Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market

"Chutes and Ladders" is a fascinating longitudinal study of low-wage workers in the U.S. labor market. I would like to see it become better known, especially among poor people and those who work with them. The main message of Newman's book is that it's not easy to climb out of poverty, but a surprising number of people do manage it. I felt that Newman shied away from some of the easiest conclusions to draw from her own work. She notes frequently that problems with kids are a major reason why many people fail to escape poverty. Child care is at best expensive and at worst unavailable. Kids get sick and have to be taken care of, often leading to job loss among the poor. Yet Newman says almost nothing about the use of birth control and/or abortion to prevent poverty or increase the chance of a family escaping it. As far as I'm concerned, kids are a luxury item. My husband and I have a son, age ten. Although we both have good jobs, we have found even one child to be incredibly expensive in both money and time. I can't imagine how we could manage with two. Yet many subjects of Newman's study, already poor, go on to have two or five or even seven kids! No wonder so many of them stayed poor! Newman mentions recent economic growth as one of the factors benefitting the poor in the U.S. This is misleading. Economic growth is generally measured by GDP, which is a measure so inaccurate so as to be almost laughable. GDP is not corrected for increasing population, pollution, exhaustion of natural resources, or declining quality of life. More accurate measures of economic growth, such as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare or Genuine Progress Indicator, tend to show that there has been almost no genuine economic growth in the U.S. since the 1970s. For more on this, see McKibben's book "Deep Economy," Daly's "Beyond Growth," or Brian Czech's "Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train." I also thought that Newman overlooked important questions on why it is that the quality of life for poor people in the U.S. is so low. After all, the average wage of a burger-flipping worker in the U.S. would put a family well into the middle class in most countries. Why is the cost of living so high here when the prices of most basic commodities do not differ all that much between countries? This is a complex question, but some surprising answers have already been found, which Newman would do well to consider. For example, one of the main reasons it costs so much to live in the U.S. is that our transportation system is organized around the automobile. Cars not only cost money for those who own them, they require high taxes to pay for all those highways. Everybody pays these taxes, including those who don't own a car. Cars also increase housing costs, because parking has to be provided for all those cars, which spreads out cities. For more on this, see Donald Shoup's book "The High Cost of Free Parking." Overall, though, Newman's book is interesting and

Maybe you've read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel-and-Dimed or David K. Shipler's The Working Poor. Or perhaps you've seen the episode of Morgan Spurlock's TV series 30 Days in which he and his girlfriend try to make it on minimum wage jobs for one month. Then you know that it is just not possible to live on minimum wage. Is welfare the only alternative? Is there any reason at all to work at mind-numbing, soul-sucking, back-breaking minimum wage McJobs? Katherine Newman takes a look at that question from the viewpoint, not of a journalist, but of an anthropologist. She and her grad student team interviewed about three hundred applicants at Harlem fast food restaurants in 1996 and then followed their progress for two years. The applicants were from Harlem, all from poor families and mostly Latino or African-American. They ranged in age from teenagers to mid-thirties. Newman documented the two-year project in her previous book No Shame in My Game. She and her team went back eight years later to see what had happened to the "subjects." They were only able to find about forty of the original applicants, so while it doesn't constitute a large enough sample to draw statistical conclusions from, they thought it still might be useful to see what paths the most successful workers had followed. Chutes & Ladders is the story of what they found after eight years. As anthropologists, they had no preconceived ideas or expectations. The reader however, might have a few ideas of what to expect, and might end up being surprised. I was. Some of the workers didn't do too well over the years, and ended up on welfare, disillusioned and angry. But some of the workers were more successful than anyone would have predicted, working in white-collar jobs that paid well above poverty level, over $100,000 in one case. In fact, about 20% of the original fast food applicants were no longer poor after eight years. How did they do it? Did they have certain advantages over the others? Did they get a lucky break along the way? Does working at a McJob really prepare you for bigger and better jobs? There are no simple answers. Newman presents all the data, in charts and statistics, and in a narrative that is just as readable and compelling as Ehrenreich's and Shipler's. You will have to draw your own conclusions. It seemed to me that the most successful workers did not gain any advantage from working at fast food restaurants or other minimum wage jobs. They just got the best job they could at the time and moved to better work when they found it. But they didn't wait around for better jobs to magically appear. They kept their ears open and paid attention to who was hiring and what sort of applicants were required. They adjusted themselves to the best of their ability to look and sound like what the employers wanted. They worked hard and learned fast, but they weren't necessarily the smartest or the most advantaged (or even the least disadvantaged). They seemed to be the ones with