No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. By Katherine S. Newman

No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. By Katherine S. Newman.

NEW YORK: ALFRED A. KNOPF AND THE RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION, 1999. PP XIX + 388.

Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game is firmly rooted in the interdisciplinary "urban poverty" literature. Yet Newman also effectively pushes the boundaries of that literature--and the subject(s) of its interest-into important new territory. No Shame in My Game is a study of the conditions, struggles, and strategies of the working poor, specifically black and Hispanic fast-food workers in Harlem, New York. This focus on workers who earn wages that do not lift them above poverty is what distinguishes Newman's study, since much urban poverty research, as well as the accompanying policy debates, is on the jobless, the unskilled, the socially isolated, the "nonmainstream," and the welfare recipient. While the book presents engaging descriptive narratives on the lives of Harlem's working poor, No Shame in My Game is much more timid in its policy recommendations.

Despite the fact that Newman never settles on a hard definition of the working poor, pulling from contested definitions of working (e.g., part-time versus full-time) and poor (e.g., official federal poverty level versus, say, 155 percent of the poverty level), the demographic data she presents on working poverty are nonetheless compelling. Of the fifteen million poor children in the United States in 1994, one-third (or five million of them) had at least one parent who worked all year. Cutting the data a different way, Newman reports that seven percent of families in which at least one family member worked were poor in 1996. As might be expected, these rates increase for young people, women, and minorities, and they compound for people who fall into more than one of these categories. These numbers give only the canvas on which Newman paints an array of ethnographic portraits of Harlem's fastfood workers "whose earnings are so meager that despite their best efforts, they cannot afford decent housing, diets, health care, or child care" (p. 40).

The data collected by Newman and her research team are impressive. They administered questionnaires to 200 Burger Barn employees across Harlem and collected indepth life histories on a subset of 150 workers. (Burger Barn is a...