|
Inside
the lives of the poor
Our national resistance
to attacking poverty head-on is not grounded in a lack of compassion.
Rather, America is paralyzed by the enduring conflict between the
high value our culture places on rational individualism and the
reality of human need. As far as resolving the dilemma of the working
poor, Shulman’s idea that some configuration of more money,
better policy and stronger labor regulations would do the trick
makes sense. But what configuration? In a capitalist society --
in fact, in any society -- poverty is an ideological problem
as much as a social and economic one. And in the U.S., there
is no clear consensus in either popular or political thought about
whether poor people are poor because of the way they act , or
the things that happen to them.
If poor people are poor because of the way they act, laws and policies
to promote the general welfare might include a system of incentives
and deterrents to reform self-defeating behaviors and efforts to
isolate those who appear disinterested in self-improvement so they
won’t drag the rest of us down. On the other hand, if individuals
are thrust into poverty by things that happen to them, we’d
need to create laws and policies to prevent or remove conditions
which exacerbate social and economic inequality. At different times during the 20th century, the United States
has implemented policies based on one or the other of these approaches
with mixed results.
After visiting the homes, neighborhoods and workplaces of the men,
women and families who inhabit the unforgiving terrain of “forgotten
America,” Pulitzer-prize winning author David K. Shipler found that neither the causes of poverty nor its potential remedies
can be calculated with the “either/or” formula. In The
Working Poor: Invisible In America (2004), Shipler
documents the exhausting struggles of families living at the edge
of the nation’s social and economic margins: “Their
wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their
lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back.” The
Working Poor rigorously challenges the simplistic logic of
the “American Myth” -- the supposition that “people
who work hard and make the right decisions in life can achieve anything
they want in America” and its equally problematic counter-logic,
the “Anti-American Myth,” which holds that “society
is largely responsible for the individual’s poverty.”
Like Sharon Hays in Flat Broke With Children, Shipler
discovers that poverty is caused by a predictable combination of factors
that involve both how individuals act and the things that
happen to them. Like the rest of us, people in poverty sometimes
make poor choices and end up worse for the wear.
But there are also pervasive social, cultural and economic factors
which compound the effects of poverty; as Shipler observes, “The
poor have less control than the affluent over their private decision…
Their personal mistakes have larger consequences, and their personal
achievements yield smaller returns.” In other words, poverty
in and of itself is wounding -- when the poor take a fall, they
fall harder.
Of the workers he portrays in The Working Poor -- including factory workers, agricultural workers, child care workers,
welfare mothers, sewing machine operators, retail workers, and many
others who drift from one low-wage occupation to another --
Shipler writes, “Each person’s life is the mixed product
of bad choices and bad fortune, of roads not taken and roads cut
off by accident of birth or circumstance. It is difficult to find
someone whose poverty is not related to his or her unwise behavior…
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.” And in the case of women, he might
have added “poorly treated,” since women living in financially
insecure families and neighborhoods are significantly more likely
to experience domestic violence.
Shipler doesn’t downplay the dejection and internal instability
experienced by the low-income families he spends time with -- like everyone else in the U.S., Shipler's subjects don't
always spend their money wisely, don't always parent well, and
are sometimes self-indulgent, disorganized, apathetic, abusive,
slovenly and oppositional. Yet Shipler renders these weaknesses with
extraordinary kindness and empathy; the reader is never permitted
to picture the working poor as anything less than fully human.
Shipler is especially concerned about the lasting effects of inadequate
or harmful parenting on both the adults and children he encounters,
but he remains guarded in his assessment:
There is no more highly
charged subject in the discussion of poverty, for impoverished
families have long been stigmatized as dysfunctional. The father
is a drunken or addicted ne’er-do-well, if he’s around
at all, and the mother is an angry shrew or a submissive incompetent,
The parents don’t read to their children, don’t value
education, don’t teach or exhibit morality. That is the
image, Absent from the picture are the devoted grandmothers and
parents who love zealously, the sensible adults who make smart
choices within limited means, the supportive web of relatives,
all of whom could overcome with more help from society at large.
At the extremes of
the debate, liberals don’t want to see the dysfunctional
family, and conservatives want to see nothing else. Depending
on the ideology, destructive parenting is either not a cause or
the only cause of poverty. Neither stereotype is correct. In my
research along the edges of poverty, I didn’t find any adults
without troubled childhoods, and I came to see those histories
as both cause and effect, intertwined with the myriad other difficulties
of money, housing, schooling, health, jobs, and neighborhood that
reinforce one another.
However, when Shipler asks a behavioral pediatrician who “treats
children of all socio-economic levels” to describe the conditions
that “prevent bad parenting,” his answer implies the possibility of good parenting is reserved for the middle-class:
“It’s a lot easier to be a good parent if you’re
well rested, you can afford baby-sitters, and you have someone to
clean your house. People who have some of those psychological resources
that allow them to be good parents quite often have the resources
that allow them to be relatively secure financially.” Of course,
the “psychological resources” the doctor itemizes are
usually dependent on the economic resources that low-income parents
sorely lack. One of the more disconcerting aspects of The Working
Poor is the number of examples of helping professionals who
fail to see beyond the lens of their own middle-class privilege
when evaluating the behavior and problems of the poor.
The Working Poor connects the lives of low-income families
to the wider circle of individuals and institutions that influence
their well-being -- employers, social workers, teachers and
school administrators, health care professionals and workforce training
programs. Some of these agents have a better apprehension of the
complex origins of individual poverty than others; some are overtly
judgmental and unhelpful, but others are doing what they can to
improve the lives of the poor. While Shipler cites some of these
efforts as exemplary, he predicts that the proliferation of isolated
interventions -- no matter how innovative or effective -- will never be enough to relieve, let alone reduce, the dire consequences
of poverty in working America. As Shipler writes, “All of
the problems have to be solved at once.”
As long as a society
picks and chooses which problems to resolve in crisis— usually
the one that has propelled the family to a particular agency for
help— another crisis is likely to follow, and another. If
we set out to find only the magic solution— a job, for example—
we will miss the complexities and the job will not be enough.
The first question
is whether we know exactly what to do. What problems do we have
the skills to solve, and where do our skills reach their outer
limits? …The second question is whether we have the will
to exercise our skill. Would we spend the money, make sacrifices,
restructure the hierarchy of wealth to alleviate the hardships
down below?
We lack the skill to
solve some problems and the will to solve others, but one piece
of knowledge we now possess: We understand that holistic remedies
are vital.
The overriding question
is what, and how much, our government will do to design and implement
such holistic remedies. This is where the American Myth and the
American Anti-Myth vie for supremacy, and where politics-as-usual
clash with the politics of care. According to Shipler, “If
either the system’s exploitation or the victim’s irresponsibility
were to blame, one or the other side of the debate would be satisfied.”
The lesson of The Working Poor is that such simplistic
morality -- and any social policies that might be derived from it -- will be insufficient to lift the downward pressures which fix low-income
families in the grim world of forgotten America. “Opportunity
and poverty in this country cannot be explained by either the American
Myth that hard work is a panacea or by the Anti-Myth that the system
imprisons the poor,” Shipler concludes. “Relief will
come, if at all, in an amalgam that recognizes both the society’s
obligation through government and business, and the individuals
obligation through labor and family -- and the commitment of
both the society and the individual through education.”
The nation’s working
poor may be invisible and forgotten, but they are part of us -- our lives and economy depend on their labor. And until we rework
our vision of the American Dream to fuse the ideals of freedom and
self-determination with the complex realities of human need and
human frailty, many more of us may be joining their ranks.
What
works for mothers
Beyond
the problems with welfare reform, beyond the problems of low-wage
work and the working poor, poverty in America remains primarily
a women’s problem -- or more precisely, a mothers’
problem. While the overall poverty rate for women aged 18 to 64
is 10.6 percent in the U.S. (compared to 8.1 percent for men in
the same age group), 33 percent of single parent women with children
under 18 live in households with incomes below the official poverty
line. Lone mothers are nearly five times more likely to live in
poverty than mothers in married couple families -- which is
one of the rationales for pitching marriage promotion as an anti-poverty
measure, although one might reasonably conjecture that the individual
and social factors favoring or discouraging marriage are as varied
and complicated as the causes of poverty itself -- and that
the two are not unrelated.
Welfare
is not, and has never been, a poverty reduction program. In its
earliest inception, states provided stipends for widowed and abandoned
mothers so they would not be forced to seek employment outside
the home. In its present incarnation, welfare legislation dictates
that mothers must earn their benefits through labor force participation
and promotes marriage as the magic bullet that will wipe out women’s
poverty once and for all. Never has the U.S. implemented a social
program providing the kind of support that would allow poor mothers
and their children to live with dignity in the mainstream of society -- or help them thrive rather than just survive.
Work,
of course, has everything to do with women’s poverty -- not only due to low-wages, pay inequality, occupational segregation,
inflexible workplace practices, stingy social policies, and inadequate
labor regulations, but also because some kinds of labor are classified
as “work” while others are not. Caring for children
is obviously “work:” it requires time, effort, organized
thinking, and is location dependent (it happens wherever
young children are). And as Beth Shulman emphasizes in The
Betrayal of Work, most low-wage occupations dominated by
women are caring occupations -- nursing assistants, home health
aides and child care workers -- and these jobs are poorly
paid precisely because they involve caring work. There are also
broader issues of care yet to be resolved: What does it mean to
be a caring society? Do individuals have a right to be cared for?
Do they have a right to care for others? What is the relationship
between care and social power, and how can it be shifted so that
care-givers have a real shot at full social and economic citizenship?
Or, as
Hays writes in her conclusion to Flat Broke With Children:
A citizen should be
able to simultaneously raise children, care for others, participate
in determining the future of the nation, and be an independent,
productive participant in the public world. The question is, what
would it take to make this possible for all members of
this society?
The public discussion about how caring work should be acknowledged
and accommodated -- as well as how it should be shared within
families and by society as a whole -- is building steam. There
is little doubt that more generous public policies and stronger
labor regulations are in order if we hope to free more working families
from poverty. But as Sharon Hays reminds us, a nation’s laws
reflect a nation’s values. Unless we are prepared to move
backwards or stay in place, the emerging mothers’ movement
must address both the “law” and the “values”
ends of this equation at the same time. Any viable solution to the
compound circumstances of women’s poverty -- as well as
the middle-class work/life predicament -- will recognize that
carework is work without resorting to legislation that
codifies carework as the best work for women. My own dream
is that someday soon, this solution will be within our reach.
Judith
Stadtman Tucker
mmo : December 2004 |
