Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, the author decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job, any job, can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, she left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from...

At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams -- breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest, attending a university, and becoming a writer -- were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, working days and taking college classes online. She also began to write relentlessly. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told: the stories of overworked and underpaid Americans....

"During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to examine the class divide in our country and the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty...

"A unique and riveting exploration of one of America's largest and fastest-growing industries--the business of poverty"--Provided by publisher.

"The author of South of Superior returns to that same territory and landscape with this story of a woman who, on the verge of losing the land and home that defines her, finds her way to a brighter future when she learns the power of giving to and accepting help from the community around her"-- Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Laurel Hill and her daughter Skye live on Lake Superior, where the local school has classes of just four children, and the nearest...

When John Barton's wife dies, he is forced to raise his daughter, Mary, alone, while he grieves the love of his life. Though he is a hard-working man, John struggles to provide for his family. Realizing how unfair his financial situation is, John becomes very resentful towards the unethical distribution of wealth between the social classes. Against John's wishes, when Mary comes of age, she decides to help support their family by working in a dressmaking...

Average guy Joe Ransom meets fifteen-year-old Gary Jones and offers him a chance at life.

"David Shipler ... journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweatshop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor ... Braced by hard fact and personal testimony, he unravels the forces that confine people in the quagmire of low wages. And unlike most works on poverty, this book also offers...

Following its initial publication, the critically acclaimed Betrayal of Work became one of the most influential policy books about economic life in America; it was discussed in the pages of Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, the Washington Post, Newsday, and USA Today, as well as in public policy journals and in broadcast interviews, including a one-on-one with Bill Moyers on PBS's NOW. Beth Shulman's powerfully argued book offers a full program to...

"The transition to parenthood is one of the most life-altering and destabilizing life events that adults experience, even those with significant financial and social resources. We commonly hear about dual-career, professional couples coping with the wage penalties associated with new motherhood or a woman's career being derailed on the "mommy track." But we know much less about how low-wage, employed mothers and fathers manage the demands of full-time...