Summary Of Working By Katherine Newman

Katherine Newman (1999), who closely examined individuals working or applying for work in the Harlem fast-food industry over the course of a year, contributes to our lack of knowledge about low-wage work and the working poor in America. Contrary to the popular image of Harlem as a place of isolation and social disorganization associated with highly concentrated urban poverty, Newman shows that while people who solely depend on public assistance and drug dealers do exist, there are plenty of motivated low-wage workers driven by the same mainstream work ethics and values as the middle class. She emphasizes, the “largest group of poor people in the US are not those on welfare, and [instead] they are those whose earning are so meager that despite
While sociologists such as William Julius Wilson have helped to focus our attention on the structures that produce disfigured values in poor neighborhoods, like Harlem, Newman offers a optimistic documentation and balances out the considerable amount of attention in recent years to the holes in the social fabric of urban communities. Newman also highlights the aspects of low-wage workers accruing human capital in the fast-food industries—unlike from the “popular impression that the fast-food jobs are devoid of
In addition, Newman argues, “the more they are attached to their jobs, the more they pull away from the negative elements in their environment and distinguish themselves in every respect from the friends and acquaintances who have taken a wrong turn in life” (109). From Latoya’s family tree, we see all six males (out of 9 children) are absent from the family, who seemingly made bad choices and has been incarcerated (190). At a time when nearly 8 percent of the male working-age population is incarcerated, little attention is paid what happens when they are released. Then, we cannot help but wonder, “What will a second chance be like in landing an entry-level job for those specific group of working poor?” Devah Pager (2003) helps to answer this question by looking at the effects of negative credentials caused by imprisonment. She provides the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches that have been taken previously to examine this phenomenon, and ultimately uses the experimental audit methodology which effectively isolates the effect of a criminal record while observing employer behavior and measuring discrimination in real-life employment settings (943). In her study, two demographically matched pair of individuals posed as entry-level job applicants in real job searches. The testers were given fictional resumes with