No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: summer youth jobs, fast food jobs, fast food workers, Burger Barn, New York, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Harvard anthropologist Katherine S. Newman explodes the myth of America's unmotivated poor in No Shame in My Game, a study of low-wage workers and their job-seeking peers in central Harlem. This is a frontline perspective: in addition to hundreds of interviews, Newman also put her research assistants behind the counters of the fast-food restaurants alongside the study's subjects. The results show that America's largest group of impoverished citizens is not the unemployed, but the working poor. But what will move readers most is the struggling workers themselves, who suffer the indignities, exhaustion, and low compensation of jobs as "burger flippers" because, as one fast-food restaurant employee, Larry, says, "It's my job. You ain't puttin' no food on my table; you ain't puttin' no clothes on my back. I will walk tall with my Burger Barn uniform on." Newman explains how obstacles such as cuts in welfare, lack of health insurance (almost half of employed Americans under the poverty line have no coverage), and substandard education undercut even the most determined efforts of working poor like Larry. Fortunately, she also offers a thick list of old and new potential solutions to this crisis, from Earned Income Tax Credits to new training programs linking private industry to public schools with at-risk youth. An essential, eye-opening read. --Maria Dolan

From Publishers Weekly

After writing two books on the American middle class (Falling from Grace and Declining Fortunes), Newman delivers an eye-opening look at the urban working poor. First of all, she makes clear that the vast majority want to workAeven when their lives would be made easier by relying on public assistance. Newman, a cultural anthropologist and Harvard urban studies professor (formerly at Columbia, where she launched her research), conducted a two-year study of more than 200 African-American and Latino fast-food industry employees in Harlem. She found a strong commitment to the work ethic, even though these minimum-wage "McJobs" keep workers below the poverty line and offer little hope of advancement. Using case histories and interviews, Newman delves deeply into the aspirations and frustrations of her subjectsAadult or teenage, native-born or immigrantAwho try to make ends meet in a community hard hit by drugs, crime, a shrinking job base and underfunded schools. Among the policy initiatives Newman proposes are school-to-work transition programs, designed to forge close relationships between high school students and prospective employers, and employers' consortia to move inner-city workers into better jobs. She cites the promising results of private-public partnerships in Milwaukee and San Antonio, which combine job training and placement with provision of support services like day care, transportation and health care. Readers numbed by the familiar laments over poverty and by sermons on the bootstrap value of hard work will find Newman's bookAclearly a product of sustained attention paid to the working poorAbracingly refreshing.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (March 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375402543
• ISBN-13: 978-0375402548
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,221,159 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Shame in This Game - Must Read, June 6, 2001

By	AA "ashour001" (Newton, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (Paperback)

This is a hands-on, front line study of America's working poor, a subject so infrequently covered in news media, with gross misunderstandings and negative stereotypes. Katherine Newman and a group of her graduate students from Columbia University spent years learning virtually ALL there is to know about the lives of workers in a fast food burger chain in Harlem in New York City. Through Newman's very accessible language we get to understand who these workers really are, what makes them settle for the lowest of ranks in the American Society, and what motivates them to go and find and keep these jobs.

Newman's very interesting approach is to take us into the lives of her "subjects", we get to know how and with whom do they live, who do they befriend and socialize with, how did they get their jobs and so much more. Relatively early on Newman makes a very clear point; the lives of the welfare poor and the working poor is so intertwined, and changes in welfare laws particularly those related to families with dependent children can make it virtually impossible for the working poor to carry on working. This conclusion emerges so very clearly as we get to know working poor with children whose ONLY possible childcare option is a welfare receiving relative looking after the family's young.

Newman deals very effectively with the cultural misconceptions about the fast food industry, reading this book you can no longer think of hamburger flippers as unskilled underachievers. Often these are brave people who have rejected the easy money drug culture, or people who have had to compete very hard to get low paying low status employment, or have to travel over an hour each way and leave young children behind. And these are jobs that require far more skill in operating equipment, planning and dealing with difficult people on daily basis than many higher paid higher status jobs. When Newman got into the details of the what these jobs really entail, I found myself thinking of much higher status jobs as being lower skilled and these jobs and the people who hold them specially in the inner city, where these are real jobs not pocket money generators, as truly worthy of respect.

Newman work covered a whole range of topics affecting the working poor including a great deal on the values of the working poor, these she found to be so "mainstream" indeed often close to conservative. Those at the bottom of the heap who put up with so much for so little had little tolerance for the do-nothing swindlers, but they did have a high level of tolerance for people otherwise. No Shame in My Game also deals extensively with education, what it means for the working poor and how the employers in the fast food industry encourage it. Indeed we see an alternate culture that encourages achievement is formed around the workplace.

The book also deals with the issues of race, within Harlem along with few examples from the wider world outside of it. We see clear evidence of patterns of discrimination based both on race and on birth place, with foreign born Hispanics fairing best despite of language handicaps and black Americans worst, while mainland US born Hispanics ranked in the middle. Newman also dealt with the prospects for advancement and with the issues of role models at some length.

As I read the book, I often wondered about two issues that appear to a large extent self inflicted, the Teen-age pregnancy was for me an obvious issue. Surely, life would be simpler and potential for advancement would be greater for young women who avoided this trap. Newman dealt with this to some extent by presenting research evidence of young poor women making a conscious decision of avoiding pregnancy when they have a clear path laid ahead of them towards education and attractive employment. Newman also touched on the possibility that teenage pregnancy is related in part to desire to have children at an early enough age to be able to get help from mothers and other relatives; with single parent family being the norm, and with the poor ailing and dying at young age. The second issue was mobility, with so many more jobs available in the suburbs and indeed with unemployment at record lows, why stay in Harlem? As I read on a clearer picture emerges of the society many of the working poor really inhabit. There are, contrary to the popular belief and indeed to mainstream America, there are very strong family links and neighborhood links. These links become vital for the poor with children who need looking after and for immigrants who cluster in apartment ghettos and pool resources in every conceivable way.

The last part of No Shame in My Game presents recommendations for dealing with the urban working poor. There are many interesting new ideas and discussions related to projects tried successfully in other parts of the country. Most of the ideas are presented in a logical and politically neutral fashion that is truly helpful, with significant emphasis being placed on business-school-government programs. A suggestion for raising minimum wage is presented along with the other ideas; it is hard to see how that may help even the sample of the working poor this book focused on, as these working poor live, earn money and spend it mostly in their poor community, and those wonderful employers in the fast food industry, operating on very thin margins, will be forced to either raise prices or reduce labor.

Overall I found No Shame in My Game a wonderful book, full of a great deal of insight, it is so well searched and presented. Newman's language and approach are appealing and the way she builds her arguments and reach conclusion comes across very logical and persuasive. While the recommendations chapter of the book could be extended to a whole book in its own right, and the issues involved are complex and difficult, I felt that additional recommendations on the issues of mobility, teen parenting and race would have been helpful.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Discussion of the Working Poor, June 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (Paperback)

Newman crafts an exceptional portrait of the working poor in urban America. The main strength of the book is the way it ties the plight of the working poor to the current policy debate. Particularly, the role of wefare reform in American cities. Although she writes before many changes in the social welfare system, she is able to identify issues that are now key. Unfortunately, some of her policy recommendations are not well suited for the setting that she describes. For instance, the recommendation to create employment cooperatives between primary and secondary sector employers seems underdeveloped, and somewhat inpractical. But, this does not detract from the thrust of the work, which identified employment as a central concern in poor communities. This argument represents the end of a long ugly discussion of social pathology in the inner city, and the start of a more productive discussion of poverty as a problem in mainstream America.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book, January 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (Paperback)

This is a progessive yet rigorous look at the working poor in the inner city. Like Elijah Anderson, Elliot Liebow, Mitchell Duneier, and Barbara Erenreich, it demonstrates that the poor are more complex than [traditional types] or ideology. Newman is a very insightful scholar who never lets her scholarship get in the way of great writing or balanced analysis. I especially appreciated the way she debunked the notion that these low skilled jobs have nothing to teach.