; others would rather forfeit their rights than contend with the hassle and humiliation. Quiet surrender ran against Christie’s grain, however. She was smart and insistent, as anyone must be to negotiate her way through the system. She never flinched from appealing to higher authority. When she once forgot to put a utilities bill in her sheaf of papers, her caseworker withheld her food stamps. “I mailed it to her the next day,” Christie said. Two weeks passed, and the card remained empty. Christie called the caseworker. “She got really snotty,” Christie remembered. “ ‘Well, didn’t I tell you you were supposed to send some documentation?’

“I was like, ‘Have you checked your mail?’ ” No, as it turned out, the caseworker’s mail had piled up unread. “She was like, ‘Well, I got people waiting up to two, three months on food stamps.’ And she didn’t get back with me. I had to go to her supervisor.” The benefits were then restored.

It is easy to lose your balance having one foot planted tentatively in the working world and the other still entwined in this thicket of red tape. Managing relations with a boss, finding reliable child care, and coping with a tangle of unpaid bills can be daunting enough for a single mother with little such experience; add surveillance by a bureaucracy that seems more prosecutor than provider, and you have Christie’s high blood pressure.

While she invoked the system’s rules to get her due, she also cheated—or thought she did. Living with her surreptitiously was her boyfriend, Kevin, the father of her son. She was certain that if the Housing Authority knew, she would be evicted, either because he was a convicted felon (two years for assault) or because his earning power, meager though it was, would have lifted her beyond eligibility. So slight are the margins between government assistance and outright destitution that small lies take on large significance in the search for survival.

Kevin looked like a friendly genie—a solid 280 pounds, a shaved head, and a small earring in his right ear. His income was erratic. In decent weather he made $7.40 an hour working for a landscaper, who rewarded him with a free turkey to end the season at Thanksgiving—and then dumped him onto unemployment for the winter. He wanted to drive a truck or cut meat. He had received a butcher’s certificate in a training course during imprisonment, but when he showed the document from the penitentiary, employers didn’t rush to put a knife in his hand.

The arithmetic of Christie’s life added up to tension, and you had to look hard through her list of expenditures to find fun or luxury. On the fifth she received her weekly child support check of $37.68 from Kevin (she got nothing from her daughter’s father, who was serving a long prison sentence for assault). The same day, she put $5 worth of gas in her car, and the next day spent $6 of her own money to take the day-care kids to the zoo. The eighth was payday, and her entire $330 check disappeared in a flash. First, there was what she called a $3 “tax” to cash her check, just one of several such fees for money orders and the like—a penalty for having no checking account. Immediately, $172 went for rent, including a $10 late fee, which she was always charged because she never had enough to pay by the first of the month. Then, because it was October and she had started to plan for Christmas, she paid $31.47 at a store for presents she had put on layaway, another $10 for gasoline, $40 to buy shoes for her two kids, $5 for a pair of corduroy pants at a secondhand shop, another $5 for a shirt, $10 for bell-bottom pants, and $47 biweekly for car insurance. The $330 was gone. She had no insurance on her TVs, clothes, furniture, or other household goods.

Utilities and other bills got paid out of her second check toward the end of the month. Her phone usually cost about $43 a month, gas for the apartment $34, electricity $46, and prescriptions between $8 and $15. Her monthly car payment ran $150, medical insurance $72, and cable TV $43. Cable is no longer considered a luxury by low-income families that pinch and sacrifice to have it. So much of modern American culture now comes through television that the poor would be further marginalized without the broad access that cable provides. Besides, it’s relatively cheap entertainment. “I just have basic,” Christie explained. “I have an antenna, but you can’t see anything, you get no reception.” And she needed good reception because she and Kevin loved to watch wrestling.

One reason for Christie’s tight budget was the abundance of high-priced, well-advertised snacks, junk food, and prepared meals that provide an easy fallback diet for a busy working mother—or for anyone who has never learned to cook from scratch. Besides the staples of hamburger and chicken, “I buy sausages,” Christie said, “I buy the TV dinners ’cause I might be tired some days and throw it in the oven—like Salisbury steaks and turkey and stuff like that. My kids love pizza. I get the frozen pizzas….I buy my kids a lot of breakfast things ’cause we’re up early and we’re out the door. You know, those cereal bars and stuff like that, they’re expensive! You know? Pop Tarts, cereal bars, Granola.” The cheaper breakfasts, like hot cereal, came only on weekends, when she had time. “They eat the hot cereal, but during the week we’re on the go. So I give them cereal in the bag. My son likes to eat dry cereal, so I put him some cereal in the lunch bag. Cocoa Puffs. They got Cocoa Dots.” She laughed. “Lucky Charms. He’s not picky. My daughter’s picky.” Those candylike cereals soak up dollars. At my local supermarket, Lucky Charms cost dearly: $4.39 for a box of just 14 ounces, while three times as much oatmeal goes for nearly the same price, $4.29.

Recreation for Christie and Kevin centered on food and drink. When her eleven-year-old daughter brought home a good report card, they rewarded her by scraping together a little cash for an evening at a modest restaurant, either Mexican or, if it was Wednesday, at Ryan’s down the street. Wednesday was steak night at Ryan’s, a big, boisterous, all-you-can-eat family place at the edge of the black neighborhood where they lived. The buffet counters, heaped with steaming potatoes and green beans and slabs of beef, were encircled by a jovial, multiracial crowd of grandparents, parents, and kids jostling one another with friendly apologies as they carried away piles of stick-to-your-ribs food for just nine bucks apiece.

As an occasional present to themselves, Christie and Kevin invited friends over, lit a charcoal fire in the metal barrel that had been made into a grill behind her ground-floor apartment, and feasted on barbecued chicken and ribs and lots of cans of Miller’s. Did they drink to get drunk?

“Mmmmmmmm,” Kevin replied in a long, low hum.

“Mmmmm,” said Christie. “Not around my children. I go to the club for that. Then I come home and go to sleep.” She gave a delighted laugh. She liked Boone’s Farm wine, Manischewitz Cream, and Paul Masson brandy, which explained the entry in the records she kept for me: “15.00 on bottle” on October 12. But she was no alcoholic, and she and Kevin swore that they had stayed away from drugs despite the constant temptation in a neighborhood crawling with pushers.

“Christie likes to have fun,” her mother said tartly. Her mother, “Gladys,” had dropped out of high school, spent years on welfare, and nurtured the fervent dream of seeing her three children in college. The ambition propelled two of them. Christie’s brother became an accountant, and her sister, a loan officer. But Christie never took to higher education. She began reluctantly at the University of Akron, lived at home, and finally got fed up with having no money. The second semester of her sophomore year, she went to work instead of to school, a choice that struck her then as less momentous than it turned out to be.

“She didn’t take things as serious as they really were,” Gladys complained. “Now she sees for herself how serious this is.” Just how serious depended on what she wanted to do. She loved working with children but now discovered that without a college degree she would have trouble getting hired at a responsible level in the Head Start preschool program, much less as a teacher in a regular school; she was limited to a YWCA day-care center whose finances were precarious. Since 95 percent of the Y’s children came from low-income families, the fees were essentially set by the center’s main source of income, Ohio’s Department of Human Services, which paid $99 to $114 a week for full-time care. Given the center’s heavy expenses, the rates were not enough to pay teachers more than $5.30 to $5.90 an hour.

Christie’s previous jobs had also imprisoned her close to the minimum wage as a hostess-cashier at a Holiday Inn, a cashier at Kmart, a waitress in a bar, a cook and waitress and cashier in various restaurants. She had become a veteran of inadequate training programs designed to turn her into a retail salesperson, a bus driver, and a correctional officer, but the courses never enabled her and her classmates to pass the tests and get hired. She had two words to explain why she had never returned to college. “Lazy. Lazy.”

It was strange that she thought of herself as lazy, because her work was exhausting, and her low wage required enormous effort to stay afloat. When the bills would inundate her, she explained, “I pay that one one month and don’t pay that one and play catch-up on this one, one month. I play catch-up pretty much. I rotate ’em around. You got a phone bill. You got to pay that every month. If you miss a payment, pssshhh. It’s double the next month and triple the next month. The next thing, you got a disconnect. I live on disconnect notices. And I pay my bill every month, but get a disconnect every month, because everybody wants you to pay on the first of the month. I don’t get paid on the first of the month. I can’t pay ten people on the first of the month. I get the disconnect notice, and I get very, very close. I call, I make payment arrangements. I’m like, ‘Hey, please give me a break. Don’t turn me off yet. I’m gonna send ya something,’ you know. The car dealer man, I might not take him all of my 150, but I take him something. They’re funny guys. They work with me, they’re real nice. And he said, ‘Well, Miss V, what do you have for us today?’ One thing the guy said, he said, ‘I notice you come every month with something.’ And I do. I come with the majority. Every month. I’m like, ‘Hey, I gotta buy food, fellas.’ ”

Her strained schedule made her vulnerable to fees and fines, including one that ended her children’s summer day care. Because she couldn’t afford the $104 a month it would have cost to put her kids part-time in the Y’s day-care center, her mother watched them after school. In the summer they went to a Boys and Girls Club for a token $7 each. But the club had a strict rule about pickup times—3 p.m. except Friday, when it was 1. One Friday, her mother forgot the earlier deadline. Instead of calling Christie at work, the club started the clock running, imposing a fine that began at $10 apiece for the first five minutes and continued at a lower rate until her mother finally appeared, more than an hour late. It reached $80 per child, an impossible amount for Christie to afford, so her children could not continue. In her life, every small error had large consequences.

Christie seemed doomed to a career of low pay without the chance of significant promotion, no matter how important her jobs might be to the country’s well-being. At her level in the economy, everything would have to be perfectly aligned to open the door to comfort. After the missteps at the outset of her adulthood, she would now need the boost of higher education or the right niche of vocational training. By itself, hard work alone would not pay off. That lesson, tainting such a revered virtue, is not one that we want to learn. But unless employers can and will pay a good deal more for the society’s essential labor, those working hard at the edge of poverty will stay there. And America’s rapturous hymn to work will sound a sour note.

—

Work didn’t work for Debra Hall either. Like many welfare mothers forced off the rolls into the labor force, she found almost everything in her life changed except her material standard of living. She had to buy a car to get to work, wake up before dawn, struggle to learn new skills, and weave her way among racial tensions on the job. Her budget had more complexity but no surplus. Her major gain was emotional—she felt better about herself—and so, on balance, she was tentatively glad to be working.

Debra was fortunate enough to live downstairs in a two-family house owned by her mother, in a Cleveland neighborhood of faded comfort. With her meager wage on the open market, she would have been confined to a dreadful flat. Here, the houses needed paint and their roofs needed shingles, but the rooms were spacious and the streets were not so hard. Across her stoop wafted the sweet smell of marijuana being smoked by two young women sitting on the steps next door. A curtain was drawn across Debra’s large front window.

Inside, the living room was dark at the height of the afternoon. She had been sleeping on the couch since returning from her 3:30–11:30 a.m. shift in a bakery, and she still wore her white uniform shirt with “Debra” on a label stitched above the right-hand pocket. Her black hair was straightened, and a perpetual smile illuminated her broad face, touched by a flicker of sadness now and then as she managed to laugh pungently through the tales she told of hardship.

The television set was on, and an upright vacuum cleaner stood in the middle of the living room floor. Decorating an end table were pictures of her two children: a younger son who was handicapped by Down syndrome, and an older daughter who was progressing modestly at the lower levels of a banking career. “Thank God she didn’t get on welfare,” Debra declared in her deep voice.

It was the birth of her daughter, when Debra was eighteen, that launched a twenty-one-year career of welfare checks and “under-the-table-type jobs,” as she put it, including positions as a housekeeper and bar hostess that paid her in unrecorded cash. The widespread practice of holding undeclared jobs while getting welfare meant that “welfare-to-work” should have been called “work only,” for it slashed people’s actual incomes. “I got used to that, having the extra money,” Debra explained. “I could make like, per week, probably like $120 ’cause they would pay you like $30 a night, plus tips….So I got used to that and got stuck on it and forgot about the outside world.”

The letter reminding her of the real world came from her caseworker. At age thirty-nine, Debra had no skills to speak of. She had dropped out of community college—“I wasn’t puttin’ anything into it,” she confessed. She judged herself “lazy” and had never tried to learn a trade. She had lived off her welfare check, her illicit earnings, and her Supplementary Security Income (SSI) payments from Social Security for her son, a teenager who was in special schooling. Welfare reform was now catching up with her. The 1996 act allowing states to impose time limits and work requirements gave Ohio the right to demand that Debra get a job or do job training.

She found her way to the Cleveland Center for Employment Training, whose board members were executives of local industries that needed machinists, welders, and other laborers, and because she liked wearing jeans and sneakers instead of dress-up clothes, she chose warehouse work—“shipping and receiving,” in the trade vernacular. As part of its real-life training, the center dispatched UPS packages for companies in a small industrial park, so Debra learned how to type, how to operate the computerized UPS system, how to keep an inventory, how to run a forklift. The course “settled me down and made me want to learn and want to do something as far as getting into the workforce,” she said. It was the first time in her life that she felt motivated, and it made her think that welfare-to-work wasn’t a bad idea. “People will want more,” she predicted, “and be able to teach their kids that’s growing up to want more….And if they put us into these training centers and show us that we can do it, we can show our kids.”

That’s how it looked when Debra was still a trainee. It didn’t look as bright once she got into a job. First, the car she had to buy to avoid a long bus ride to work was not cheap and not reliable. Then, UPS had no openings, so she took her forklift certification, her carefully prepared résumé, and her newly acquired interviewing skills to Orlando Bakery. Poised to answer all questions brilliantly, she never got to speak. A man guided her quickly around the plant, and then asked, “Can you start at seven?”

She was stunned. “All this rehearsing I did to talk and everything like that, and he just asks me can I start at seven.” She gave a sour laugh. “I thought I was being hired as a forklift operator,” she continued. “I was wanting to run a forklift ’cause they have forklifts. They have them in shipping and receiving, the dock area where the trucks pick up. You have to load the trucks up and everything. But it’s all men!” she yelped. When she arrived at work the first day, she was put on an assembly line. “Excuse me, heh,” she told a supervisor. “You just hired a woman that can drive a forklift.”

“ ‘Oh, we don’t have any openings for a forklift operator.’ ”

On-the-job training could be summed up in a single command: copy the worker next to you. Debra watched closely and began by flipping bread on the dreaded garlic line, a conveyor that required employees to start at 7 a.m. and stay until the entire day’s production was packaged, usually about 5 p.m. and sometimes as late as 6. “Everybody there can’t stand it,” she said. “The garlic loaves, the sticks, garlic sticks, garlic rolls—and every chance they got they was coming over with a different type of bread to see if they could make it garlic.” After the bread passed through a slicer, “you have to separate it, lay it flat, then it’s two people next to the one that’s separates it, make sure it lays flat and don’t go down double. Then it goes through the butter. You know, they have butter like a fountain. It goes through, then it goes through the freezer, then you got four people there that stacks it. Then you got a person that stands there makes sure it goes through, then they pack it.”

The workers were unionized, but the conditions were unworthy of a union contract. The pay was $7 an hour, including a paid lunch hour and a fifteen-minute break after nine hours of work. Benefits didn’t kick in until an employee had been on the job for six months. It wasn’t hard labor, but it challenged Debra’s mental and physical agility. “The first day I worked there, I’m like, I’m not gonna get this. It was terrible.” She was laughing again. “I’m like, oh, God, my whole body was sore. And just lookin’ at the conveyors ’cause the stuff is steady movin’, you know, and it’s movin’ fast ’cause it’s comin’ past you….I was crying almost. I was like, I can’t do this.”

After a while she was offered a welcome chance to move off the garlic line, and even though it meant getting out of bed at 2 a.m for her shift, she would be doing less stressful work: packing bread into bags and cartons. The respite from tension was short-lived, however. No sooner had Debra learned the packing task than she was yanked again into panic when a supervisor abruptly assigned her to a machine that she was untrained to operate. “I didn’t even know the name of the machine,” she said. “I just happened to hear them say, ‘You be Number Two.’ I was like, ‘What you all be talking about?’ ” Number Two was, indeed, the name of the machine, a huge piece of equipment that needed somebody to “flip switches,” Debra explained. “You have to feed the bags in, make sure the zip locks that close the breads is on. You have to set the machine a certain way—different kinds of bread, hamburger buns, hot dog buns. You know, different parts of the line you have to set the slicer to slice the bread. You have to know how deep.”

She was having nightmares. “I’m still disoriented because I can’t think. All I keep doing is feel like I’m floating, because of this machine….I done had dreams where my supervisor was fussin’ because this didn’t go right. You know what I’m saying? The job came home with me….This doesn’t make sense for this little seven dollars.” A few months later her wage went to $7.90.

Being black, Debra also felt herself on the wrong end of subtle racial strains. “Seems like they’re too lenient on the Hispanics,” she asserted. “I was next to one, and she wouldn’t keep up. You know, bread was piling all up, and she puttin’ ’em in boxes, and flattening them out, and he come over and raise hell.” She pretended to speak no English, so Debra became the target of the complaint. “Hold on!” she objected. “She can understand as much English as I can understand. Don’t come over here pressing me because she won’t keep up! I done made three boxes to her one. But she runs off that Spanish, gets a Spanish partner, and they get to going on and on and on and on, you know what I’m saying? Oh, my God, yeah. It’s a lot of that, a lot of that.”

Debra had no confidence that she could move up in position and pay. Whenever she asked supervisors about the salary at their level, they’d answer vaguely, “It varies.” She couldn’t get specific figures, so she had no sense of what her goal might be. She seemed doomed to repeat her family’s inability to emerge from low wages. She barely knew her father and couldn’t remember what work he did. Her mother had cleaned houses and had drawn a welfare check. Two of her brothers had been shot dead, one in a bar fight, the other in his car. A third was in prison for burglaries, a fourth worked as a truck driver, and a fifth did maintenance at a retirement center. One sister worked in a factory, another in a bar, and a third took care of her grandchildren. Debra’s daughter had taken the modest step from bank teller to a promotional sales job, but Debra was mostly delighted that she had avoided pregnancy. “I was lucky. I just did a lot of preaching to her,” Debra said. “I did escape being a grandma early.”

Debra’s cash flow was so anemic, compared with her expenses, that she barely had a bank balance. Her wages from the bakery were deposited directly, but they were gone as soon as they hit the ledger. “I have maybe $8 in the account every week,” she said. “You can’t get less than ten from the money machine, so if I have five, I can’t get five.” If she went to a teller, the bank levied a $3 charge. She was so low one January that she had to pay a $15 fee for a two-week $100 advance from a storefront payday loan operation.

Her fellow workers in the bakery were trapped in gloom. Nothing there encouraged her. As she began the job, one employee after another cautioned her: “You don’t want to work here.” She heard the warning even from an assistant supervisor who had been her high school classmate.

“Debra, I know you don’t want to work here,” she remembered her classmate saying.

“How long you been here?” Debra asked.

“I’ve been here twelve years,” her friend replied.

“And I didn’t have anything to say,” Debra remarked to me, “but my mind was saying, ‘What the hell you doing here so long?’ ”

—

The new millennium arrived in a crescendo of American riches. The nation wallowed in luxury, burst with microchips, consumed with abandon, swaggered globally. Everything grew larger: homes, vehicles, stock portfolios, life expectancy. Never before in the sweep of human history had so many people been so utterly comfortable.

Caroline Payne was not one of them. A few weeks after New Year’s Day, she sat at her kitchen table and reflected on her own history. Two of her three goals had been achieved: She had earned a college diploma, albeit just a two-year associate’s degree. And she had gone from a homeless shelter into her own house, although it was mostly owned by a bank. The third objective, “a good-paying job,” as she put it, still eluded her. Back in the mid-1970s, she earned $6 an hour in a Vermont factory that made plastic cigarette lighters and cases for Gillette razors. In 2000, she earned $6.80 an hour stocking shelves and working cash registers at a vast Wal-Mart superstore in New Hampshire.

“And that’s sad,” she declared. “I got thinking about that the other day. I’m only making eighty cents more than I did more than twenty years ago.” Or less—the equivalent of $3.70—taking into account the rise in the cost of living. And she did not know then how much sadder it would become.

Caroline’s was the forgotten story of prosperity in America. With indifference, the economic boom at the turn of the century passed her by. The reasons were not obvious, but they were insidious. She was not the victim of racial discrimination—she was white. She was not lazy—she was caustic about colleagues and relatives who were. She was punctual, rarely out sick, willing to do night shifts, and assiduous in her work habits. The Wal-Mart manager, Mark Brown, called her “a nice lady” with lots of enthusiasm. “She’s self-driven,” he observed. “She’s always willing to learn and better herself. She’s got potential. She can definitely move up.”

But she did not move up. She had never moved up. And that ceased to amaze her, it had been going on for so long, in job after job after job. She was astonished only by Mark Brown’s praise. “I’m surprised,” she remarked when I told her what he had said. She was stacking blank videotapes on a shelf. “I didn’t think they liked me here. People don’t usually say nice things about me.”

Somewhere along this track that leads nowhere, a good many Americans give up on the dream. They sink back onto welfare, or they stop imagining themselves as foremen or department heads or office managers. Caroline was fifty, with so many years of disappointment that her moments of despair seemed quite reasonable. She had been treated occasionally for depression, and she once tried to commit suicide with an overdose of aspirin. Still, she kept striving. She called herself “luckylady” in her e-mail address. She said, “Have a wonderful day” on her answering machine. She did not have big thoughts about corporate profits or dark judgments about society’s unfairness; she just tried for basic financial security. Her persistence seemed so incongruous that it played like a dissonant melody against the monotone of job stagnation. Again and again, she applied to manage one sales department or another at the store, and again and again she was passed over in favor of men—or, she observed wryly, women who were younger and slimmer.

“I work my butt off, excuse my language. I’m there most of the time,” she said sharply, “but that don’t matter to them.” She was paid a dollar an hour more during nighttime shifts, nothing close to what her flexibility was worth to a store that stayed open around the clock. Trying to get ahead, she was always available to change hours and fill in, even during evenings when she had to leave her fourteen-year-old daughter, Amber, home alone. Without a car, Caroline had a twenty-minute walk each way, trekking back and forth at odd times of night in all kinds of weather. One cold February day, walking gingerly along icy streets to save her temperamental back, she trudged from her house to her job at her normal time of 10 a.m., only to be told to come for a shift beginning at 1 p.m. instead. So she made her way home and then returned to the store: three trips consuming one hour before earning her first dime of the day. This she did willingly—even after the store had hired a man, whom she knew, at a wage higher than hers. “He’s working in electronics at night, but you go in and he’s standing around looking at them TVs or doing something else,” she said in a soft whine. “He doesn’t keep busy or do anything, and they don’t say nothing. And I’ve complained about it, and I’ve been practically told to mind my own business.”

Nor could she compete with the slender women, who received flirtatious attention from the assistant manager. “You notice a lot of these young girls get these jobs,” Caroline declared. “My age shows on me terribly. I’ve had people think that I’m Amber’s grandmother, I’ve had such a hard life.”

The people who got promotions tended to have something that Caroline did not. They had teeth. Caroline did not have teeth. If she had, she would not have looked ten years older than she was. But her teeth had succumbed to poverty, to the years when she could not afford a dentist. Most of them decayed and abscessed, and when she lived on welfare in Florida, she had them all pulled in a grueling two-hour session that left her looking bruised and beaten. Under the state’s Medicaid rules as she understood them, a set of dentures would have been covered only if she had been without any teeth at all; while some of them could have been saved, she couldn’t afford to do less than everything. In the end, unfortunately, the dentures paid for by Medicaid didn’t fit and made her gag, so she couldn’t wear them. An adjustment would have cost about $250, money she didn’t have.

No employer would ever admit to passing her over because she was missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote. Caroline had learned to smile with her whole face, a sweet look that didn’t show her gums, yet it came across as wistful, something less than the thousand-watt beam of friendly delight that the culture requires. Where showing teeth was an unwritten part of the job description, she did not excel. She was turned down for a teller’s position with the Claremont Savings Bank, which then hired her for backroom filing and eventually fired her from that. Wal-Mart considered her for customer service manager and then promoted someone else, someone with teeth.

Caroline’s was the face of the working poor, marked by a poverty-generated handicap more obvious than most deficiencies but no different, really, from the less visible deficits that reflect and reinforce destitution. If she had not been poor, she would not have lost her teeth, and if she had not lost her teeth, perhaps she would not have remained poor. Poverty is a peculiar, insidious thing: a cause whose effects then cause the original cause, or an effect whose causes are caused by the effect. It depends on where in the cycle the analysis begins. Like most of the forgotten America, Caroline was a bundle of causes and effects.

Depression, a frequent companion of poverty, afflicted Caroline in paralyzing bouts of self-neglect, according to Brenda St. Laurence, the caseworker and home visitor who helped Caroline for years. “A lot of times she doesn’t wear her deodorant and really needs to, doesn’t take a shower, her hair will be really messy,” Brenda said. “She’s a heavy smoker; her clothes will smell smoky at times.” I never saw Caroline in that condition during five years of interviewing, but Brenda came from the same world as her clients and easily moved into their lives. Brenda was not a graduate-degree professional from an affluent upbringing; she had a high school diploma and a working-class background. She did not condescend, but she did judge, and with enough affection to be regarded warmly by those she tried to assist. At Caroline, she directed more understanding than blame. “When you are a depressed person,” Brenda observed, “you can’t get motivated.”

Like many laborers stuck at low levels, Caroline was the victim of many factors: appearance, yes, but also a heavy burden of childhood, marital, and educational handicaps that included difficulty reading and writing. All her deficiencies intertwined with the injustices and the ruthlessness of the free market. At times, personal trials distracted her so intensely that she could not concentrate on her work. And so, as the country’s economic power rushed forward, she was caught in a back eddy of stagnant wages and limited horizons. The recession that followed the boom made little difference at her lowly position; she continued to move laterally among her modest jobs, from store to factory to store. Her pattern mirrored the broader experience of low-income single parents nationwide, whose employment rate and hourly wages barely changed during the recession.[2]

Caroline’s father had been a school janitor and her mother, an occasional factory worker. “We didn’t have a lot of love and security that kids need,” she remembered. Nor was there material plenty. “When I was a kid, I never had much.” Long after that early void, neediness remained. “I always wanted things,” she admitted. “I can get spending and overdo things sometimes.”

Even in her late forties, she was like a teenager craving instant gratification, said Brenda, who worked with Caroline on budgeting and tried to rein in her spending. “She likes her credit cards,” Brenda remarked. “She said that she deserves these things. She said she works hard, she wants nice things before she dies. Of course,” Brenda added, “I come from a family of eight where you just bought the necessities. Food was the most important thing, paying the rent was the second thing, keeping light and heat.”

After Caroline bought her house, Brenda saw her mature. But it was hard to break the patterns of childhood, and the debts of the past did not disappear easily. Caroline’s family had moved repeatedly and disrupted her education. She spent first and second grades in a four-room schoolhouse in Meriden, New Hampshire, then repeated second grade there because of reading problems. “I’m a slow reader,” she confessed, “and I have to have it quiet, and I read word for word. I’m self-conscious about it.” She didn’t remember her mother or father ever reading to her. “With us kids, she was not really a mother.” In third grade, she and her family lived over a shoe store in downtown Leominster, Massachusetts, with sirens and traffic and no place to play. The following year they moved to a trailer park in Keene, New Hampshire, where she spent fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.

One day as a sixth-grader, walking home from a playground, she was slapped with terrible news. A sympathetic friend of her sister’s said how sorry she was to hear that Caroline’s dad was leaving. What? Caroline had been given no hint of this. “And I ran the rest of the way home,” she recalled, “and I remember opening that trailer door, and I just looked at him—we had a double-decker—and I ran up the stairs, and I cried and I cried.” And the seed of distrust was planted.

“There was really no communication in that family, and it was very hard. And my dad come up and tried to talk to me and things then, and he said he was really surprised that it bothered me the most, because I used to be the tomboy one, you know. But I think underneath I was never really happy, but I would always smile, and I think I was puttin’ on a front making people think I was, when I really wasn’t.”

From then on, she wrote in a college essay, she felt like “nothing but a piece of furniture being shoved around in all directions.” The rootlessness made her friendships transitory. She spent seventh and eighth grades with an aunt back in Meriden, while her brother and sister were farmed out to other homes. Her mother remarried. “My stepdad drank a lot,” she said. “He tried to get fresh with me and things like this, and I was scared and never told my mom, you know? And I got to the point where I hit him.”

Then, since Caroline did not want to live with her stepfather, every year of high school was spent in a different place. As a freshman, she stayed in Lebanon, New Hampshire, with a woman for whom she had been a baby-sitter. She did most of her sophomore year back in Keene, then went to live with her father, first in Woodstock, Vermont, in her junior year, then as a senior in Northfield, Massachusetts, where she proudly graduated. “I’m the only one out of three kids that actually ended up graduating from high school,” she boasted. “My brother ended up going in the service, and my sister got married at fifteen. And I’m not trying to brag, but I felt good ’cause my mom and dad never graduated from high school neither. It took me an extra year ’cause I stayed back in second grade.”

Two months after her commencement in 1969, Caroline got married. “And now there’s times I wished I hadn’t,” she declared. “I was young, and I think it was because I wanted that security, and I thought I loved the guy, maybe at the time. I had a strong belief that when you get married it’s supposed to work; I had real old-fashioned, strong beliefs. And I think it was so easy for me to latch onto people because I haven’t had lots of love and security and communication and things. It was almost like if a guy gave me affection, I’d latch onto almost like the first one that come along. And that’s not good. I’ve learnt over the years, it’s not good.”

The marriage produced three children, lasted fourteen years, and finally sank into a swamp of suspicion created by her husband’s infidelity. She worked night shifts in factories to put him through engineering school, took care of the kids and the animals they raised, and in the end caught him out all night with another woman. The relationship was then corroded by distrust until it disintegrated.

Because she could not afford a lawyer and just wanted out of her marriage, she ended up with only $400 a month in child support and no share in their house. “It was a nice place,” she said sadly. “It was a log home that we had built when I was pregnant. We had to put in our own bridge, and I had always wanted a covered bridge made out of logs. Never did get one. But at the time I couldn’t afford the taxes and everything.” Immersed in the memories, she was quietly weeping.

Proudly and foolishly, Caroline rejected an offer from her ex-husband’s parents to put a trailer on their land for her and the kids. Taking care of her was not their responsibility, she felt. So she took a small apartment and bounced between welfare and dead-end jobs, supplementing her income by scavenging for cans. “We’d go and watch a ball game at school, and I’d take bags and stuff them in my pocketbook,” she recalled. “After the ball game I’d be going around poring through the garbage cans pickin’ out five-cent cans.” Her older daughter would ride her bike as far ahead of her mother as possible to avoid any hint of association. “I figured, that few cents buys some milk, buys some bread, things that you need, you know what I’m saying? It all helps. But it embarrassed her. She hated it as she got older.”

Alone and scared, Caroline married again, and this time it was worse. Vernon Payne insulted her, hit her, flew into jealous rages—once when he thought he saw her talking to a young man outside the nursing home where she worked. The “man” was actually a woman with her hair cut short. The marriage lasted two years. “At times I hated men,” she said. “Men were no good, they just lied, and you’re not gonna tell me no different.” On the rare occasions when she voted, she made a point to vote only for women.

Yet she remained hungry for a man in her life and duplicated the pattern so often seen among single mothers who carry the wounds inflicted by men. Women of limited means who crave and cannot create loving partnerships dominate the ranks of the poor, for they are not just single mothers. They are also single wage-earners.

Amber, Caroline’s fourth child, was born into the troubled second marriage. Except for a clubfoot, the petite, dark-haired girl seemed healthy. Only gradually did telltale signs of trouble emerge. She was late walking compared with Caroline’s other children, and a little later to be potty trained. That struck her mother as nothing more than a normal variation among children. “She could watch TV and remember a lot of things she saw,” Caroline recalled. Then, a test in a preschool program found some learning “delays.”

After the divorce Amber spent every other weekend and a week or two in the summer with her father, Vernon. She once came home with a burn on her finger, and someone filed a complaint with Vermont’s child protective services. “They came right there and took me in a room right at work and threatened they were gonna take Amber away from me even before I got home from work,” said Caroline. The authorities had both the wrong crime and the wrong culprit, as it turned out later, but their suspicions were kept alive by persistent anonymous reports. Caroline suspected her own mother, “a back stabber,” in Caroline’s words. “Even if I just grabbed ahold of Amber, like her arm like this, she would say, ‘Oh, don’t hurt that kid!’ ” The state pursued the matter, and Caroline found herself in a fight for her daughter. “I had to go to court, I had to go to parenting classes, to keep Amber.”

Family turbulence can rarely be walled out of the workplace. An employee with desirable skills or a powerful position may have enough value to be tolerated through a difficult time. But Caroline had so little capital of that sort that she could not purchase an employer’s patience for her personal trials. When her life at home got stressful, her life at work got perilous. That meant marginal performance, no advancement, and a rolling career of short stays in jobs with no accumulation of seniority.

“You’re all nerved up, you’re stressed, you don’t know what somebody’s gonna pull on you next,” she said. Even at the factory in the middle of the night, she would cry and cry, “and people would know things were wrong.”

Amid the struggle, Caroline somehow did a training program in office skills, got off welfare, and landed a decent job as the front-desk receptionist in an insurance company. (She still had her teeth.) She answered phones, sorted mail, typed up initial files for insurance policies. “It was quite an experience,” she said, and she would have continued if the pressures over Amber hadn’t damaged her work. “They were giving me some warnings,” she said, “that I wasn’t doing so good, and I think it was being upset at all these problems.” She was obviously going to be fired, so she quit—“got done with the job,” as she put it.

She searched intensively for good office jobs, applied for one after another, and heard nothing. She would call to find out why. Again and again, she would be told that another candidate had a college degree. So she decided to get one, and enrolled at Vermont’s Johnson State College. She obtained a student loan and began classes in business and accounting.

And then she noticed that Amber, who was nearly five, was masturbating. “Kids experiment anyway, but she was doing it excessively,” Caroline said. “It was more and more obvious. I’d give her a bath and she’d be touching herself. There was these little signs, but it was hard to prove anything because she was not old enough to come out and tell me, and it would be my word against theirs. But I had this funny feeling.” Often, at the end of a weekend with her father and his wife, “she’d come right to me real quick, you know? And I’d say, ‘Give your father a kiss,’ and she’d kind of back away.”

So, one day when her father brought her home, Caroline took her into the bathroom. “I noticed she was red, front to back. And this was not right.” Alarmed, Caroline asked a college friend, Tina, to talk with Amber alone and see what she could learn. “And Tina said, ‘You won’t believe the things she told me.’ ” They took the little girl to the hospital, where a doctor confirmed that she had been penetrated. The police were called, Caroline’s welfare caseworker was summoned. As Tina and the caseworker questioned Amber, Caroline and a police officer watched and listened from behind a one-way mirror. The girl repeated what she had told Tina, and a restraining order was issued against Vernon Payne. To escape, Caroline moved with Amber to Florida for several footloose years that disrupted Caroline’s education, and Amber’s as well.

Nearly a decade later, when Caroline told Amber that her father had died, the girl, then fourteen, said in a sudden burst of relief, “Good, good.”

Amber’s “delays” became more pronounced in Florida. Further testing when she entered first grade measured her IQ at 59, in the range of mild intellectual disability, a handicap more prevalent in lower-income households. But she did not get the consistent special schooling that might have helped her, because Caroline repeated her parents’ syndrome of uprootedness by moving from place to place: a tiny apartment, a trailer with a woman friend, a filthy trailer of her own, a place with a male friend, and another trailer—all in New Port Richey, Florida—then to a cousin’s in Winter Haven and back to New Port Richey. In three years, Amber attended three or four different schools. Caroline then headed north to New Hampshire, where she moved a few times from one school district to another. Altogether, she estimated, Amber had been in seven or eight schools. “She was probably like this little rag doll that just got brought anywhere,” said her caseworker, Brenda, who pressed Caroline to settle down and resist her urge to keep moving; otherwise, Brenda told her, teachers and counselors could not get to know Amber well enough to provide fruitful help. The argument took hold after Caroline became a homeowner, until that achievement was reversed by misfortune and miscalculation. “She’s very good with Amber,” Brenda said then. “I work with so many families. Sometimes I wish I had another Caroline.”

There was no clear evidence on the extent to which educational stability might have aided the girl. Her middle-school principal called her condition “a language-based learning disability.” She could barely read and write, could not easily tell time from clocks with hands, and was unable to understand that she had enough money if she gave a storekeeper $10 to buy something for $4. Yet she could play the flute if her mother wrote the letter for each note on the musical score. She took gymnastics lessons at a dance school, for which her mother paid by cleaning the school’s studio once a week. And Amber could give a lucid verbal account of a class trip to Montreal, for example; if you heard her talk, you wouldn’t suspect a low IQ. With sweet courtesy, she eagerly helped her mother around the house, and she could cook for herself in a microwave. But she also had epilepsy, and the risk of a seizure prompted doctors to advise that she not be left alone. The logistical maze of arranging care for Amber around constantly shifting hours of work had Caroline tangled in anxiety.

Social Security provided Amber with SSI, a monthly disability payment, but that didn’t give Caroline the means that an affluent parent would have to muster an arsenal of expensive private tutors and therapies. Nor did Caroline have the skills and sophistication to help her child extensively at home, as school officials urged. “They came right out and told me in one of the meetings that it was my job to teach my daughter to read,” Caroline complained. “I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m a single mom. I bring up my daughter…I do my job…I pay my taxes in full. You do your job.’ They gave me a dirty look. They didn’t say nothing.”

Brenda, her caseworker, hit the same wall. “I would say to Caroline, ‘At night, please sit and read to your daughter, even if it’s ten or fifteen minutes.’ She’d say, ‘That’s not my job. That’s the teacher’s job.’ ”

So Amber had only the meagerly funded special education classes in the public schools of Claremont, a town so strapped for financing that it led a group of communities in a celebrated victory before the New Hampshire Supreme Court to win state grants for impoverished school districts. The court’s ruling was not implemented effectively, however, and Claremont—ranking 236 out of New Hampshire’s 259 municipalities in per capita income—still badly underpaid its teachers. Amber felt herself standing still, and she was furiously frustrated, especially after she entered high school and was consigned to a vocational-technical department that taught cooking, check-writing, and other basic skills of independent living—but little or no reading.

Whether her capacities could have been expanded by the kind of training that money could buy was an open question. Would affluence have made any difference to Amber? Her pediatrician, Steven Blair, who had treated her since she was nine, paused for a long time, considering his answer. “Minute differences,” he said finally. “Not substantial differences.” On the other hand, specialists in intellectual disability, once called mental retardation, generally argue for “individualized therapeutic and educational services for the child in conjunction with flexible support services for the family,” as Jack P. Shonkoff puts it in a basic pediatrics textbook. “Such services are delivered best when they focus on the family as a dynamic system and view child and family adaptation as interdependent and mutually influenced by the environment in which they live.”[3] That was as realistic in Caroline’s case as suggesting a long vacation in Paris.

To flee with Amber from Vermont, Caroline had to suspend her studies, which she later resumed in Florida, at Webster College, completing a two-year associate’s degree in office technology and information processing. She also ran up a debt of $17,000 in student loans, a sum that rose to $20,000 as she deferred payments. Contrary to conventional wisdom about education as a good investment, Caroline’s degree turned out to be a colossal waste of money. She never landed a job in her field of training, never got one that required anything more than a high school diploma. She would have benefited with a bachelor’s degree, of course, but the associate’s degree proved useless as a credential.

When she moved back north from Florida to New Hampshire, Caroline lived for two weeks with her aunt, applied for welfare, and had a typical brush with governmental absurdity. She was told by officials that the best way to get welfare benefits and subsidized housing was to move into a homeless shelter, so she did. That made her an emergency case. In just three weeks—a hundred times faster than if she had lived in a major American city—she had a Section Eight voucher that paid most of her rent in a privately owned apartment. Then she set about working toward her dream: a house of her own.

For seven days a week she worked two part-time jobs—one in a store for $5.25 an hour, the other for “four something” an hour answering phones and doing other chores at the local lodge of the Loyal Order of Moose, where she was also a member. In two years, Caroline paid off most of her back bills and put herself in a position to start thinking seriously about finding a house to buy.

She did not quite realize it at the time, but she had assembled an essential structure of attributes to open the door to a mortgage. They included a record of diligence on the job and connections with people of influence—both intangible benefits of being in the workforce. Furthermore, she had a reliable monthly check in the form of Amber’s Social Security payment. Very few low-wage workers can claim a steady income from the government or helpful personal contacts.

The key individual for Caroline turned out to be her boss at the store, also a real estate agent, whose good friend happened to be president of the Sugar River Savings Bank. The banker met Caroline and was impressed. “She seems like the type of woman who would go hungry to pay the bill,” he told her boss. Not quite, though. She had two or three bills to take care of to burnish her credit check, so she spent a year on those while the house she wanted stayed unsold. The price dropped, and she finally got the bank’s approval for a mortgage.

It didn’t hurt that Amber’s Social Security payment of $514 a month would be deposited directly into an account at Sugar River Savings, from which the mortgage installment would be automatically withdrawn. (The SSI check rose to $736 after Amber’s father died, but the money flowed in and out, which usually left an account balance of under $100.) Using those funds for mortgage payments was legitimate, Caroline reasoned, because Amber would eventually inherit the house—an assumption that, in the end, couldn’t survive the family’s poverty. It was a terrible fact that a mortgage would not have been forthcoming without Amber’s disability.

The snug, gray clapboard house, built in 1891, was nestled among others on an icy street. It was about to be improved, courtesy of a federal program that would replace the siding, repaint the trim, and remove lead paint inside—testimony to Caroline’s skill at securing government aid. The windows were now insulated with plastic sheeting stapled to the frames, and over the side door hung a “Merry Christmas” banner. In a different place at a different time, the house would have been considered quaint and charming enough to be worth plenty. But sitting in a sad, old neighborhood near the center of a New England town that had been left behind, it was worth just $37,000 when Caroline discovered it in 1997. With $1,000 from her income tax refund to cover closing costs, she became the owner—along with the Sugar River Savings Bank.

There was no price tag on her satisfied sense of possession and autonomy. She proudly conducted a tour: the two beige couches in the living room, the flowery wallpaper, the yellow curtains, the old TV set and VCR, Fluffy the cat with a red collar and a bell, the pantry and storeroom behind the kitchen, her adult son’s crossbow for deer hunting, the cellar with a washer and dryer and oil furnace, the upstairs where colorful afghans she had crocheted lay folded waiting to be given to Amber’s teacher and school bus driver and principal for Christmas.

Caroline worked in a clothing factory, sewing for $6 an hour. She was laid off. She worked a few hours a week at the shelter where she had lived, helping applicants to the fuel assistance program. When winter ended, she was out of a job, so she worked at Tambrands, a factory that made Tampax, for $6.50. Sitting for hours at a time, she began to get acute pain in her legs and finally had to go to the emergency room. Her back was the cause. “And so the doctor says, ‘I want you to take one night off and rest as much as you can. Stay off your feet. Stay off your legs.’ ” She called Tambrands, owned by Procter & Gamble, to tell them she wouldn’t be in on Sunday because of her back. Monday morning the phone rang: Her services were no longer needed. So she went back to the sewing factory and got laid off two or three times. Working at the edge of poverty means working on the coldest side of corporate America.

The Claremont Savings Bank, which had rejected her as a teller, called to invite her to apply for a filing job. She was hired for twenty-five hours a week at $7 an hour, with the prospect of going to $10 or $11. Mercifully, it was less painful because she could alternately stand and sit as she went about her main task of taking cancelled checks in a tray to a large open drawer where customers’ accounts were separated by dividers. Each account had a signature card, so Caroline—and others working the same job—were to verify the signature on each check, then file it in the proper account.

She liked the position. The bank was a short walk from her house. She had bought the right clothes. She would learn other tasks. She had $2.02 in her own bank account. Her mother was dying. Her tortured relationship with her mother was coming to an end—except, of course, it would never quite end but would rather be frozen in whatever emotions had been created over the years. And when her mother died, Caroline was thrown unknowingly into depression. She heard the diagnosis when she went for counseling. “I didn’t realize that I’d been in depression. I didn’t realize, OK?”

People at the bank were beginning to notice mistakes. “We know that on average, three or four times a year we will get a call that a customer has gotten wrong checks,” said a bank officer, preferring not to have her name published. “In a period of eight weeks, we got three or four calls. We started monitoring and had people double-checking, and we isolated it and found where the error was coming from.”

Caroline was called in for a talk. “They said I wasn’t catching on fast enough,” and she admitted that she may have made errors. But others were filing too, she noted. “I was gettin’ the blame for it, and I felt it wasn’t all me, you know what I’m saying? And in the meantime I was dealing with my mother being in and out of the hospital, dying, and they had told her she was gonna die but we just didn’t know when.”

It was hard to get the checks mixed up, the bank officer insisted, because they were different colors. Maybe Caroline’s attention wandered, the officer speculated. “She had difficulty learning what we needed her to do. There were other functions we needed her to learn how to do, but we could never get to that. We would ask people to start assembling statements to be mailed to customers, researching any errors….We couldn’t even get to that. Microfilming. There’s a systematic way to microfilm work and file it away. She really had difficulty learning to do that, so we stopped having her do it. So she was only doing filing, and that was not working out well….She wasn’t receptive at all to the fact that she was making mistakes. It was definitely her. To be honest with you, I was surprised she had trouble because I thought she could do it. In fairness to her, we had just come out of a situation where we had to do a lot of handholding. She came in after that other person was gone, and I think everyone was exhausted and didn’t have the energy to spend the time with her.” After eight weeks Caroline was fired.

Her back was killing her, and she applied for SSI disability payments through Social Security. She was afraid to get another job while she waited for the decision, lest she undermine her case, so she went back on welfare and waited and waited. She thereby became typical among low-income laborers who develop back problems, apply for SSI, and don’t work for months while hoping for approval. When Caroline was finally turned down six months later, she got a job at Wal-Mart.

Now the problem took a different form. Thanks to a chiropractor paid by Medicaid, Caroline’s back had improved. But then she got a rude lesson in welfare law: “I just found out I have no medical insurance anymore,” she said desperately one day. She had fallen ill, had seen a doctor, had been given a prescription, and had gone to the pharmacy to have it filled. There she learned that her Medicaid had expired because she had gone to work (Amber’s continued because of her disability). “I didn’t know that,” Caroline declared. She had to pay $11 for the medicine and cancel an appointment for an eye exam the next day. More urgently, “I got to stop going to the chiropractor and everything now,” she said, “and that’s what kept me going to work, because I can’t afford to pay it. I owe him 150 already.”

Wal-Mart offered health insurance, but she found the premiums too expensive. Besides, she couldn’t handle the $250 annual deductible, so she joined the growing ranks of the 45 million uninsured Americans, who included the many low-wage workers passing up insurance that their employers made available. They did short-term calculations that made the weekly cost seem high, without figuring the long-term cost of large medical bills. It was a gamble, and Caroline was lucky. Through the following year her back pain eased enough to permit her to continue working. She drifted along with no insurance and never went for regular checkups and did not get seriously ill.

Anyone who walked all the way around the outside of the Wal-Mart superstore on Route 103 would walk a mile, Caroline said. The place was immense. It sold everything from lawn mowers to ground beef, under-pricing smaller stores that were struggling to survive in the center of town. Its 300 to 330 employees, who came and went seasonally, wore Wal-Mart’s uniform of blue smocks and friendly smiles, trained as they were to be surprisingly helpful to customers.

Mark Brown, the manager, could pay his people more without raising prices, he conceded. He sat at a table in the store’s snack bar, watching the part of the grocery section he could see, listening to the public address system’s calls for help at the registers, his eyes darting around this corner of his fiefdom like a school principal waiting for the next catastrophe. He was thirty-one, but he looked as young as a college kid and spoke with the twang of his native southeast Missouri. He had come from another store in Georgia and was learning to ski here in New Hampshire.

His employees started at $6.25 an hour, earned an extra dollar at night and another 25 cents “for going to the front end,” which meant working one of the twenty-four cash registers. And if he started them at $8 an hour, say, instead of $6.25, how would that change the economics of the store? “Hmmm. I don’t think it would change at all.” He wouldn’t have to raise prices? “No. We’ve got a corporate pricing structure. And the way we do things, we go out and we check our competition every single week. Every department manager in this store goes out once a week and checks competition, and that’s what determines our prices. We have a core price structure that we set regionally, by areas. Definitely the base price here would be probably higher than what it is in Arkansas, where there’s a cheap cost of living. So it would be higher here, but it would still be standard to this area. And then after they give us that base, then we go out and check our competition, and if we’re gettin’ beat, we lower our prices.”

So there’s enough profit to absorb an increase from $6.25 to $8? “There would be, because if we were having to raise our wages, then evidently everybody else would be too, and if we make sure we’re low enough, our competitors’ customers are gonna shop with us.” Would wage increases have any effect at all? “We’d have to cut corners on other things like, you know, we may not be able to put all the pretty balloons up all over the store. The non-necessities we’d have to cut back on.”

Three days later Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., announced a net income of $5.58 billion for 1999, up 26 percent from the previous year.

Caroline was bouncing from one department to another, from one shift to another, but her pay stayed within a narrow range, beginning at $6.25, going to $6.80, sometimes up to $7.50 if she worked at night. So unpredictable were her hours that she couldn’t work a second job, which would have helped her cash flow. She kept applying for higher positions and kept hearing that she needed a bit more experience.

“I did make Cashier of the Month for November,” she reported happily. “I’ve collected over fifteen hundred dollars for the World War II veterans memorial in Washington. That’s what got me Cashier of the Month.” She also persuaded customers who checked out at her register to buy a total of seventy-two tickets to a Bruins game in Boston to raise money for the Claremont fire department, and that won her a weekend getaway from Pepsi. She could take herself and three other people to a paid stay in any Marriott she chose, anywhere. “But I have to get there,” she said. That was the catch. So it was going to have to be nearby, someplace that somebody would drive her. Hawaii never entered her mind, not even New York; she considered only places in New Hampshire. “I think there’s one up here in Lebanon,” she said. “If I could get somebody to take me to Manchester, Amber likes to look at the malls. I’ve never been down there. Just to look at things.” In the end, Caroline, Amber, a friend of Caroline’s, and her child drove north to a hotel in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, where they visited a small shopping center in North Conway.

“I bought this,” said Amber. “It’s a lamp. It’s one of those bunny lamps that goes round and round. And I bought a sweatshirt that I took with me on the trip.”

“That jacket I was wearing that was ripped on the side for two years,” said Caroline, “I bought me this winter coat at one of the stores in the mall. Originally it was a hundred-dollar coat, OK? It was marked down to $79.99, but they were having a big discount so I got it for $31.99. So that wasn’t bad.”

Wal-Mart had such a big turnover of personnel that Mark Brown didn’t feel comfortable saying how high it ran. But he was clear about the reasons in the years of prosperity. “A lot of it, I think, has to do with the fact that our economy’s so strong today. You could go anywhere in this town, anywhere outside of town, and you see the signs, ‘Now Hiring, Now Hiring.’ I mean, if they’re not treated right, all they got to do is just walk out the door. It’s very competitive, very competitive.” So Wal-Mart tried to hold people by providing them with a share of the company’s profits. Eighty percent came in stock, the rest in cash, maintained in an account in which an employee began to be vested after a year, and was fully vested after seven.

But this enticement was not working for Caroline. She had taken out a second mortgage, for $19,000, to replace her roof, doors, and windows, and she needed money now. “The way they schedule your hours,” she said, “sometimes it’s ten to seven, sometimes it’s nine to four, sometimes it’s seven to four, sometimes you work later in the evenings, and you never know what day. You don’t always have the same two days off. Like I was supposed to have last Sunday off because of Amber’s recital. I asked for it off. Well, I got home and later that night there was a message on my phone: ‘Can you please come to work for a while?’ I did. I did. It was overtime. I never said no to them. But why couldn’t they have the decency to pay me a little bit more?”

That was the way the store treated “associates” when the economy was booming. In more depressed parts of the country and during recessions, however, some Wal-Mart managers were accused of forcing employees to work before punching in or after punching out to avoid paying overtime as required by law. “Wal-Mart management doesn’t hold itself to the same standard of rectitude it expects from its low-paid employees,” wrote Barbara Ehrenreich, who worked at a Wal-Mart in Minnesota while researching her book Nickel and Dimed. “When I applied for a job at Wal-Mart in the spring of 2000, I was reprimanded for getting something ‘wrong’ on this test: I had agreed only ‘strongly’ to the proposition, ‘All rules have to be followed to the letter at all times.’ The correct answer was ‘totally agree.’ Apparently the one rule that need not be slavishly adhered to at Wal-Mart is the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that employees be paid time and a half if they work more than forty hours in a week.” Workers were warned against “time theft,” which meant “doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all,” she reported. “Theft of our time is not, however, an issue.”[4]

Caroline never had the overtime problem in her New Hampshire store, but in six Southern states employees filed a class-action suit against the company for ordering them off the clock as their weekly time approached forty hours. Their attorney calculated the benefits to the firm: If each of 250 hourly wage “associates” in a single store worked just one hour of unpaid overtime a week, that would total 250 unpaid hours a week, 1,000 a month, 12,000 a year—and there were over 300 Wal-Mart stores in Texas, producing savings in that state alone of more than $30 million that should have been paid to employees.[5]

Caroline did not suffer from any violations of law, as far as she could tell, but her career went nowhere. Mark Brown, the manager who liked her, got transferred to Pennsylvania, dimming her prospects for advancement. So after a year and a half at Wal-Mart, she signed up with a temp agency, which found her a $7.50-an-hour daytime job Monday through Friday assembling wallpaper sample books. And she had the pleasure of telling Wal-Mart’s assistant manager that she was leaving for higher pay.

“I’m just hoping they’ll be sorry someday,” Caroline said.

“Because they don’t know who they’re missing,” Amber added. “She’s such a nice mom, and she’s pretty cool.”

After a month the agency tempted Caroline with a job back at the Tampax factory for $10 an hour, the most she had ever earned. She took it, but there was a problem: Procter & Gamble had organized the factory on rotating shifts. One week she left the house at 5:30 a.m. and got home at 2:30 p.m., the next week she left at 1:30 p.m. and was home by 10:30 p.m., and the third she left home at 9:30 p.m. and returned at 6:30 a.m. Putting aside the question of sleep, stamina, and the basic requirements of an orderly life, the “swing shifts,” as they were called, raised havoc with Caroline’s arrangements for Amber. She had rented rooms to boarders occasionally or taken in homeless families so Amber wouldn’t be alone. But these situations never lasted long; Caroline found the people intrusive or bossy or dishonest.

One family staying with her as she worked the swing shifts became difficult, and she kicked them out. “The people were sort of homeless,” she said. “I was kindhearted, you know me, took ’em in. They had three little kids. He was on probation, a car accident, something….They were paying $100 a week. They didn’t pay the last two weeks. They said they would stay for the winter. I only intended it to be a short-term thing. The little kids destroyed wallpaper in my house and other things….On top of that, come to find out, he had got another girl pregnant and had another baby.” Furthermore, they were getting checks from welfare and food from WIC, while he had his own business laying flooring and carpeting. “They make good money,” Caroline said resentfully, “and I’m wondering if they reported it all. They’re not married. People scheme the system like this, and they get away with it.”

Without the boarders, though, Caroline had nobody to look after Amber, so she very reluctantly left the girl home alone during her evening and nighttime shifts. While Caroline was running the machines that put tampons into boxes, she was worrying about Amber, and with good cause. “I don’t think she should be left alone now,” said her pediatrician, Steven Blair, who feared that given her epilepsy and cognitive problems, “she could be in trouble pretty easily.” She could stay home by herself for “a short evening,” he believed, “but I wouldn’t leave her for many hours at a stretch.”

Amber happened to tell her teacher how scary it was being home alone after dark. The teacher was alarmed. “She can’t take care of herself,” said the principal of Claremont Middle School, Donald R. Hart. “She’s fourteen, that’s our concern. No young lady, middle school student, should be left alone at night. She gets scared, she’s had people knock on her door at night. We would still have the same reaction with a normal fourteen-year-old. When you look at statistics when kids get themselves into trouble with drugs, alcohol, sex, it’s after school hours in the home.” So, what did the school do to help? It summoned up a dreaded specter from Caroline’s past: The teacher threatened to report Caroline for neglect. “We have a legal obligation to report if neglect is going on,” said Hart. “We would be breaking the law if we suspect neglect, abuse, or anything like that.”

It was late in October of 2000, the height of the presidential election campaign, and the country seemed consumed by politics. Not Caroline. Her voice trembled with rage and fear as she searched frantically for a way to keep both her job and her daughter. The celebrated New Hampshire primary had long since passed without so much as denting Caroline’s consciousness. She didn’t bother to see any of the candidates as they crisscrossed the state, and, looking back, she was not even sure whether or not she had voted. “I can’t remember,” she said frankly. “I might have been working. I don’t think I did.” And now, even with Al Gore and George W. Bush arguing and preaching and promising intensely on the TV in her living room, Caroline had no spare room in her thoughts for either of those men. “I haven’t really listened to them,” she said. “Right now it’s the least of my concerns. They’re all liars in a way. They tell people they’ll do this or that. I have no use for Clinton, because he did not set a good example by running around with that girl. I think his wife’s a fool to stay with him.”

Clinton wasn’t running, of course. No, but she felt that Gore shared responsibility. “He’s the vice president. He must have a good idea of what’s going on in there. He’s next in line. Why couldn’t he have stepped in and done a little more and straightened things out?” For that reason, Bush struck her as preferable, but she obviously didn’t know about his affluence. “I want a motivated person like me that has been through these situations and knows what it’s like out here. It will never happen. If I vote it will be straight women. I’d like to see a woman president. I would not like to see some rich person in there. I’d like to see somebody who has sense enough to help these people who need the help, you see what I’m trying to say? The system needs to be straightened out. They need more resources to help these people who are trying to help themselves.” November 7 came and went without her vote.

Faced with the threat of being reported to the state’s child protection agency, Caroline stopped going to work and started working the phones and surfing the internet trying to find care for Amber. Unlike most of America’s low-wage laborers, Caroline had a computer, bought on time with a Sears credit card. Mostly she liked to play games and send e-mails, and even search for men on-line, but now the machine became a tool in a desperate task. She found the website of one agency after another, made calls, and came up empty-handed: the Governor’s Office of Disability, Parent to Parent, Social Security, Health and Human Services, Family Assistance, the Parent Information Center. “They’re all trying to find help, and there doesn’t seem to be help out there,” she said. She was told that Amber was too old for welfare’s child-care support and too young for Social Security’s.

All she really needed was a month, because a young couple she knew in Massachusetts planned to move up and live in her house while they worked—and they could be there evenings and nights with Amber. But when Caroline called her boss at the factory, he told her that he could not leave the position vacant for a month and had asked the temp agency to find someone else; he needed workers.

At school, the principal, Donald Hart, raised the issue with his “wraparound team,” comprising a school psychologist, a local counseling agency representative, a juvenile protection worker, and a guidance counselor. “I’ve asked them what is out there for services for Amber while Mom is working,” he reported, “and there is just nothing out there.”

“And I don’t have any extra money to pay anybody either,” Caroline added. “And I’m trying to do the best I can and get caught up on little bills. And now I don’t have a job, and I’m gonna have to go apply for welfare. You pull yourself up and then somebody has to knock you down. If I don’t work, it’s [also] neglect: not feeding or clothing my child.”

Perhaps the most curious and troubling facet of this confounding puzzle was everybody’s failure to pursue the most obvious solution: If the factory had just let Caroline work day shifts, her problem would have disappeared. She asked and got brushed off, but nobody else—not the school principal, not the doctor, not the myriad agencies she contacted—nobody in the profession of helping thought to pick up the phone and appeal to the factory manager or the foreman or anybody else in authority at her workplace.

Indeed, this solemn regard for the employer as untouchable, off limits, beyond the realm of persuasion unless in violation of the law, seems to permeate the culture of American anti-poverty efforts, with only a few exceptions. Even the most socially minded physicians and psychologists who treat malnourished children, for example, will advocate vigorously with government agencies to provide food stamps, health insurance, housing, and the like. But when they are asked if they ever urge the parents’ employers to raise wages enough to pay for nutritious food, the doctors express surprise at the notion. First, it has never occurred to them, and second, it seems hopeless. The suggestion makes them shrug. Wages are set by the marketplace, and you cannot expect magnanimity from the marketplace. It is the final arbiter from which there is no appeal.

Perhaps they’re right. With Caroline’s permission, I called her supervisor at the factory, just to ask why they had swing shifts. I assumed that it was hard to find people willing to work only evenings or nights, so a rotation expanded the labor supply. The supervisor never called back. After leaving many messages, I finally got a call from the human resources manager, a curt woman named Deborah Garrity. Since Caroline was a temporary worker hired through an agency, Garrity said, the factory had no responsibility for her and could not comment on her working hours, or even on the reason for the swing shifts. The following week was Caroline’s turn for the day shift anyway, and the temp agency had not yet found a replacement, so she went back to work. The school had not yet made a report of neglect, but the prospect hung over her.

The company did have a rationale for the rotating shifts, I later learned from Kevin Paradise, the Human Resources Leader of Tambrands factories in New Hampshire and Maine. “Rotation allows greater exposure of employees to the overall business,” he explained. People on perpetual night shifts tended to lose the big picture, to be less aware of a factory’s mission, and to leave problems for the succeeding shifts. He called this “a separation from the cultural standpoint.” Nighttime workers were also less likely to be promoted, because at night they didn’t have contact with management. These reasonable arguments did Caroline no good.

And then a little miracle happened. A woman with whom Caroline had worked at the homeless shelter happened to know someone from her church who offered to take Amber whenever necessary to her farm outside of town. So the job was saved. And in the end, the young couple moved early from Massachusetts, and Amber didn’t need the farm option. And when the couple was eventually evicted by Caroline, who felt they were snooping into everything, she found a woman nearby who would take Amber for $50 a week. That effectively reduced Caroline’s hourly wage by $1.25, but she was still ahead financially.

“God works in mysterious ways,” she declared. “I have a guardian angel.” Even with the angel’s help, though, she didn’t hope to be rolling in money. “I don’t want to,” she replied. “I want to be average. I think rich people have a lot of problems too. I wish for a normal life.”

But hers was a normal life in the forgotten America, and in such lives, small blessings had a way of shimmering elusively, then evaporating. For months, Caroline had looked forward to requesting a permanent job at the Tampax factory. At first, she was told that she could apply after working five hundred hours as a temp, then she was told one thousand hours, and then she learned that a young man had been hired permanently after only a month as a temp worker. When she questioned the procedure, a supervisor barked, “We hire who we want.” Furthermore, the application required her to take a written test without being paid for the time she would spend. And her pleas to work a day shift were rejected, even though a few people were being put on steady hours.

So she left Procter & Gamble and returned to the factory that made books of wallpaper samples, working 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and dropping from $10 to $7.50 an hour. She tried to look on the bright side. She was saving $50 a week in child-care expenses, her daughter was more content, and her income had the chance of declining enough that she would qualify for fuel assistance, a government program that subsidized the cost of heating oil. It was February, after all.

As the recession set in, Procter & Gamble closed the Tambrands factory, which made Caroline feel smart about having resigned. Otherwise, she didn’t notice the economic downturn. “I can’t see much difference,” she remarked. “I’ve always struggled, and I’m still struggling.” She continued to move horizontally from job to job. She felt free to walk out of the wallpaper factory after a squabble, got hired by a manufacturer of photo albums for $7 an hour, and then worked as a cashier at a Cumberland Farms convenience store and gas station for $7.50. “The only thing I don’t like is a drive-off,” she said—the driver who fills the tank and speeds away without paying. “You can lose your job if it’s more than five bucks, if you get too many of them.” How many would be too many she did not know, however: The boss kept the employees off balance by never telling them.

She was still living on the edge, perhaps one drive-off away from unemployment, unable to keep up payments on her debts. Life seemed oppressive and dangerous. Every dollar that was coming in was going out, and she still owed about $12,000 on her credit cards, $20,000 on her student loans, and $54,000 for two mortgages on her house. Nothing in her job prospects suggested that she would ever be able to make any headway against the weight of all those debts. She was trapped in the inescapable netherworld of work, and as the grinding fact of that stagnation gradually infiltrated her understanding, as she finally accepted the improbability of advancement, she began to think about the unthinkable: bankruptcy. Under the law, her student loans would not be forgiven, and her mortgages could not be avoided without losing her house. But the credit card balances would go away, and that would ease her burden.

The trouble was, Caroline did not feel morally right about taking the step. She had recently purchased new appliances on time from a local store, and Brenda told her that declaring bankruptcy was a form of stealing. “It hurt my feelings when she came out and said that,” Caroline admitted, but it also struck a chord. Her spending had been undisciplined, she knew, though she thought she had improved. She needed a fresh start. Painstakingly, she saved until she had $800 for filing and lawyer’s fees, and made the move. “It was hard, and I got real depressed,” she said. “It was my pride, and I didn’t want people to know about it.”

Amber was chafing against the limits of her schooling. She hungered to read, but the high school provided only one hour of tutoring a week. She craved more math than she could get. She yearned to be in the main part of the school, not in the vocational and technical wing, where students were stigmatized as stupid and many seemed considerably less able than she. “Beth,” a counselor at a community center, concluded after intervening with the school: “They did not have here in this district what Amber needed and wanted very desperately. What she needed and wanted was to be more in the mainstream, and this was really not allowed, and that was a shame, because she had so much to offer.” Amber also needed “continuous, intense reading instruction,” Beth observed. Instead, she was taught what she already knew: cooking, shopping, doing laundry. When school officials received pleas from the counselor, who had previously worked as a para-professional with emotionally handicapped kids in a nearby town, “they laughed at me,” Beth said in surprise. Perhaps they wouldn’t have laughed if Caroline had been wealthy enough to hire a psychologist or a lawyer to make her case and bring pressure, as the affluent must often do.

Whether or not Amber could have been mainstreamed was an open question. The school psychologist, who had done a battery of tests the year before, had confirmed Amber’s mild to moderate intellectual disability, with IQ scores ranging from 43 to 57 in a variety of areas from numerical operations to written expression. “Amber did not know her birthday,” the report stated. “She had difficulty with word finding. Amber’s math skills are dependent on using her fingers to add and subtract.”

Whatever the best course, Caroline gradually lost confidence in the Claremont system’s ability to provide it. She had no money for a private school, but she did have a daughter-in-law in Muncie, Indiana, who agreed to take Amber temporarily while her husband served in the army. The public school there sounded promising. “I spoke with the superintendent’s office,” Beth said. “They told me what school it would be. I spoke to the special ed teacher there. She was very helpful, and I explained exactly what Amber needed. [She said,] ‘We have programs here. She’ll be at the high school with everybody, will be expected to do as much as she is able.’ ”

By September, Amber was in Indiana, ecstatic with school, enrolled in an adult literacy class, and slated to begin three tutoring sessions a week in reading and math. She soon moved into higher-level special ed classes, was scheduled for tests in the spring, and felt herself progressing. Her brightened mood on the phone buoyed her mother’s spirits. But the advances would come at a high price.

Caroline had heard that jobs were plentiful in Muncie, so she prepared to follow her daughter there. To leave, however, she had to sell her precious house, for she could not comfortably rent it out from a distance. Tenants might do damage, and she had no money to travel back and forth to oversee repairs. It took a few months until a buyer could be found to invest in this struggling town, and Caroline had to settle for a break-even sale at $79,000, an amount that should have brought her a nice profit over the $37,000 she had paid. She made nothing, though, not a penny. In effect, she said sadly, “I gave it away.”

The responsibility that she had demonstrated as a homeowner had lifted the value and, ironically, had stolen her equity. She had maintained and improved the house sensibly for the long term. She still owed about $34,000 on the first mortgage, and the second mortgage of $19,000 carried a pre-payment penalty, which forced her to pay just over $20,000 to get out of it. The federal grants of $17,000 for lead paint removal and new siding required pro-rated reimbursement if the house was sold within ten years and five years respectively, so she had to pay back nearly $16,000. In total, she owed about $70,000. After adding the real estate agent’s fee, taxes, and other closing costs, she ended up short $300, which the agent kindly absorbed by reducing the commission. Five and a half years of mortgage and interest payments had yielded nothing, and one of her dreams was gone.

As the New Hampshire winter arrived in early December, Caroline left with pockets nearly empty. She could not even afford to rent a U-Haul truck. Her older daughter, who had a good job with Verizon, lent her $700, and a couple of friends donated their vacation time to drive the truck and Caroline to Indiana, by way of a slashing blizzard in upstate New York. On the move again, as she had been since childhood, she was happy to see a little of the country.

Muncie was not gentle, though. “I miss my house, and I miss my friends,” Caroline lamented, “but I had so much overhead, I’m glad to be out of that.” After six weeks with her daughter-in-law, she found a small apartment in a public housing project in a hard section of town. “It’s not the best neighborhood,” she observed mildly. It was riddled with drug dealers and prostitutes, and a shooting had just occurred two blocks from the convenience store where she was working. “Jobs don’t pay nothing around here,” she had discovered. Her hourly wage, $5.45 without benefits, meant a downward slide even from the $6 at the Vermont plastics factory more than a quarter century before. “I just can’t get ahead,” she said.

Six months later, Caroline’s skill in hunting for government aid brought her a couple of important finds. First, she was accepted into public housing in a safer neighborhood. “It’s really nice,” she said. Second, she managed to get Medicaid to contribute over $400 for a new set of false teeth, provided that she could come up with $322 to cover the balance. She did not have that kind of money in her anemic bank account, so her older daughter gave her a loan. The teeth gave her confidence. “They fit nice, and I still got to get used to them,” Caroline reported hopefully. Once they felt comfortable, she planned to try them out in a few job interviews. She found work at a convenience store, went to $7 an hour, and was training to be an assistant manager. That was the optimistic side of her balance sheet.

The debit side was severe, however. The benefits of moving to Muncie were beginning to look dubious. “I think it’s harder to make friends here,” she observed. “I don’t get out much.” The finances were harder. She was stunned by Indiana’s income tax (New Hampshire had none), plus the city and county taxes. Her low wage didn’t keep up with the outflow. “I’m broke,” she said flatly. Furthermore, the reason for the move—Amber’s life prospects—now seemed less certain. She was learning more, but Caroline could no longer afford the $140 a month for Amber’s reading tutoring. Besides, Caroline said, “the school told me I was wasting my money.” Amber would never learn to read.

Money may not always cure, but it can often insulate one problem from another. Parents of means could have addressed Amber’s difficulties without uprooting themselves and discarding their assets. They could have purchased services; brought their own skills to bear; and walled off their house, their jobs, and their lifestyle from the intrusion of hardship. In the house of the poor, however, the walls are thin and fragile, and troubles seep into one another.

Notes

Introduction: At the Edge of Poverty

1.  From the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

2.  Richard A. Oppel, Jr., New York Times, Dec. 18, 2000, p. A19.

3.  Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Bulletin, Sept. 2014, Vol. 100, No. 4, Table 2, p.12.

4.  “Life Expectancy at Birth” and “Mortality Rate, infant,” The World Bank, 2015.

5.  Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2nd ed., unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam, 1956), p. 1935.

6.  American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 1419.

7.  Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam, 1983), p. 922.

8.  Michael Harrington, The Other America (Baltimore: Penguin, 1963), pp. 173–74.

9.  The Census Bureau “counts money income before taxes and does not include capital gains and noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).” The poverty threshold is adjusted annually on the basis of the consumer price index.

10.  For more on the history of the poverty index, see Gordon M. Fisher, “The Development of the Orshansky Poverty Thresholds and Their Subsequent History as the Official U.S. Poverty Measure,” http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/povmeas/papers/orshansky.html [inactive].

11.  Kathleen Short, John Iceland, and Thesia I. Garner, Experimental Poverty Measures, 1998 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau), http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/povmeas/exppov/exppov.html [inactive].

12.  Kathleen Short, “The Research Supplemental Poverty Measure,” Current Population Reports: 2010, Nov. 2011, http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60‒241.pdf [inactive].

13.  The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Public Broadcasting System, Mar. 17, 1997.

14.  Weekend Edition, National Public Radio, Jan. 16, 2000.

Work Doesn’t Work

1.  Alan Weil and Kenneth Finegold, Welfare Reform: The Next Act (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2002). Introduction at http://www.urban.org/pubs/welfare_reform/intro.html [inactive].

2.  Robert Lerman, “Single Parents’ Earnings Monitor,”Urban Institute, Oct. 26, 2001, and Dec. 26, 2002, available at www.urban.org.

3.  Jack P. Shonkoff, Chapter 37.2, “Mental Retardation,” in Richard E. Behrman, Robert M. Kliegman, and Ann M. Arvin, eds., Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics, 16th ed. (Philadelphia: Saunders, 2000), pp. 126–29.

4.  Barbara Ehrenreich, “Two-Tiered Morality,” New York Times, June 30, 2002, Section 4, p. 15. Also, Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (New York: Holt, 2001), p. 146.

5.  Now with Bill Moyers, PBS, Nov. 8, 2002.

ALSO BY

DAVID K. SHIPLER

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Mightier Than the Sword

Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times veteran David K. Shipler turns his incisive reporting to a critical American ideal: freedom of speech. Anchored in personal stories—sometimes shocking, sometimes absurd, sometimes dishearteningly familiar—Shipler’s investigations of the cultural limits on both expression and the willingness to listen expose troubling instabilities in the very foundations of our democracy. Focusing on recent free speech controversies across the nation, Shipler maps a rapidly shifting topography of political and cultural norms: parents in Michigan rallying to teachers vilified for their reading lists; conservative ministers risking their churches’ tax-exempt status to preach politics from the pulpit; national security reporters using techniques more common in dictatorships to avoid leak prosecution; a Washington, D.C., Jewish theater’s struggle for creative control in the face of protests targeting productions critical of Israel; history teachers in Texas quietly bypassing a reactionary curriculum to give students access to unapproved perspectives; the mixed blessings of the Internet as a forum for dialogue about race. These and other stories coalesce to reveal the systemic patterns of both suppression and opportunity that are making today a transitional moment for the future of one of our founding principles. Measured yet sweeping, Freedom of Speech brilliantly reveals the triumphs and challenges of defining and protecting the boundaries of free expression in modern America.

Political Science

RIGHTS AT RISK

The Limits of Liberty in Modern America

Rights at Risk is an enlightening, intensely researched examination of violations of the constitutional principles that preserve individual rights and civil liberties from courtrooms to classrooms. With telling anecdote and detail, David K. Shipler explores the territory where the Constitution meets everyday America, where legal compromises—before and since 9/11—have undermined the criminal justice system’s fairness, enhanced the executive branch’s power over citizens and immigrants, and impaired some of the freewheeling debate and protest essential in a constitutional democracy. Often shocking, yet ultimately idealistic, Rights at Risk shows us the shadows of America where the civil liberties we rightly take for granted have been eroded—and summons us to reclaim them.

Law/Current Affairs

THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE

How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties

How have our rights to privacy and justice been undermined? What exactly have we lost? Pulitzer Prize–winner David K. Shipler searches for the answers to these questions by traveling the midnight streets of dangerous neighborhoods with police, listening to traumatized victims of secret surveillance, and digging into dubious terrorism prosecutions. The law comes to life in these pages, where the compelling stories of individual men and women illuminate the broad array of government’s powers to intrude into personal lives. Examining the historical expansion and contraction of fundamental liberties in America, this is the account of what has been taken—and of how much we stand to regain by protesting the departures from the Bill of Rights. And, in Shipler’s hands, each person’s experience serves as a powerful incitement for a retrieval of these precious rights.

Current Affairs/Law

THE WORKING POOR

Invisible in America

As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology—hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor. We meet drifting farmworkers in North Carolina, exploited garment workers in New Hampshire, illegal immigrants trapped in the steaming kitchens of Los Angeles restaurants, addicts who struggle into productive work from the cruel streets of the nation’s capital—each life another aspect of a confounding, far-reaching urgent national crisis.

Social Science

A COUNTRY OF STRANGERS

Blacks and Whites in America

In this magnificent exploration of the psychological landscape where blacks and whites meet, David K. Shipler bypasses both extremists and celebrities and takes us among ordinary Americans as they encounter one another across racial lines. We learn how blacks and whites see each other, how they interpret each other’s behavior, and how certain damaging images and assumptions seep into the actions of even the most unbiased. We delve into dimensions of stereotyping and discrimination that are usually invisible and discover the unseen prejudices and privileges of white Americans, and what black Americans make of them.

Political Science

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