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

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

By: Katherine S. Newman  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

Publisher: Vintage

Release Date: 2000-04-25

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
A study of the working poor, with a lot of tired-out rhetoric - This book is an ethnographic study of the working poor. The author is a social scientist. Using a team of assistants, she did an in-depth study of a group of poor teenagers in Harlem who worked at an unnamed burger franchise.

I think the book is worth reading, although it has serious flaws. It is worth reading, because it does give some very detailed portraits of the poor. We get an in depth look at the life of some interesting people. This kind of social science, which is based upon intensely reported facts, seems to me to be very worth-while. I would like to see more of it.

The biggest flaw in the book, however, is the bias of the author. The facts of the book present a fairly clear picture. These teens -- and those around them -- have difficulty getting ahead in life, because: (a) almost all of them did not take school seriously and do not have a decent education; (b) most of them had kids in their teens, without being married; (c) most of them do not have parents; (d) most of them live surrounded by drugs, crime and violence. In short, her facts provide further verification and support for the usual underclass theory of poverty. The poor are poor, because they are trapped in a self-destructive culture, which does not value education, family or stability. (The fact that their schools are horrifically bad, and expect all of them to fail, contributes to this, of course.)

But the author does not see it that way. She feels very strongly that America is a horribly unjust place. She feels that it is just wrong that the poor have to take low-paying jobs. She feels that her subjects are heroes -- stainless saints, with moral perfection -- because they condescend to work. The idea that their behavior is in any way connected to their problems -- and that the solultion to povety might have to change their behavior -- she rejects out of hand. The solution to poverty, in our author's view, is to radically alter everything about America. She does not go into detail about the political changes she wants. She does not need to do so. She is, after all, an academic. She assumes that you, too, are an academic, or why would you be reading her book? Thus, she assumes that you and she agree on politics, which is to say that what these kids need is massively increased welfare spending, in every direction and on every subject.

So, to get the useful facts in this book -- and there are many -- you have to strain through a great deal of rhetoric and tired left-wing posturing. Oh well, on balance, the book is still worth reading.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
A bit dry, but informative� - I was actually assigned to read this book for my Introduction to Sociology class. While I might not have picked it up on my own, I found that it wasn't that bad. Newman tells us stories of the working poor in Harlem, many who work at the local "Burger Barn". Their struggles do really grip you and give you a different picture of these people. While a couple of chapters were a little bogged down in numbers, and Newman assumes her readers are familiar with some aspects of welfare and such, overall, the book was an interesting look into how people try to "make it", that is easily accessible to most.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A wonderful book - 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.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
No Shame in This Game - Must Read - 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.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Excellent Discussion of the Working Poor - 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.

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