Excerpt from
No Shame in My Game

The Working Game

Anthropologist Katherine Newman offers
a close-up look at the working poor

Katherine Newman was stuck in early morning traffic in central Harlem 10 years ago when the idea for her new book, No Shame in My Game, came to her. As she watched hordes of people hurrying to work, Newman wondered why the picture before her was so different from the one many Americans have of the urban poor as welfare dependent and unwilling to work. Thus be-gan a project that took Newman into the lives of hundreds of people working in the fast-food industry in central Harlem. Now at the Kennedy School, Newman spoke about her findings and about No Shame in My Game.

Q You said in the introduction that your motivation for writing No Shame in My Game was to shed some light on many of the misconceptions about the poor. Could you elaborate on that?

We see people and think we know who they are in sociological sense, but really we don't. When Americans think about the poor, they are likely to imagine people who don't work, who have been reliant on welfare for years, who have no "family values," and who are therefore to blame for their sorry state. But most poor Americans do work. They just fail to earn enough to pull themselves above the poverty line. We know more about those who are welfare recipients than we do about the nation's low-wage workers. If we are to attack any of our nation's social problems, it's important to be as clear-eyed as possible about the people we're trying to help — what obstacles they face, what virtues they bring to the table.

Certainly there are differences between the working poor and the middle class, differences in family structure, opportunity, and experience. Growing up in a poor neighborhood where there is an active drug trade is not the same as growing up in the neighborhood I live in. But in my research I didn't see a completely different kind of America. What I saw were people who, yes, are unwed mothers sometimes or people who have had some experience with welfare, but who love their children, who supervise their children's homework, who worry about whether or not their kids are safe, who support their children even if they don't live with them — especially the men, who would like to have a better life even if it's probably not in the cards, but who think about it and know what it would mean to have a better life.

The more you can paint a detailed picture of this kind, the more likely it is that ordinary citizens will pay attention to the problems these people have, and, second, that we as a nation will do something constructive to solve them. These are goals that all KSG faculty work toward.

Q Could you explain a little bit about how you conducted this research?

My research team tracked a total of 300 people in Harlem for a period of about 18 months. We interviewed them at work, talked with their supervisors, and put them in front of our tape recorders for hours to collect their life histories. A small group gave us permission to follow them around day-in and day-out for almost a year. During that time, we worked behind the counter at these same restaurants, interviewed their teachers and preachers, and got to know their parents and their kids. Some of them kept personal diaries for me for a year. No Shame in My Game chronicles their work, family, school, and neighborhood lives for that 18-month "snapshot." I am now working on a follow-up project that will take us down the road for a total of eight years so that I can give readers a better understanding of what happens to these workers over the long haul.

Q What made you decide to have members of your research team actually work in the same restaurants as the people you were studying and what was it like for them?

There are lots of popular misconceptions about low-wage jobs that I wanted to test. I wanted to try to train fresh eyes on the question of what sorts of skills do you learn in a job that is popularly defined as "unskilled." By looking at the mistakes my research team committed while trying to learn to do these jobs, we learned something about these skills. Working these jobs was humbling. My grad students would put in two-hour shifts and would stagger home, whereas the people we were studying were on their feet all day long, putting in eight-hour shifts. It's hot, greasy work, and it's tiring. One of my students who tried to learn how to run the drive-through window gave up after a couple of hours. She couldn't do it. Finally the employer replaced her with someone who just barely graduated from high school and who was a real master at it. The jobs were more demanding than we realized.

Q Overall, however, you come away believing that these jobs were a positive thing. Isn't that correct?

No Shame in My Game may well provide the only positive portrait in print about fast-food jobs, which are routinely derided as exploitative or damaging to their occupants. I really didn't see it that way. I don't think it's good news if people spend their whole lives working in these jobs, but the business owners in Harlem would be the first to agree with that. They would like to see their good workers move along to something better. But I came to see involvement in the low-wage work world as an extremely im-portant and positive attachment to the most mainstream of American institutions: the labor force. Working caused these people to see themselves as part of the mainstream world. It provided structure and safety for people who often lived in neighborhoods that were quite dicey and whose private lives were sometimes chaotic. It created a friendship circle of fellow workers and tended, over time, to pull people away from the streets where their friends or family members might be engaged. It gave them a sense of dignity that derived directly from the most central of cultural beliefs in American society: work as dignity.

Q Has there been anything in the information you collected that surprised you?

Yes. I didn't realize how important "connections" would be to finding low-wage job opportunities. The studies that have been done on networks and employment have focused mainly on people who are considerably higher up on the educational and occupational ladder. We know that for professionals and managers — even for blue-collar workers — connections are ex-tremely important. We're not as familiar with the job-search pathways of low-educated and low-skilled workers, and so it did surprise me to discover that even for jobs that are popularly defined as "skill free," connections matter in a powerful way. These are jobs, after all, that we believe have no skill requirements, so why should it matter? It turns out it matters a lot to employers who use these networks very extensively to staff their restaurants.

Connections also have a lot to do with whether people are able to pull themselves out of the low-wage labor market into something better. If you have friends who have unionized low-skill jobs as opposed to part-time, nonunionized jobs, chances are that you'll be able to make a jump into a job that pays $10 an hour or $14 an hour.

Another surprise was that I didn't think of em-ployers as mentors, as people with a social agenda. I thought of them as people who were out to make money. They are all of those things it turns out. They wouldn't be in the business world if they weren't, but they could find easier places to do that. The selection of central Harlem did reflect some of their social ambitions and civic commitments. As I think about it in retrospect, it shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. It made me realize that understanding employers was an anthropological project all its own.

I also didn't really think in advance about how employers would be important in shaping the educational performance of the workers who were still in school. It turns out that these things are completely intertwined. Managers look over the report cards of the high school and junior college students who are working for them. They threaten to cut their work hours back if they don't do well in school. Employers buy their workers schoolbooks as a reward. They give cash rewards for good report cards. This provides a whole cadre of adults who are paying attention to the school performance of these inner-city workers. While I don't think employers are looking to become social workers, with very little extra effort, they can play a powerful role in encouraging young people to stay in school.

Q How common was this commitment by employers?

I found it in all the restaurants. Franchise owners think of themselves as civic creatures. It is embedded in the franchise agreement. Some of the restaurants were running tutoring programs. Their workers may never have had any kind of official identification. Few drove cars. Some don't know how to open up bank accounts; some of them don't know how to read. Some of them need glasses; they can't see properly. Employers step in to address these needs. They teach their workers how to apply for IDs; they get glasses for them; they teach them how to read.

Q Did you ever feel frustrated that you couldn't change the lives of the people you followed?

Yes. About Jamal in particular. It was clear to me that he was very smart. But that smartness was buried under layers of past experience that had been quite damaging to his sense of self-esteem, to use a well-worn phrase. The load he carried and the burdens he created for himself on many occasions were so enormous that I actually thought that the most important message I could convey to the reader was that this man worked for a living. His mother was a drug addict. He was on his own by the time he was 13 years old. He was kicked around from one place to another. He lived in the most shabby, desperate circumstances. He scared people. He looked dangerous. You could say that he should have learned to shed this rather threatening demeanor, but it became clear to me that you couldn't shed that demeanor in the neighborhood where he lived or you would be picked out as a victim in due course.

Nonetheless, I don't think anyone who just knew the bare bones outline of his history would have predicted that this guy would get up every morning and board a bus at 5 a.m. to get to work by 6 a.m. and work as many hours as he could get. I just don't think that that's what readers or social scientists would have predicted. Through the lens of his life, I hope to rattle people's preconceptions and to make them realize that even when you're brought up in this pretty awful situation, you can still have a sufficient attachment to the idea of work that you will pursue it even when the rewards are not enormous.

But yes, I was frustrated on his behalf, though my frustration paled in comparison to Jamal's. He would say, "I would really like to be a pilot." But you could see in his eyes, he knew that wasn't going to happen. He had one set of pipe dreams and another reality to live with. And that resulted in a lot of frustration that he sometimes took out on other people whom he loved, which isn't all that surprising. He wasn't a perfect person.

Q How much of a difference do you think benefits such as the earned income tax credit and health insurance make for low-wage earners?

They make an enormous difference. The earned income tax credit is by far the most important antipoverty instrument that we have for the working poor, and it has made a huge difference. It has opened up a truly significant gap between what you can put in your pocket from a job and what you can reap from welfare. I think the earned income tax credit should be available to any low-wage worker. It's not the only thing we can do, but it's a very im-portant thing. Health insurance is critical and generally not available to these poor workers; they earn too much for Medicaid, but their employers don't provide private insurance. Government has a role to play here, but what I try to do in this book is move away from a sole preoccupation with what government can do and think harder about private-sector opportunities.

Q Do you mean there just isn't the support for programs such as Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC) in the current political climate?

I don't think AFDC ever really had broad public support. It had a problematic history from the beginning because it is just antithetical to American culture. There is no way to explain it that fits with the centrality of work in this society. But rather than dwell on things that I think have no chance of moving forward, I tried to focus on private-sector initiatives that I think do stand to be successful and require very modest, if any, government involvement.

Q So you have hope?

Ironically, welfare reform may have a real silver lining for poor workers. Of course, there's still a big group of recipients that will not be able to find work, and we have no idea what we're going to do about that, but by ending welfare, we've made the situation of the low-wage worker that much more visible politically. I expect this to be an issue in the upcoming presidential campaign, and that may be all to the good for the working poor. They certainly stand on the correct side of American culture, and that is a very important asset. They are doing what we asked them to do, and that means they're eligible for our support and sympathy.