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The introduction to this chapter considers the paradox that now that European society is ageing, it is becoming quite urgent that more is invested in the welfare of children, in contrast to the situation in the post‐war decades, when Europe was youthful and welfare policies came to focus on the elderly. An examination is then made of how welfare risks concentrate across households, focusing both on families with children generally, and on high‐risk lone parent and work‐poor households in particular. Next, the impact of family welfare on citizens’ life chances, particularly during early childhood, is addressed. Women's paid employment emerges as a key ingredient in any strategy to combat poverty in families with children, and it is noted that this calls for a much more concerted strategy of equalizing women's opportunities (discussed in the next chapter). It is nonetheless vital that any sustainable and effective policy for combating social exclusion must combine child‐, family‐, and women‐friendly policies within an integrated strategy, on which the social quality and economic efficiency of twenty‐first‐century Europe will largely depend.

For many of those among the working poor who lack coverage by medical insurance, the biggest problem is gaining access to a physician. Immigrants constitute a disproportionate number of the working poor families. Although progress had been made since the mid-1990s, this chapter reports that 44 percent of the immigrant children in working poor families were not covered by health insurance in 2001, along with 17 percent of the US born children of the working poor. The serious vulnerability of children in working poor families highlights the need for continued support of existing programs, such as Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, so that they might be extended to the approximately 6 million uninsured children who are currently eligible for coverage. In addition to support for these programs, the chapter recommends that states provide universal coverage for all children along the lines of Governor Schwarzenegger's proposal to expand health insurance coverage for all uninsured Californians.

Examines the fields of education, employment, and unemployment. It starts from the social indicators on low education, joblessness, long‐term unemployment and regional disparities proposed by the European Commission. However, it goes beyond these, covering also differential access to education, employment activation, and the working poor and low pay.

This chapter explores the reasons for the mass strikes among the guestworkers laboring in Florida's cane fields during the 1960s. It argues that these strikes were caused by a confluence of two seemingly unrelated events: the Cuban Revolution and Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. Like the collision of two weather systems, these transformations—a revolution and a reform program—brought unintended but devastating changes to working conditions in Florida's fields. What had been a hard but coveted opportunity for poor black men from the Caribbean became, as Johnson's Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz put it only somewhat hyperbolically, “the worst job in the world.”

This chapter describes the history, activities, and problems of the Norman Street Block Association, which was but one attempt by residents of Norman Street to influence their environment. In three years of interaction with the residents of Greenpoint–Williamsburg, the author collected a mass of data which testified to the frequent involvement in collective action of working-class poor in urban areas. Although seldom successful and often not long-lasting, such persistent efforts to control the environment were a significant feature of low-income life.

This chapter aims to hook the reader on the lives of poor workers. It begins with a description of the author's visit to high-tech China. It then narrates his own personal story on how he got to where he is today, starting with his experience with mass poverty in Kenya while a graduate student. The chapter concludes by asking the reader to put himself/herself in the shoes of the billions of people in the world who are working hard but working poor.

This chapter discusses how place matters to the “new” American welfare state, where community-based services become a primary method for helping the working poor. It explains the geography of the safety net, where the spatial distribution of social service provision is essential to understanding how communities help the poor. It suggests that if the safety net is mismatched to the geography of need, social programs will have limited success and isolated poverty will persist. It adds that the failure to recognize the spatial distribution of social service providers, thus, may lead to persistently unmet needs and ineffective tools to aid the poor.

This chapter sets out the general theoretical and empirical terrain of the book, drawing attention to continuities and discontinuities both in the provision of welfare as an attempt to tackle or at least contain poverty and in the shape and nature of employment in the UK. It defines some of the key terms we use in this book. The chapter highlights the recent turn in research to understanding the dynamics of poverty and it also explains the broader research programme in which the study was located. The chapter also contends with some important, contemporary myths about the demand for and supply of labour. The chapter highlights the broad landscape of changing employment and welfare conditions. The chapters which follow, in the middle of the book, paint a finer portrait of the consequences and reality of these changes as they are lived by people in low-pay, no-pay Britain.

This chapter explores the work histories and work experience of parents, their ambitions and the role of training in helping mothers in particular back into work. It summarises the evidence from the 200 families about their work experience, the evolution of jobs in their families and the links between parents’s work ambitions and training opportunities. It then explores the parents’ direct accounts of work, studying and training, using parents’ own words to convey their experiences, including work history and the prospects of ‘work-poor’ families. It notes that the work background of the families clearly influences why some parents do not work, including inter-generational worklessness. It further notes the impact of working tax credits, childcare worries, the knock-on effects on benefits and associated problems in relation to jobs, and suggests what might help.

This chapter throws light on the personal and family background of labor activist Ellen Dawson. Dawson was brought up in a working-class background. Like the vast majority of working-class families of the period, the Dawsons were trapped in a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence where survival was often their sole objective. Unquestionably, the Dawson family was at the very bottom of the Scottish working class. They were among the poorest of Britain's working poor.

This chapter provides a unique overview of how ‘the bottom’ in general is constructed in the US, UK, Sweden, and Denmark. Some of these patterns reflect some of the socio-economic ‘realities’ However, the described patterns in the mass media representation also demonstrate a large number of disparities between ‘reality’ and the mass media construction of ‘reality’. Some of the disparities found by the previous American literature could also be found in UK, Sweden and Denmark. But the description of cross-national patterns in mass media constructions reveals other striking disparities. One is that despite the fact that the neo-liberal labour market trajectory created many working poor, the American and British mass media depicted very few media-poor that had a job. And despite the absence of working poor in Sweden and Denmark (due to due to high minimum wages, the Danish and especially the Swedish mass media depicted many media-poor with a job.

The chapter focuses on people's recurrent experiences of getting, doing, losing and leaving jobs. It shows how much of the work now available is typically low-skilled, low paid and insecure yet usually demand uncommonly high levels of personal commitment. These jobs were found to be typically physically and mentally demanding yet poorly valued in terms of remuneration and status. For a few interviewees better quality employment meant they escaped the poverty and churning of the low-pay, no-pay cycle. It is employment opportunities – the demand side of the labour market - which are most significant in shaping the low-pay, no-pay cycle and patterns of recurrent poverty. Intriguingly, although able to - sometimes graphically - describe the pain and unpleasantness of poor work, interviewees would simultaneously proclaim how they ‘loved’ working. This conundrum is explained by reference to the intrinsic social, psychological, moral and class cultural value of work to interviewees. The chapter also scrutinises how and why workers left jobs, which was often related to the pressures of work on personal health or because of wider crises in people's lives. Predominantly, the inherent insecurity of jobs, with employers who were as quick to fire as they were to hire, meant that jobs were lost.

The author begins The Servant Class City with an introduction to one of their friends, the entrepreneur Raymond, and the odd jobs he does to earn a living. To some observers, Raymond’s situation and outlook is frustrating; he is obviously a hard worker, so why doesn’t he just learn a trade or start his own business? The barriers to either, however, are multiple. It is not from the lack of trying; but rather, the structures of opportunity have shifted, making it difficult to attain any level of economic security or move up economically through greater income. The book specifically examines the unique economic structures of the city of San Diego, California.

The seventh chapter looks more closely at the challenges and costs of the lack of financial institutions within an inner city, and what the implications are for asset accumulation and economic stability. Despite a plethora of large banking establishments in the downtown area and a good concentration of retail banks, poorer adjacent neighborhoods in central San Diego have a dearth of retail banking. Financial services are available, but they are what are sometimes called “fringe banking.” These businesses typically have higher costs than conventional retail banks, but are often the only means that the urban and working poor can access financial services. Since obtaining critically important assets are critical for the urban poor, having a well-functioning financial services system to aid in this is crucial. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The concluding chapter of The Servant Class City provides a review of the key issues and makes policy suggestions. The lack of economic mobility in the United States is a growing problem across socioeconomic and racial/ethnic demographics. The central research question regarding economic mobility is why so many people in low-income families have a difficult time moving out of the bottom rungs. The chapter also criticizes the current status of urban policy.

This chapter explains that geography matters to the American welfare state, particularly for policies and programs targeted at working poor populations. It argues that policymakers, scholars, and communities, should be concerned with issues of equality and stability in the provision of safety net assistance. It added that the geography of the safety net is closely related to the issues of race, poverty, joblessness, and social isolation, in communities.

The fifth chapter looks at informal, or “off-the-books,” employment and how integral it is in low-income communities, particularly for those who cannot afford vital services or do not earn enough through their primary occupation. Traditionally, this type of “street hustling” has been viewed as on the peripheries of urban economic activity. The chapter includes an analysis of informal work alongside other forms of low-wage labor precisely because when looked at it analytically, this type of wage labor is not marginal, but is in fact integral to the economy of the urban and working poor.