Sociology 3945: Outline--Week Twelve

I. Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game: the Working Poor in the Inner City, 1999...

A. How she got interested:

1. In the 1990s, the national focus on welfare families and welfare reform obscured the fact that the majority of poor families in the United States have at least one more or less full-time worker in the paid workforce.

2. Particularly true for people's image of the innner city. Visualized the "underclass" as a group of people who had lost or never had the work ethic. Yet as she traveled through Harlem, she saw a community teeming with impatient people trying to get to work.

3. Decided to carry out a two-year study of Harlem's working poor, with a focus on four businesses she calls "Burger Barns" (probably McDonalds), which together employ at any given time some 200 workers. Quotes, pp. xiv-xv

4. Based on criticism of the early phase of her project, (that she was going to end up finding only the "diamonds in the rough," the hardworking people who might or might not be representative of Harlem) added a study of applicants for fast food jobs that didn't get them, looking for them all over New York City so that she could claim a representative sample.

B. Research methodology.

1. "We cannot understand the obstacles they face and the achievements they have earned just by looking at numbers and tables. Anthropologists like me find it more illuminating to spend time with poor workers and their children and their parents, employers, friends, schoolteachers, and ministers in order to appreciate the nuances of working poverty."

2. The research team: Newman plus a large group of doctoral students--African-American, Puerto Rican, and white--who "crisscrossed class and color lines to learn about people who lived near our Columbia neighborhood but were a world apart..."

q. p. 36

3. Groups: First Jobs.

C. Working lives

1. Jamal's world.

a. Jamal and his partner, Kathy, live in what looks like an ordinary house. Q, p. 3

b. Jamal, a large black man, age 22, gets up at 4.30 a.m. to catch a bus to a Burger Barn where he sometimes gets a full eight-hour shift. Found his job through "associates;" he makes it a point to make connections wherever possible. Employers not seeking out people like Jamal, whom many see as intimidating

c. "Over the two years I got to know him, the Jamal I came to see was bright, perceptive beyond his years... and very, very depressed." Kept a diary for this project.

"the fact that he could speak articulately and forcefully about the world he lives in and keep a diary for me for over a year, told me that such a fate was a waste of a young man who could have switched places with any number of my students had his biography been different."

(Who goes to college and who doesn't? I look at my own relatives from my parents' generation... being in the inner city is probably as big an obstacle as they faced in the depression era...)

d. Lost custody of their child after an episode of abuse. Can only get Tammy back if they find an apartment with a separate bedroom for Tammy and if Kathy stays home with the toddler. Absolutely beyond their means to rent a two-bedroom apartment on Jamal's earnings. His top earnings for any month had been $680 before taxes.

e. Began work at a corner grocery at age 13 to get things he could never get from his crack addicted mother.

Quote, p. 12

2. Carmen's World. A Dominican immigrant, living in a bustling colonia, with her father and stepmother. A studio apartment for five, costing $700 a month; her father works two jobs and while a sophomore in high school, Carmen began to work full-time at a Burger Barn.

a. Burger Barn supportive of her schooling; managers did whatever they could to make her schedule compatible with school. Burger Barn job obtained with a referral from her counselor. Her schedule: Q, p. 17

b. After graduation, married Salvador and got pregnant; as a result of health problems during preganancy and at Salvador's urging, dropped her job... very bright and determined to go to college

3. Kyesha's world. Puerto Rican. Contrast of Tyron and Kyesha, who grew up in the same housing project. Q, p. 24

a. Kyesha started work to be able to buy clothes, but work became the center of her life: Q, p. 25

b. Her mother encouraged this whole process; insisted on abortions when Kyesha got pregnant twice during high school and Kyesha went along to be able to hold onto her job.

c. Kyesha now 21, with a "love child," and she is able to hold onto her job in part because her mother Dana, a long time welfare recipient, is actually a full-time child-minder for her own kids and a collection of neighborhood children. Also gets some help from the child's father.

d. Kyesha still lives with her mother in the projects. She very much wants a place of her own, but can't afford it on the $5/hour she earns after 5 years at Burger Barn.

Q, p. 30

And now "welfare" is coming after Dana, as a result of the welfare reform law of 1996

(Q for class: Why are wages so low at these Burger Barns? This after all was the boom economy of the late 1990s, and in the suburbs, fast food restaurants were advertising constantly for workers and paying $7 an hour or more. Why are rents so high? And why do these families stay in an area where rents are high, jobs scarce, and wages low?)

D. Central Harlem and the four Burger Barns

1. Community mostly black, with 30 percent of its households collecting public assistance in 1990 and a 40% poverty rate.

2. The workforce at these four Burger Barns, though, only half black; 1/4 Dominican; and the other 1/4 miscellaneous Latino groups, the largest number Puerto Rican.

3. 70% of Burger Barn workforce 19 or older; 35% 23 or older.

4. Among the 19-22-year-olds, 56% high school graduates; 25% high school dropouts; 18% some education beyond high school.

5. Nearly half of the workers were men.

6. Family status

a. 1/3 living with single parent, usually mother

b. 1/3+ parents trying to support families

7. Jobs. Largest employers in the community two large hospitals, which have been shedding jobs in large numbers; many women being pushed into job market by welfare reform

8. Health and healthcare. Most jobs in Harlem do not include health insurance, and rates of illness are much higher than in more affluent neighborhoods.

II. No Shame in My Game, part II

A. Getting a Job

1. Among Harlem's fast food establishments, ratio of applicants to jobs is 14/1

2. Majority of 200 workers in her study had begun their work lives when they were 13-15... begin to cover "marginal cost" of living in household

a. bagging groceries

b. "summer youth"

c. "Walking all over town, calling in at every place that looks likely, can indeed produce job possibilities...but not as many as most job-seekers hope. Harlem's Burger Barn owners have whole closets full of applications completed by the walk-in trade, so many in fact that they cannot review more than a fraction of them, even when they are hiring."

d. Social networks... e.g. "People in my family find jobs mostly through my grandmother." (She's worked at the same daycare center for 17 years).... those with large families advantaged, and if they work out well, can often bring in siblings or cousins.... but at the same time, they have to protect their own credibility (which is why networks are so useful to employers)

B. The Social Costs of Low-Wage Work: the grief these workers take as they walk/bus to work wearing their uniforms....

C. The nonmonetary benefits of working at Burger Barn

1. The time squeeze... you don't have time to hang out with your nonworking peers... (Travis Hirschi, control theory)

2. Your friends apt to become your co-workers for a variety of reasons... and these are people who are committed to the values of work.

"I've been working at Burger Barn for a little more than a year now. The best thing that's happened there is that almost all my friends--no, all my friends--are from work."

Q, p. 116

Often friendship across race and ethnic lines.

3. Romantic relationships may also grow out of this setting. e.g. Kyesha and Ron both worked at Burger Barn, and between them make about $9/hr... though their relationship didn't last, they both contribute to the care of their son

4. The impact of scheduled work, as it affects personal organization and motivation. Q, 123.

5. Burger Barn employees attending high school, graduating high school, attending post-secondary education, in greater numbers than their unemployed peers. Employers and managers very explicitly promote school achievement... the owners of these businesses were themselves minorities, with a "missionary zeal" about schooling and hard work... they visit schools for career days, they want to see report cards. Q, 129

There's also the negative lesson; you don't want to be doing this kind of work all your life and you see older folks without the schooling doing exactly that...

In the case of Burger Barn employees attending college, Newman cites incidents of managers advancing pay to meet tuition deadlines and rearranging schedules each term.

D. Challenges of work that are not at all obvious from the outside

1. Rush hour and absenteeism necessitate "work-arounds" and a lot of teamwork

2. Customer relations problems discussed earlier

3. Multi-cultural environment, both with fellow workers and with customers.

4. Training of new workers (supposedly based on video tapes, but tapes missing, vcr not working, etc.)

"They can communicate at a very rudimentary level in several dialects, and they know enough about each others cultural traditions to be able to interpret actions, practices, dress styles, and gender norms in ways that smooth over what could become major conflicts on the street."

E. Getting stuck, moving up

1. Newman's belief that these jobs should be treated as teaching some major lessons that could generalize to better paid and more prestigious jobs, but the public image of these jobs gets in the way.

Workers themselves don't see what Newman sees. When she asks them to explain the skills involved in their jobs, they look surprised and say something along the lines of "Any fool could do this job."

2. Constant search for better jobs. Civil service tests, putting in applications.

3. Wilson, When Work Disappears. Chapter on attitudes of employers toward inner city applicants, including many minority employers: see examples from TeachSoc listserv

4. Networks: crucial for getting their fast food jobs in the first place or getting another job if their job ends.

a. Others in their networks apt to be poor themselves and therefore not a point of contact for better jobs.

b. Also quite a few with grandparents, parents or other relatives in better paying (often unionized jobs--factories, hospitals) but in industries experiencing lots of layoffs and limited ability to help.

5. Advancement in the workplace. Burger Barn mostly promotes from within, but many more low level workers than managers. Still, for workers who show extra initiative and leadership, they may be able to move up.

6. Work ethic. Newman thinks these Harlem Burger Barn employees may well work harder and younger, for less pay, than their suburban counterparts... in some cases, their parents are themselves models of hard work in lowly jobs... in other cases, it's more of a negative example and shows the teen what s/he doesn't want.

7. Relationship between those with what Elijah Anderson calls "street values" and what he calls "decent values"... "A Code of Honor regulates the relationships between denizens of the underground economy and the straight residents of inner city neighborhoods; you don't deliberately harm people you've known a long time, unless they get tangled up in your business affairs.... For this reason, the working poor are careful to acknowledge the troublemakers... Building this social relationship... is a protective act."

B. Availability of jobs: the jobseekers' sample (a random sample of about 100 workers who had tried to get jobs at Burger Barns in central Harlem)

1. 73% of those who applied for jobs at Burger Barns were unemployed one year later, when Newman's team tracked them down... and many of them had been looking for jobs all over the city... had to add pages to their questionnaire to list all the places

2. Dominicans and other Latinos more often successful in their job search (at least partly the product of employer preference not to hire locals)

3. The younger job seekers having an increasingly hard time.

4. The network-poor job seeker stands little chance.

5. The longer you've been here (the U.S.), the harder it gets. 25% of the native-born had found jobs; 40% of the foreign born

6. Do job applicants have unreasonable expectations? No, on average willing to accept minimum wage, even when they'd worked for more in the past.

7. Very few of these job seekers have never worked, and they have worked at jobs that are low in prestige and low in pay.

"To maintain, as many political figures anxious to cut welfare rolls do, that anyone who wants a job can get one is clearly to ignore the facts."

III. Edin and Lein, Making Ends Meet, 1997... In the last years of Aid to Families with Dependent Children(AFDC, they studied a sample of work-dependent and welfare-dependent single mothers in four cities--Charleston, San Antonio, Chicago, and Boston. The cities were chosen to represent lower and high levels of welfare support and better and poorer labor markets. N=214

Underlying questions: who are these mothers? Are they lazy? Are they extravagant? Do they have more kids to increase their welfare payments? What hardships do they experience? Can they get ahead in the jobs that are available to them? Why can't they get child-support payments from the fathers of their children?

Sociology 3945: Outline--Week Twelve

I. Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game: the Working Poor in the Inner City, 1999...

A. How she got interested:

1. In the 1990s, the national focus on welfare families and welfare reform obscured the fact that the majority of poor families in the United States have at least one more or less full-time worker in the paid workforce.

2. Particularly true for people's image of the innner city. Visualized the "underclass" as a group of people who had lost or never had the work ethic. Yet as she traveled through Harlem, she saw a community teeming with impatient people trying to get to work.

3. Decided to carry out a two-year study of Harlem's working poor, with a focus on four businesses she calls "Burger Barns" (probably McDonalds), which together employ at any given time some 200 workers. Quotes, pp. xiv-xv

B. Research methodology.

2. The research team: Newman plus a large group of doctoral students--African-American, Puerto Rican, and white--who "crisscrossed class and color lines to learn about people who lived near our Columbia neighborhood but were a world apart..."

q. p. 36

3. Groups: First Jobs.

C. Working lives

1. Jamal's world.

a. Jamal and his partner, Kathy, live in what looks like an ordinary house. Q, p. 3

c. "Over the two years I got to know him, the Jamal I came to see was bright, perceptive beyond his years... and very, very depressed." Kept a diary for this project.

"the fact that he could speak articulately and forcefully about the world he lives in and keep a diary for me for over a year, told me that such a fate was a waste of a young man who could have switched places with any number of my students had his biography been different."

(Who goes to college and who doesn't? I look at my own relatives from my parents' generation... being in the inner city is probably as big an obstacle as they faced in the depression era...)

e. Began work at a corner grocery at age 13 to get things he could never get from his crack addicted mother.

Quote, p. 12

2. Carmen's World. A Dominican immigrant, living in a bustling colonia, with her father and stepmother. A studio apartment for five, costing $700 a month; her father works two jobs and while a sophomore in high school, Carmen began to work full-time at a Burger Barn.

a. Burger Barn supportive of her schooling; managers did whatever they could to make her schedule compatible with school. Burger Barn job obtained with a referral from her counselor. Her schedule: Q, p. 17

b. After graduation, married Salvador and got pregnant; as a result of health problems during preganancy and at Salvador's urging, dropped her job... very bright and determined to go to college

3. Kyesha's world. Puerto Rican. Contrast of Tyron and Kyesha, who grew up in the same housing project. Q, p. 24

a. Kyesha started work to be able to buy clothes, but work became the center of her life: Q, p. 25

b. Her mother encouraged this whole process; insisted on abortions when Kyesha got pregnant twice during high school and Kyesha went along to be able to hold onto her job.

c. Kyesha now 21, with a "love child," and she is able to hold onto her job in part because her mother Dana, a long time welfare recipient, is actually a full-time child-minder for her own kids and a collection of neighborhood children. Also gets some help from the child's father.

d. Kyesha still lives with her mother in the projects. She very much wants a place of her own, but can't afford it on the $5/hour she earns after 5 years at Burger Barn.

Q, p. 30

And now "welfare" is coming after Dana, as a result of the welfare reform law of 1996

D. Central Harlem and the four Burger Barns

1. Community mostly black, with 30 percent of its households collecting public assistance in 1990 and a 40% poverty rate.

2. The workforce at these four Burger Barns, though, only half black; 1/4 Dominican; and the other 1/4 miscellaneous Latino groups, the largest number Puerto Rican.

3. 70% of Burger Barn workforce 19 or older; 35% 23 or older.

4. Among the 19-22-year-olds, 56% high school graduates; 25% high school dropouts; 18% some education beyond high school.

5. Nearly half of the workers were men.

6. Family status

a. 1/3 living with single parent, usually mother

b. 1/3+ parents trying to support families

7. Jobs. Largest employers in the community two large hospitals, which have been shedding jobs in large numbers; many women being pushed into job market by welfare reform

8. Health and healthcare. Most jobs in Harlem do not include health insurance, and rates of illness are much higher than in more affluent neighborhoods.

II. No Shame in My Game, part II

A. Getting a Job

1. Among Harlem's fast food establishments, ratio of applicants to jobs is 14/1

2. Majority of 200 workers in her study had begun their work lives when they were 13-15... begin to cover "marginal cost" of living in household

a. bagging groceries

b. "summer youth"

B. The Social Costs of Low-Wage Work: the grief these workers take as they walk/bus to work wearing their uniforms....

C. The nonmonetary benefits of working at Burger Barn

1. The time squeeze... you don't have time to hang out with your nonworking peers... (Travis Hirschi, control theory)

2. Your friends apt to become your co-workers for a variety of reasons... and these are people who are committed to the values of work.

"I've been working at Burger Barn for a little more than a year now. The best thing that's happened there is that almost all my friends--no, all my friends--are from work."

Q, p. 116

Often friendship across race and ethnic lines.

3. Romantic relationships may also grow out of this setting. e.g. Kyesha and Ron both worked at Burger Barn, and between them make about $9/hr... though their relationship didn't last, they both contribute to the care of their son

4. The impact of scheduled work, as it affects personal organization and motivation. Q, 123.

There's also the negative lesson; you don't want to be doing this kind of work all your life and you see older folks without the schooling doing exactly that...

In the case of Burger Barn employees attending college, Newman cites incidents of managers advancing pay to meet tuition deadlines and rearranging schedules each term.

D. Challenges of work that are not at all obvious from the outside

1. Rush hour and absenteeism necessitate "work-arounds" and a lot of teamwork

2. Customer relations problems discussed earlier

3. Multi-cultural environment, both with fellow workers and with customers.

4. Training of new workers (supposedly based on video tapes, but tapes missing, vcr not working, etc.)

"They can communicate at a very rudimentary level in several dialects, and they know enough about each others cultural traditions to be able to interpret actions, practices, dress styles, and gender norms in ways that smooth over what could become major conflicts on the street."

E. Getting stuck, moving up

1. Newman's belief that these jobs should be treated as teaching some major lessons that could generalize to better paid and more prestigious jobs, but the public image of these jobs gets in the way.

Workers themselves don't see what Newman sees. When she asks them to explain the skills involved in their jobs, they look surprised and say something along the lines of "Any fool could do this job."

2. Constant search for better jobs. Civil service tests, putting in applications.

3. Wilson, When Work Disappears. Chapter on attitudes of employers toward inner city applicants, including many minority employers: see examples from TeachSoc listserv

4. Networks: crucial for getting their fast food jobs in the first place or getting another job if their job ends.

a. Others in their networks apt to be poor themselves and therefore not a point of contact for better jobs.

b. Also quite a few with grandparents, parents or other relatives in better paying (often unionized jobs--factories, hospitals) but in industries experiencing lots of layoffs and limited ability to help.

5. Advancement in the workplace. Burger Barn mostly promotes from within, but many more low level workers than managers. Still, for workers who show extra initiative and leadership, they may be able to move up.

B. Availability of jobs: the jobseekers' sample (a random sample of about 100 workers who had tried to get jobs at Burger Barns in central Harlem)

1. 73% of those who applied for jobs at Burger Barns were unemployed one year later, when Newman's team tracked them down... and many of them had been looking for jobs all over the city... had to add pages to their questionnaire to list all the places

2. Dominicans and other Latinos more often successful in their job search (at least partly the product of employer preference not to hire locals)

3. The younger job seekers having an increasingly hard time.

4. The network-poor job seeker stands little chance.

5. The longer you've been here (the U.S.), the harder it gets. 25% of the native-born had found jobs; 40% of the foreign born

6. Do job applicants have unreasonable expectations? No, on average willing to accept minimum wage, even when they'd worked for more in the past.

7. Very few of these job seekers have never worked, and they have worked at jobs that are low in prestige and low in pay.

"To maintain, as many political figures anxious to cut welfare rolls do, that anyone who wants a job can get one is clearly to ignore the facts."