Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, took classes online to earn a college degree. And she wrote relentlessly: true stories of overworked and underpaid Americans; of living on food stamps and WIC coupons. Here she explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"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...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland--and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it's best to let the uncanny house--and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling--go to rot. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
"An eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in the American Midwest. During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and 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 look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about...
Author
Publisher
Beacon Press
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
"The story of low-wage workers rising up around the world to demand respect and a living wage. We Are All Fast Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages traces the evolution of a new global labor movement sparked and sustained by low-wage workers from Manila to Manhattan, from Baja California to Bangladesh, from Capetown to Cambodia. This is an up close and personal look at globalization and its costs, as seen through the eyes and...
Author
Publisher
Macmillan and Co
Pub. Date
1912.
Language
English
Description
""The Charwoman's Daughter is the strange wistful story of sixteen-year-old Mary, the only child of her fiercely protective, widowed mother.... Mary and her mother live in a one-room tenement flat that is home to the rituals of their bitter love. By day her mother cleans the houses of the Dublin rich, while Mary makes observations as she walks through the city. The imaginitive richness of her insight makes the city come alive as a place that is both...
11) Class: a memoir
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Maid was a story about a housecleaner, but it was also a story about a woman with a dream. In Class, Land takes us with her as she finishes college and pursues her writing career. Facing barriers at every turn including a byzantine loan system, not having enough money for food, navigating the judgments of professors and fellow students who didn't...
Author
Publisher
Plain View Press
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"Richard R. Troxell's book Short Stories in a Long Journey blends his personal story with the life of an activist for ending and preventing homelessness. This book highlights the structural defects in our system and laws and proposes common-sense economic solutions to the problems of homelessness and substance abuse, such as the Universal Living Wage to address income inequality, a modest liquor surcharge to finance substance treatment, and a bronze...
Author
Publisher
Scribner
Pub. Date
2012.
Language
English
Description
"What if you couldn't afford nine dollar tomatoes? That was the question award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan couldn't escape as she watched the debate about America's meals unfold, one that urges us to pay food's true cost - which is to say, pay more. So in 2009 McMillan embarked on a groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America. For nearly a year, she worked, ate, and lived alongside the working poor to examine...
16) The end of Eddy
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy. "Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again. Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy." Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different -- "girlish," intellectually precocious, and attracted to other...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. Getting Me Cheap is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers--primarily women--who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and...
Author
Publisher
Soft Skull Press
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories is a collection about dishwashers, veterans, people who sleep outside, people who look through dumpsters, sandwich-makers, people who drive ice cream trucks, people who work in factories that manufacture pieces of metal, people who clean up after weddings, and other people who are not often the subject of books. It is very funny, tender-hearted, vivid, briefly and beautifully surreal at times"--
Author
Publisher
New Press
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
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...
Publisher
Dreamscape Media
Pub. Date
[2023]
Language
English
Description
"The current poverty rate in America is staggering, and the future is bleak. This film takes a closer look at the research from Dr. Ron Haskins and Dr. Isabel Sawhill that outlines a three-step process towards changing the tide in America. The film focuses its attention on Amarillo Texas, a rural hub of the Texas Panhandle. We speak with educators, pastors, students, and community leaders about what poverty looks like in their hometown. The data is...