42 pages • 1 hour read
David K. ShiplerThe Working Poor: Invisible in America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The American Dream
The American ideal that through hard-work and persistence a person should be able to thrive and attain a state of well-being is an important motif in the book. It is both praised and challenged by Shipler. On the one hand, the ideal has the advantage of setting a “demanding standard, both for the nation and every resident” (5), leading to the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty. The American Dream has lead Latin American migrant agricultural workers to the United States so that they might better provide for their families, as it is also present in the career ambitions of young students from deprived backgrounds. When the Dream of rising from poverty and oppression is realized through the examples of Peaches and Leary Brock, it is a means of integrating outcasts into the mainstream. As soon as Peaches begins to earn a sufficient wage, she “let herself dream a little," entering into the national ethos of visualizing aspirations:"I can go to New York and see it if I want to” (261).
However, the American dream also wrongly “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” (5). With the marketplace as a “fair and final judge; a low wage is somehow the worker’s fault, for it simply reflects the low value of his labor” (6). Throughout his study, Shipler shows how such work cannot be deemed low value when it is essential to America’s functioning. The fact that people who perform this essential labor are often not able to maintain a decent standard of living is deeply shaming for the whole country. In a way of implicating the reader and preventing a judgmental “us and them” attitude, Shipler makes visible the labor of the working poor and shows how it relates directly to every reader who eats, wears clothes. and utilizes manufactured goods.
Credit
The word “credit” derives from the Latin verb “credere,” which means to believe. Belief, or "wishful thinking," is an appropriate association for money a person does not currently possess but intends to pay back at a future point, plus interest. As an important motif in Shipler’s book, credit is omnipresent in the lives of the poor, from the sharks who haunt deprived neighborhoods and charge interest on payday loans, to the debts that plague poor families, such as Kara King’s $600 divorce-bill from an abusive previous marriage. The inadequately schooled, often innumerate poor are swindled out of the maximum potential of their money, as they fall back on credit.
Shipler shows how their attitudes to finances, conditioned in hardship, are both survivalist and impulsive. Sometimes their survivalist mentality is understandable, as in the case where the deadline for a bill arrives before the next payday; at other times, the poor are judged for spontaneous purchases of articles that give them the illusion of keeping up with the rest of America. For example, the case-worker Brenda St. Laurence describes with some disapproval how Caroline Payne “likes her credit cards” because they pay for the “nice things” (54) her hard work ought, but does not, earn her. Brenda, who comes from a more self-disciplined background than Caroline, believes that relying on credit is a weakness. Shipler, however, advocates a compassionate attitude towards "indulgent" spending amongst the working poor, stating that due to the force of advertising and the worship of wealth, America is a difficult place to be frugal.
Teeth
In Shipler’s text, teeth are a prominent symbol because their quality is a visible index of well-being and status. Toothless at the age of 50 because she has not been able to afford dental care, Caroline Payne appears 10 years older and is overlooked for promotion. She smiles without showing teeth and therefore lacks the “thousand-watt beam of friendly delight” (53) that a more visible, better-paid position seems to require. Caroline’s teeth, according to Shipler, “reflect and reinforce destitution” (53) because they are a barrier to her gaining visibility and promotion.
Kara King also has poor dental health, owing to a previous alcoholic husband who used to “smack [her] around and break [her] teeth” (175). In this instance, missing teeth are a visible marker of physical abuse inflicted on women stuck in the poverty trap as their bodies become the whipping grounds for the frustrations of substance abuse and thwarted masculinity.
In impoverished school-districts, a toothache is cited as a common barrier to concentrating in lessons. Diets that are high in sugar, alongside inadequate dental care, both of which are common in poor households, lead to this affliction. As in the case of Caroline, the dental health of these school children both reflects their poverty and reinforces it because toothache prevents them from fully applying themselves in the classroom.
