First, a centralized data system that took in all information and then generated matching programs, with completed applications, ID cards, authorizations, whatever, would make it possible for those in need to do one-stop shopping. He also provides much detail about the hurdles faced by the working poor when they try to get social services.Ī couple of possible ideas popped to me from this. Certainly centralizing revenues and then distributing them according to actual need would be a preferable way to address such imbalances. For instance, there is attention given to the disparity in spending for schooling based on local real estate valuation. From the tales and analyses emerge nuggets of potential policy directions. The book provides considerable ammunition for the view that the poor are kept there by an uncaring and hostile society. This is a depressing account of many individuals who are afflicted with poverty and are, with exceptions, unable to escape. It is a book that stands to make a difference. This impassioned book not only dissects the problems, but makes pointed, informed recommendations for change. And unlike mostworks on poverty, this one delves into the calculations of some employers as well-their razor-thin profits, their anxieties about competition from abroad, their frustrations in finding qualified workers. 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.
We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor-white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. 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 makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology-hard, honest work.
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