'The Working Poor' tells rarely told tales

Until recently, I lived in a four-bedroom house with four other people. One has been unemployed since November. Another has a chronic medical condition, leaving her too insecure to haggle for a better wage or a job elsewhere. The other two work for just above minimum wage, one without benefits, in jobs that offer little opportunity for advancement.

I've watched American capitalism fence them out of financial, and with it, emotional security and opportunity.

Though they're rarely told, their stories, and those of their 35 million countrymen and women who live on incomes below the poverty line, are far more revealing about the state and nature of American life than the fate of Martha Stewart or even the war in Iraq.

Given this blindness and apathy, David K. Shipler's "The Working Poor" is a welcome and important piece of journalism.

Following the recent work of author Barbara Ehrenreich ("Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America"), Shipler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author ("Arab and Jew") spent nearly seven years following 15 people as they tried to work their way out of poverty after the 1996 welfare-reform law forced them off the dole.

Their stories will make readers occasionally hopeful but more often discouraged and angry at both the brutal reality of American-style capitalism and at the poor themselves, who often make glaringly stupid decisions.

Through his characters, Shipler manages to see all aspects of poverty — psychological, personal, societal — and examine how they're related. He shows how an already-tattered blanket rapidly unravels.

Meet Lisa Brooks, whose rundown apartment exacerbates her child's asthma, "which leads to a call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill that can't be paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the interest rate on an auto loan, which leads to the purchase of an unreliable used car, which jeopardizes a mother's punctuality at work, which limits her promotions and earning capacity, which confines her to poor housing." And so on.

Shipler also examines individual elements of poverty's always interrelating causes and effects. First, being poor is expensive. "Poverty is like a bleeding wound. It weakens defenses." The poor go to loan sharks, both Tony Soprano-style and his legal counterparts, payday-loan agents and credit cards that charge exorbitant interest rates. Without health insurance, they pay emergency-room fees. Their secondhand appliances fail on them. They don't have cash on hand to buy in bulk. Ratchet. Ratchet. Ratchet.

Next, work doesn't work. Here's Caroline Payne. "She was not lazy — she was caustic about colleagues and relatives who were. She was punctual, rarely out sick, willing to do night shifts, and assiduous in her work habits." And yet, after 20 years, her wage went from $6 an hour at a shoe factory to $6.80 at a Wal-Mart. In the intervening years, she had obtained an associate's degree, which led to nothing. When she had to have her teeth pulled, she suspected it killed her chances of a promotion at Wal-Mart.

A chapter on the abasement and exploitation of immigrants — legal and illegal — is unsurprising, though the more outrageous for being so.

The saddest and most alarming detail of the book, however, is the number of poor women — they and their children make up the majority of America's indigent — who tell Shipler unprompted and rather casually that they've been sexually abused as children, adults or both. Poverty isn't just not having the good life. It can be far more painful.

While Shipler evokes empathy for his subjects, he also isn't afraid to grab us by the back of the head, forcing us to look at the folly of the working poor's choices. Willie and Sarah Goodell spend $50 a week on cigarettes alone; they spend money on meals out, clothes, shoes, CDs. They have no bank account. They are irresponsible parents to their young children, who will almost certainly struggle in school and continue the cycle of poverty.

There is much here to ponder for conservatives and liberals alike. The dominant ideological biases don't hold. The working poor are not always blameless victims, but the current regime of tough love and Wal-Mart wages will not lift them out of poverty.

This book ultimately matters, though, if it draws our attention to people like my former roommates: the people who take care of our children, clean our homes, stock the shelves at Wal-Mart, cook our restaurant meals and generally subsidize our throw-it-away affluence.

J. Patrick Coolican: 206-464-3315 or jcoolican@seattletimes.com