San Antonio College Library

Does the American Dream still exist when nearly 30 million Americans live in families in which workers find a paycheck and poverty in the same envelope? Just as Michael Harrington's The Other America shocked the nation with its disclosure of poverty in the 1960s, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy's The Forgotten Americans exposes the breadth of poverty that exists today among responsible, hardworking Americans. At the end of the prosperous 1980s,...

This text illuminates workers' lives at home, on the job, and in the voting booths.

This is a book about working-class identity, consciousness, and self-determination. It offers an alternative to middle-class assimilation and working-class amnesia. The twenty-five contributors use memory - both personal and collective - to show the relationship between the uncertain economic rhythms of working-class life and the possibilities for cultural and political agency. Manual labor and intellectual work are connected in these multicultural...

This book gives voice to the 57 million Americans--including 21 percent of the nation's children--who are sandwiched between poor and middle class. While government programs help the needy and politicians woo the more fortunate, the "Missing Class" is largely invisible and ignored. Through the experiences of nine families, sociologists Newman and Chen trace the unique problems faced by individuals in this large and growing demographic--the "near poor"--Who...

A Social History of the Laboring Classes provides a sweeping account of the most significant aspect of nearly every American's life: work. Beginning with the seventeenth century, Jacqueline Jones examines the experiences of different groups of American workers - waged and unwaged, urban and countrysidewithin a framework of the economic transformations that have occurred at regular intervals throughout American history. This concise synthesis by an...

Presents an examination of the working poor in the United States. Several families describe their lives as members of the working poor community where one unexpected expense, sudden illness, or a missed payment could mean financial ruin. The genesis of the show was a book by David Shipler, "The Working Poor."