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Working PoorA social scientist shines new light on inner-city employment.by Edward L. Glaeser
Katherine Newman. Martha Stewart |
Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game ardently pursues two goals. She has written a superb ethnographic study of the employed yet impoverished inhabitants of a modern American ghetto. As a piece of social science, this book is a worthy heir to the great ghetto studies of the past, including The Philadelphia Negro, by W.E.B. DuBois, and Black Metropolis, by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton.
But as the introduction makes clear, Newman, Ford Foundation professor of urban studies at the Kennedy School of Government, is also interested in a political agenda. At the end of the book, she advocates specific programs. She wants to focus policy attention toward the working poor. One effect of this focus would be to protect this particular, and quite large, group. But perhaps more importantly, a renewed emphasis on the working poor might change prevailing stereotypes. The image of the welfare queen could be replaced by a less negative image of a hardworking burger-flipper.
The unfortunate aspect of Newman's attempt to merge social science and politics is that some readers may miss the book's major ethnographic contributions because of its political agenda. Indeed, the New York Times review became a political counter-manifesto, slighting Newman's analytical work to challenge her policy presumptions (more about that later). The existence of the urban working poor is an incontrovertible fact, and Newman gives us an invaluable view of their lives. Her observations have obvious political ramifications that would have been easier for readers of all political stripes to stomach if she had not felt it necessary to push her policy agenda so strongly. The strength of this book is not its policy analysis, but its research.
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No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City, by Katherine S. Newman
(Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95).
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And what research it is. using more than 300 detailed interview-surveys and many of the research tools that only anthropologists know how to wield (as an economist, I am appropriately envious), Newman has given us a terrific set of new and important facts about the working residents of Harlem. Her focus on them--rather than on criminals, welfare recipients, and the truly destitute--links her book more closely to the early twentieth-century classics by DuBois, Drake, and Cayton than to much of the more recent research, which has tended to focus on the out-of-work inhabitants of inner cities. That is an oddity in itself, because almost everywhere the working poor significantly outnumber the nonemployed. Newman has turned the spotlight back onto the largest group of poor Americans.
She focuses on the employees of Burger Barn (an alias for a large chain, the name of which was changed to protect the innocent). These employees are overwhelmingly young (more than 90 percent are under 33), but they are not teens (70 percent are 18 or older). They are also poor; most are earning close to the minimum wage. Newman and her students got to know the employees (and also the want-to-be employees) well, and they are thus able to give us a privileged glimpse into their lives. This glimpse yields a number of surprising and important facts, two of which Newman herself seems to think are preeminent.
First, the very existence in the middle of Harlem of a large, hardworking group of employees who share the ethical norms of mainstream America may be a surprise --and valuable reminder--to many readers distracted by the media focus on the unemployed or the illegally employed in ghettos. Second, the current hot job market in much of this country does not mean that inner-city residents find it easy to get jobs. (Interestingly, Newman's subjects are more likely to identify the unemployed as "losers by choice" than she is).
I certainly agree that these two points are important, but I think the real strength of the book (like the strength of the DuBois or Drake and Cayton works) lies in the number of secondary, and more surprising, insights that spring from its pages.
I never knew, for example, that the appeal of fast-food establishments to their own employees was determined to such a large degree by their social atmosphere. Her respondents develop a rich set of relationships (often personal, occasionally sexual) with their coworkers and clientele. Burger Barn provides well-meaning workers with similarly inclined peers and a safe setting. Newman paints a picture of an exasperating and often difficult work situation, but also an environment that is more pleasant for many of her subjects than the outside world. While the popular press has emphasized that many better-paid workers prefer work to home life, it never occurred to me that the same could be true of a fast-food restaurant in the ghetto. Clearly, I was being parochial.
This helps to solve one of the primary puzzles of this book. Given the illegal economic opportunities (mainly drugs) and welfare, coupled with the low wages and seemingly unpleasant conditions in the legal sector, why would anyone work in a Burger Barn? Newman's emphasis on the comfortable social atmosphere in the legal workplace provides a part of her answer.
Newman also emphasizes that young workers acquire human capital through Burger Barn jobs. Some workers use their earnings to continue in school. The jobs provide skills that can be used elsewhere, and offer access to the managerial track within Burger Barn itself. Like previous observers, Newman particularly highlights the importance of noncognitive skills. Success at Burger Barn doesn't require knowledge of stochastic calculus, but it isn't easy, either. Workers need to have a considerable aptitude for teamwork, and often need a great deal of ingenuity to address the unforeseen events that occur on the job.
Perhaps the greatest skill younger workers need to master is how to curb their tempers and obey the wishes of their managers or customers. Given that many of their customers are peers who take particular pleasure in taunting their employee acquaintances, who are unable to respond, any sort of restraint seems extremely difficult. (Personally, I can't imagine lasting more than three hours in this job, and I am sure that only a handful of my colleagues could last a day.) But the successful Burger Barn employees withstand the derision and learn to thrive in the service economy. A significant number of Newman's subjects appear to have learned how to structure their lives and how to deal better with others through their work at Burger Barn.
The third reason that workers come to Burger Barn is because they believe in the same mainstream work ethic that causes many nonghetto residents to scorn those in the inner city. Much more than most social scientists, Newman's Burger Barn employees believe that working people are ethically superior to those on welfare or those who are part of the drug culture. The important role of these ethical standards certainly belies the usual stereotypes of the ghetto.
Newman also helps us to understand other crucial questions about the inner city. Why don't ghetto residents move somewhere with better employment prospects? Why don't they invest in more education? Why does the cultural divide between the ghetto and the mainstream economy appear to be so large?
Newman's depiction of the rich social network that ghetto residents use to get by helps explain why residents stay. The ghetto enclave is attractive both to African Americans, who face considerable discrimination in the outside world, and to Hispanics, who often have imperfect English-language skills. Yet these explanations still fall short in many cases, such as the story of the father of one of her subjects, who moved with much of his family to Michigan, found a job as a bookkeeper, but then returned to Harlem, where he was unemployed.
Newman does make it abundantly clear that acquiring education is immensely difficult. Her stories of workers trying to support their families while taking courses are often heartrending. In many cases, at least, the work experiences are complementary to the school careers. Through their jobs, young subjects appear to learn the value of schooling, to receive solid mentoring in many cases, and to gain structure in their lives. Considering that 15 percent of the Burger Barn employees either had or were acquiring a four-year college degree, I finished the book amazed at how much human capital was being acquired under the circumstances.
Newman does not really address the causes and consequences of high rates of single-parent families in disadvantaged neighborhoods. These questions are critical, and have been unresolved since the Moynihan report of more than 30 years ago. Many of Newman's subjects endure extra financial hardship because they are single parents (or just low-income parents), and almost all of her subjects suffered themselves because they had no father. Family structure is an inescapable issue and remains one of the most pressing topics for future research.
The book also fails to address employment over the life cycle. To what extent will these workers transition into the nonpoor lower-middle class? To what extent is Burger Barn leading up or leading down? Newman's subjects are too young to really help us answer those questions. To a certain extent, the snippets we have about their parents give us a clue (and suggest an enormous variety of labor-market experiences, ranging from significant economic success to jail). But these are not a balanced sample, and don't really give us a true vision of what happens to Burger Barn employees when they hit 40. I can only hope that one of Newman's students will follow up the sample 20 years hence.
That Newman doesn't nail these topics is no criticism of the book, simply a wish for future work. My only real criticism concerns the policy recommendations at the end of the book. Newman's advocacy of place-based programs (such as empowerment zones, which are often contrasted with person-based programs, such as the earned-income tax credit, which she also advocates) is poorly argued and unconnected with the body of the book. Place-based programs are usually indirect. They distort the migration decision (i.e. they create incentives that keep people who should find a better life outside the ghetto from doing so), and may in the end do nothing more than raise real-estate values and induce the truly poor to move elsewhere for reasons unrelated to better job prospects. If she had at least considered seriously the costs and benefits of the various proposals that she discusses, I would have been happier. Luckily, the explicit policy elements of the book can easily be avoided, and readers can focus on the superb social science.
