No Shame in my Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City by Katherine S. Newman

Knopf, 400 pages, $26.95.

Talk about a no-win situation. In our society, "burger flippers" get scarcely more respect than do welfare recipients -- though it probably takes more perseverance to find a part-time job at a McDonald's in Harlem than to land a position at Fidelity Investments in Boston. No Shame in My Game tells us that even the drug addicts in poor neighborhoods mock the people behind the counters of fast-food restaurants.

But "McWorkers" are heroes to Katherine S. Newman, a Harvard professor who was inspired to write No Shame after getting stuck in a Harlem traffic jam and noticing that "thousands of people were on their way to work." We've read plenty about welfare mothers, Newman says, but she wants some attention for those who "work over vats of grease to make the French fries we eat, bag the groceries we take home from the supermarket . . . and then go home to raise their children on wages so low that they sink beneath the poverty line even when they work full-time."

Newman followed 300 job-seekers and workers at four fast-food restaurants in Harlem (here called "Burger Barns") to get a sense of just how valuable the American work ethic can be in a neighborhood with few employment options. The good news is that any steady job appears to help keep a person drug-free and responsible for his or her actions (as in providing financial support to illegitimate children, for example). Conservatives should be pleased by some of the Burger Barn workers, such as the young woman who says of the jobless men on her block, "People just don't try, that's what I think."

The bad news is that even in a booming economy, there simply aren't enough jobs to go around in places like Harlem. Some of the interviewees have older relatives with secure jobs, but almost all those jobs are in the public sector (the post office or the city hospitals, for example), which politicians of both parties have pledged to shrink. In addition, many full-time workers rely indirectly on welfare programs that are being "reformed" out of existence. As Newman explains, "Many of the immigrants in the low-wage system manage in the same fashion: their oldest relatives receive SSI [Supplemental Security Income], and `work' for the family by taking responsibility for the babies." Paying for child care is not an option on a Burger Barn salary.

Perhaps most disappointing is that a fast-food job generally leads, at best, to a lateral career move. Burger Barn workers dream about a job, say, stocking shelves at a drugstore, where they don't have to wear uniforms that reek of raw meat. But pay rates that are substantially above minimum wage seem out of reach, even for someone with a high-school diploma and 10 years of work experience. A job at the Gap is the Holy Grail for some of the interviewees in No Shame.

Newman criticizes federal and state governments, but I would have liked more data on the large corporations that control most of the work force in America. In one chapter, she lauds fast-food chains for encouraging younger employees to stay in school. But later she provides evidence that fast-food chains are more likely to hire older people who are done with education and, more surprising, who live outside the neighborhood. ("It may well be that `the ghetto you don't know,' the one that is far away from the housing projects right around the restaurants, is more attractive to employers.")

No Shame can border on the sentimental: "Little Tiffany wasn't saving for gold chains, she was trying to help make ends meet in a family that was falling apart." But Newman's selective view of Harlem life is still more convincing than the "welfare queen" stories perpetuated by Ronald Reagan. Congressional aides will earn their salaries by keeping this book away from their bosses, who will then be able to campaign against shiftless ghetto dwellers with a clear conscience.

-- Robert David Sullivan