When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor

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, asintellectually 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.

This book keeps it real while also managing to keep it interesting too. I have read many of these books on poverty and the working poor and most of them are dry, humorless things. Most books on poverty are written by college professors who over analyze poverty so much that you can't get a real feel for the suffering, privations and other realities that illustrate the pains of life spent in sufficating poverty.This When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor does a great job of putting a human face on the numbers and science of understanding poverty. What's more while the book centers on black poverty in many ways it never forgets that other races suffer the cruelty of poverty as well. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor looks at how black people are uniquely and more intensely affected by poverty in ways that other minorities are not.When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor proves scientifically two things my grandparents told me growing up as a black man in the United States. My grandfather told me Wolf he said, jobs are disappearing that let a black man with just a high school diploma and good manual dexterity skills make the living wage needed to support a family in the style I was accustomed. My grandfather saw early as the 1960's that, I would not be able to follow in his footsteps if I hoped to live in a nice home in a fine neighborhood. My fathers job carrying coal across the water to Sparrows Point Steel Mills by barge was made redundant by a high speed conveyor belt that did his job much faster 24\7. Lucky for us he was near the end of his working life and we were almost grown when his job died out.My grandfather saw many low skill manual labor jobs die out. Today there are no more elevator operators, assembly jobs and other such low skill positions. Some much is automated centralized and globalized my grandfather told me when I was still in elementary school I needed to focus on getting an office job working with computers or in accounting. My grandfather said people who can't transition to the knowledge economy of the future would not survive. My grandfather knew early I was a science nerd so all he had to do was aim me at computers and I'd take it from there. Today I am a successful computer specialist so I do fine.My grandmother saw the other part of this book come true. My grandmother lived through Jim Crow Racial Segregation she said what kept black communities strong then was that by law successful blacks had to live in the same communities as poor blacks. My grandmother hated segregation but she said, the good thing about that time was black kids got to see successful black lawyers, businessmen, doctors and others because; they lived in the same communities, shopped at the same stores. My grandmother lammented the fact that now with integration rich and better off black folk left the inner city ghettos dispersed into better safer stable multiracial neighborhoods where people of like income seek refuge I number among them. My grandmother asked me a question that troubles me to this day which is why I read books like, When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor. My grandmother asked me Wolf, if every black man leaves the inner city ghetto for the distant suburbs soon as they become successful who will young black folk have to look up to except the dope dealers, numbers runners and other criminal low life scum of the Earth. She was right and this book proves both my grandparents were right in their observations, they did not have all the letters behind their names but they saw in the 1960's foundations being laid for the ugly new world detailed in When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.My grandparents prepared us for the arrival of the information economy so all three of her children including me are doing extremely well. I read books like When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor because; they show me how I am blessed and why I should try to help others. Left to myself I would never go back to ghetto areas since that life is not something I am at all comfortable with. I go back to ghetto schools and talk to people while trying to help in other ways because; things in inner city ghettos have gotten worse than I ever before. I go to some places in Baltimore that were mostly black when I was young and they were never the horrific war zones I see today. Today when I look at the places of my youth 50 plus years ago I'm shocked at the sheer magnitude of the change from wonderful shops, working class community to absolute bombed out hell hole. It breaks my heart to see people living in such squalor and desolation. This book puts the changes in perspective so I can try to understand them. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor os a book so real it haunts my very soul. If I could give this book fifty stars I would do so in a heart beat because; it is that good.

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.”