TBR: Chutes and Ladders
In 1999, Katherine Newman published No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. This book examined the experiences of 300 individuals who had applied for minimum wage jobs at fast food restaurants in Harlem during the early 1990s. Newman found that competition was fierce for these jobs, with as many as 14 applicants for each position, and high school graduates in their 20s crowding out teens and high school dropouts. Moving back and forth from generalizations drawn from the broad study to detailed profiles of individual workers, she reported on the fast food workers’ pride in being part of the legitimate economy — even in low-status, low-paid jobs where their friends teased them and they came home stinking of grease. They valued the semi-independence that paying their own way gave them, even though almost none could afford to live on their own. Published just after welfare reform, the book was a stinging rebuke to those who said that the poor didn’t want to work.
Seven years later, Newman is back with Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market. She’s followed a subset of the workers she first met in 1993 and 1994 and is back to tell us how they fared during the boom years of the late 1990s and the recession of 2001-2002. The book opens with an update on the workers who were most prominently featured in the first book. Jamal is now working at a lumber yard in a small town in Northern California, having followed his new wife back to her family out west. Kyesha has a union job as a janitor for the NYC Housing Authority. Carmen is out of work, having been fired from her department store job for a rules violation, but her husband Sal is the manager of the video store.
Newman divides the workers into three groups — "high flyers," "up but not outs" and "low riders." While many, even most of the workers are still struggling, perhaps the biggest surprise in the study is how many high flyers there are in a group that once seemed so disadvantaged — about 20 percent of those Newman was able to track over time. (She also uses a national sample for comparison, and estimates that the figure is closer to 10 percent for overall minimum wage workers in retail food industries. She also argues that this figure is not much lower in economic bad times than in boom years.) Although Newman doesn’t explicitly make the connection, one of the points I took away was that the "welfare reform success stories" that various governors liked to flaunt were neither as rare as the opponents of welfare reform suggested, nor as much the result of welfare reform as the supporters implied.
Newman concludes the book with a review of suggestions for how to improve the lives of the working poor, and generally I agree with them (expand the EITC, make higher education more affordable, support quality child care). But the book left me with many unanswered questions about what made some of these workers succeed while others struggled. By and large, formal education wasn’t the answer — the high flyers were more likely to have succeeded by getting into a unionized position or a skilled trade than by getting a bachelor’s degree. (Those pursuing advanced degrees may not yet have seen the payoff, since they were usually only able to go to school part-time.)
In addition to the core ethnographic study, Newman pulls in a lot of data and information from related studies. I’m a policy wonk, and even I found myself glazing over at times. But the book is well worth reading, mostly for how it will undermine your preconceptions, whether you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative.
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By the way, I’ve set up an Amazon aStore as a way to display the books that I’ve reviewed by category. It’s a work in progress, so let me know if you have requests.
