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When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor Paperback – July 29, 1997

by William Julius Wilson (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 143 ratings
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Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America's inner cities--from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime--stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy. Wilson's achievement is to portray this crisis as one that affects all Americans, and to propose solutions whose benefits would be felt across our society. At a time when welfare is ending and our country's racial dialectic is more strained than ever, When Work Disappears is a sane, courageous, and desperately important work.



"Wilson is the keenest liberal analyst of the most perplexing of all American problems...[This book is] more ambitious and more accessible than anything he has done before."
--The New Yorker
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  1. Print length
    322 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Vintage
  4. Publication date
    July 29, 1997
  5. Dimensions
    5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0679724176
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0679724179
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America's inner cities--from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime--stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy. Wilson's achievement is to portray this crisis as one that affects all Americans, and to propose solutions whose benefits would be felt across our society. At a time when welfare is ending and our country's racial dialectic is more strained than ever, When Work Disappears is a sane, courageous, and desperately important work.



"Wilson is the keenest liberal analyst of the most perplexing of all American problems...[This book is] more ambitious and more accessible than anything he has done before."
--The New Yorker

From the Back Cover

Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America's inner cities--from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime--stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy. Wilson's achievement is to portray this crisis as one that affects all Americans, and to propose solutions whose benefits would be felt across our society. At a time when welfare is ending and our country's racial dialectic is more strained than ever, When Work Disappears is a sane, courageous, and desperately important work.


"Wilson is the keenest liberal analyst of the most perplexing of all American problems...[This book is] more ambitious and more accessible than anything he has done before."
"--The New Yorker

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; First Edition (July 29, 1997)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 322 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679724176
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679724179
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 143 ratings

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William J. Wilson

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
143 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Wesley Cobbs
5.0 out of 5 stars How decisions are made.
Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2013
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I rate this book with five stars because it is telling the message in a scholarly way that I have been saying earlier. I have only began to read it. However, the message is important. It is said if you go grocery shopping while you are hungry you will make different decisions than when you go after eating. Likewise people who don't have many resources will make a different decision.
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Larry P.
5.0 out of 5 stars Keepitmovin
Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2014
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Mr. Williams definitely done his research to address the issues never taken into consideration why things are the way they are. I like his out and out truth about how we suffer a people problems of have and have nots. How we take from the poor to give to those who already have and there is no real bad people but corrupt policy.
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Burt Saxon
5.0 out of 5 stars classic sociology
Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2021
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Anything by WJ Wilson is worth reading.
He saw what what was coming
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ANDRE CHERRY
4.0 out of 5 stars Cities in the 80s were left unprepared to deal with ...
Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2017
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Cities in the 80s were left unprepared to deal with the crack-cocaine tsunami, the AIDS epidemic, and the steep rise in homeless populations, largely jobs leaving urban centers, Wilson found. As I read Wilson’s thorough work, I kept thinking about how similar his findings were to what Anne Case and Angus Deaton more recently found in rural America: heroin addiction, deaths of despair, and unemployment or underemployment. Black, brown, or white it doesn’t matter. Long term exposure to environments of chronic unemployment is detrimental to individuals, families, and the communities. The primary problem that Wilson found, which continues to be a problem today is that, “... systematic scientific argument is no match for the dominant belief system -- it is the moral fabric of individuals, not the social and economic structure of society, that is taken to be the root of the problem.”
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not a natural
3.0 out of 5 stars I voted for Obama and got William Julius Wilson
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2011
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The first two hundred six pages of the paperback edition of When Work Disappears merit reading by a broad audience of intelligent lay people. Though sometimes tedious because of inclusion of an inordinate number of comparisons of percentages and dollar values in the text, the first seven chapters are really quite interesting.

Unfortunately, however, this book, like so many of its kind, eventually devolves into predictable platitudes. A detailed and insightful analysis that comprises the bulk of the book is followed by an off-the-shelf prescription for long-term improvement that is fraught with cliche's and is hopelessly off the mark. Until the final chapter, the reader imagines that he or she is studying important aspects of the way our social system actually works. Then, without warning, the author betrays the fact that, in spite of decades of social research and public policy analysis, he is just as short-sighted as most well-meaning, life-long liberals who think that innocuous tinkering with ancillary institutions will provide a long-term economic remedy for all of us.

Perhaps the most insightful contribution of When Work Disappears is the sharp distinction Wilson draws and develops between poverty and joblessness. I have long been inclined to think that working for compensation that is inadequate to maintaining, at a minimum, the bare material rudiments of a middle class life style is a rip-off. Wilson has not changed my views in this regard, but he has forced me to reconsider the value of work -- just about any work that is not physically brutalizing or psychologically destructive -- as a means of social integration and wholesome personal regulation.

Most work, after all, is an inherently social activity. We work alongside others, in collaboration with others, in joint ventures that develop our organizational skills, and we work in ways that manifest, develop, and direct the unspoken interactive wherewithal that enables us to be amicably cooperative while avoiding needless conflict. Even if we are competitive strivers whose primary aim is to improve our position by out-stripping the attainments of our co-sorkers, we need to know and display socially acceptable on-the-job behavior in our efforts to achieve more.

In addition, work provides us with opportunities for more rewarding spare time activities. Relaxing alone is all well and good, but eventually it gets old, even depressing. Making social connections on the job can provide one with a group of peers who enjoy being together in activities as mundane as bowling or going to the movies, as
intellectually demanding as playing chess, or as skill-intensive as remodeling an old car while keeping expenditures low enough to make the activity practical.

Furthermore, being socially engaged, both on the job and off, perhaps while car-pooling to and from work, provides access to information not available in the best library or on the Internet. Word-of-mouth can be an invaluable source of knowledge concerning other kinds of employment -- a second job, a job for one's spouse, an opportunity for advancement that has not been advertised. Word-of-mouth can also apprise one of still other ways of improving one's life, such as the availability of sliding-scale health care at a clinic you otherwise wouldn't know existed.

Collectively, moreover, a neighborhood or community in which most people have jobs has a rhythmic stability that makes it a pleasant and nurturing place to live. Most jobs have a schedule, and most people who work have to abide by the schedules intrinsic to their jobs. This may sound unduly regimented, but Wilson presents it as predictable, dependable, and orderly, qualitites that make life less hectic and less emotionally taxing. At the same time, other institutions -- churches, small businesses, bars, restaurants, playgrounds, social clubs -- acknowledge this day-to-day routine by organizing themselves accordingly. The social world in which one resides may be a location where poverty is commonplace, but it is also a locus of informal social controls that operate to the benefit of all. It's a community.

In the 1950's and 1960's company towns often had this near-comunitarian character. Just about everyone worked in the same place doing basically the same thing without dramatic differences in compensation. Were company towns insular and intolerant of individual differences? Sure. But at least they were communities where most felt a strong sense of belonging.

The trouble with company towns, however, was and is that the company may shut down, sell out to a labor-hostile national chain, or simply move away. As Wilson acknowledges, this brings us to the crux of the problem of joblessness today: many employers have moved from the center city to the suburbs or to another country. The jobs may still exist, but center city residents no longer have access to them. Many jobs have been relocated or simply eliminated by the ubiquitous processes of internationalization, out-sourcing, down-sizing, and introduction of technology intensive labor-saving techniques. All this is done to reduce labor costs.

Writing in 1996, Wilson views the principal losers in this profit-seeking mode of job destruction to be center city residents who may once have been poor but are now also jobless and surrounded by joblessness, as well. This is the primary concern of When Work Disappears. Over the past fifteen years, however, it has become ever clearer that the processes that have restructured center-city labor markets are becoming just as destructive with regard to labor markets in which everyone else participates, including those with one or more college degrees.

Recessions come and recessions go, but recoveries are now manifest in increased corporate profits but not in increased earnings or improved employment prospects for people who work for a living. Cutting labor costs is a time-honored way of increasing profits, and multinational corporations are poceeding apace to make the most of it. For them, it's the rational thing to do. If politically correct right-wing talk show hosts object to this judgment, discerning intimations of class warfare, they are right. Unfortunately, capital is doing all the fighting, while the rest of us are disorganized casualties.

Wilson, I think, would agree with everything I've written above, except the last paragraph. As Wilson views the world, large economic actors, whether multinational corporations or some other entities, range between socially neutral and socially benign. If they aren't creating good jobs and hiring, it's because the skilled human capital they need is not being created, Thus Wilson's stunningly pedestrian long-term prescription for joblessness: better schooling carefully tailored to meet the needs of prospective employers, with schools' output then selected, sorted, and allocated through a cooperatively constructed school-to-work partnership. What could be more banal? What could be more ineffective?

To make matters worse, Wilson holds that we can improve schooling and upgrade the workforce mainly by placing a heavy emphasis on accountability. A national system of gauging school effectiveness, using tuition vouchers and tax credits to promote competion thereby making schools more effective, and identifying and getting rid of that omnipresent scapegoat, the ineffective teacher. Astonishing, really, that Wilson's thorough analysis of joblessness and its consequences should take us right where we are: No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, charter schools, and increasing emphasis on privatization.

What Wilson proposes is little more than blind adherence to mainstream human captial theory, a deeply flawed, thoroughly debunked perspective, coupled with perniciously intrusive accountability schemes that mandate testing, testing, and more testing. But does anyone really believe that increased availability of human capital will persuade employers to invest in job creation in the U.S. or elsewhere? Well, actually, as it turns out Obama does. George W. Bush did. And so did Bill Clinton. Blaming ecnomic problems on poor schooling and proposing better schooling as the eventual fix has been with us for four decades. There is no evidence that there is merit to this perspective, but schools, as with teachers, are such convenient scapegoats.

I think it's reasonable to surmise that our schools functioned pretty well until we started relenelessly tinkering with them in the 1970's. Now our schools may very well be dysfunctional simply because we have been monomaniacally determined to find eduational solutions to economic problems such as joblessness.

Historically, it's not dificult to see where these misguided ideas came from. Looking at the social science and public policy literature from the end of World War II until the early 1970's, it's clear that just about everyone expected post-war prosperity to continue indefinitely. When it didn't, we all looked around for an institutional reason, something we could diagnose and fix. If human capital theory is correct, then Education --> Productivity --> Income, for individuals and for entire nations. If this scheme doesn't hold true, the problem must be with our schools: for some reason they've stopped making workers productive. Though he doesn't use just these words, this is the way Wilson thinks, and his way of thinking has carried the day. As a result, schools are constrained to do little more than teach students to take standardized tests, and economic circumstances, for most of us, have continued to deteriorate.

Here we are, immersed in an era of Reaganesque Rugged Individualism, surrounded by a world economy that has been restructured to the painful disadvantage of most of us, and one our most influential liberal social scientists tells us we need better schools. What a mess. Does Paul Goodman have any contemporary intellectual heirs? We certainly need them.
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Satisfied
5.0 out of 5 stars EDUCATIONAL
Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2020
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I find the book useful for discussions. A good purchase for students.
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w. tyler sall
5.0 out of 5 stars Specific to Architecture, But interesting
Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2018
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Required reading for an Architecture class and I enjoyed this book, it was informative and interesting. I'd recommend it.
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Terissa
5.0 out of 5 stars Good Read
Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2019
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Relevant and I formative. Good read
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