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COPYRIGHT 2004 The National Affairs, Inc.
MORE than a decade ago, the political scientist Lawrence Mead predicted that the passage of workfare legislation would move American politics to the left, because mainstream Americans would be more receptive to easing the lot of "a poor population working at higher levels." To the extent that welfare reform transformed the idle poor into the working poor, the poor would be viewed with greater sympathy. The publication of David Shipler's study The Working Poor: Invisible in America ([dagger]) shows Mead's prescience. In the book, Shipler tells the stories of "working people who ha[ve] been left behind" while American prosperity soared--people whose "wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives." The premise underlying his book is that the term working poor "should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America."
Previously a New York Times reporter for more than 20 years, Shipler is the author of three earlier books (on Soviet Russia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and American race relations), the second of which won a Pulitzer Prize. Thus he comes to the book not as a poverty expert but as a journalist. His book chiefly recounts the stories of many impoverished workers--among them a child-care worker in Akron, Ohio, a Korean waitress in Los Angeles, a Mexican agricultural laborer in North Carolina and an ex-drug addict who learned to service photocopiers in Washington, D.C.--whom he came to know and befriend over the course of several years. By telling their stories, Shipler seeks to make middle-class Americans aware of the living conditions of these "invisible" Americans, and...
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