San Antonio College Library

More than three billion people in the world live on less than two-and-a-half U.S. dollars per person per day. In this book the author explains how the poor work, how they have improved their self-employment earning opportunities, how poor-country governments can stimulate more inclusive economic growth, and how they can be aided. Studies have shown repeatedly that the main and often the sole asset of the poor is their labor. It follows that to understand...

"Making It Work" examines Milwaukee's New Hope program, an experiment testing the effectiveness of an anti-poverty initiative that provided health and child care subsidies, wage supplements, and other services to full-time low-wage workers. Employing parent surveys, teacher reports, child assessment measures, ethnographic studies, and state administrative records, "Making It Work" provides a detailed picture of how a mother's work trajectory affects...

"This book chronicles the impact of the sweeping transformation of the social safety net that occurred in the mid-1990s. With the dramatic expansion of tax credits--a combination of the Earned Income Tax Credit and other refunds--the economic fortunes of the working poor have been bolstered as never before. 'It's Not Like I'm Poor' looks at how working families plan to use their annual windfall to build up savings, go back to school, and send their...

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."

Publisher's description: An astonishing 35 million Americans work full time but do not make a living. They are nursing home workers, poultry processors, pharmacy assistants, ambulance drivers, child care workers, data entry keyers, janitors. Indeed, one in four American workers lives in or near poverty. Despite the great wealth of the United States, these low-wage workers have lower living standards than do similar workers in most other industrial...

From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming...

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, could be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, she left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was...

This agrarian novel of the forties calls cottonfields "the great open air slum of the South."

At 28, Stephanie Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, and with a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree,...