The Working Poor by David K. Shipler

years older than she was. But her teeth had succumbed to poverty, to the years when she could not afford a dentist. Most of them decayed and abscessed, and when she lived on welfare in Florida, she had them all pulled in a grueling two-hour session that left her looking bruised and beaten. Under the state’s Medicaid rules as she understood them, a set of dentures would have been covered only if she had been without any teeth at all; while some of them could have been saved, she couldn’t afford to do less than everything. In the end, unfortunately, the dentures paid for by Medicaid didn’t fit and made her gag, so she couldn’t wear them. An adjustment would have cost about $250, money she didn’t have.
    No employer would ever admit to passing her over because she was missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote. Caroline had learned to smile with her whole face, a sweet look that didn’t show her gums, yet it came across as wistful, something less than the thousand-watt beam of friendly delightthat the culture requires. Where showing teeth was an unwritten part of the job description, she did not excel. She was turned down for a teller’s position with the Claremont Savings Bank, which then hired her for backroom filing and eventually fired her from that. Wal-Mart considered her for customer service manager and then promoted someone else, someone with teeth.
    Caroline’s was the face of the working poor, marked by a poverty-generated handicap more obvious than most deficiencies but no different, really, from the less visible deficits that reflect and reinforce destitution. If she had not been poor, she would not have lost her teeth, and if she had not lost her teeth, perhaps she would not have remained poor. Poverty is a peculiar, insidious thing: a cause whose effects then cause the original cause, or an effect whose causes are caused by the effect. It depends on where in the cycle the analysis begins. Like most of the forgotten America, Caroline was a bundle of causes and effects.
    Depression, a frequent companion of poverty, afflicted Caroline in paralyzing bouts of self-neglect, according to Brenda St. Laurence, the caseworker and home visitor who helped Caroline for years. “A lot of times she doesn’t wear her deodorant and really needs to, doesn’t take a shower, her hair will be really messy,” Brenda said. “She’s a heavy smoker; her clothes will smell smoky at times.” I never saw Caroline in that condition during five years of interviewing, but Brenda came from the same world as her clients and easily moved into their lives. Brenda was not a graduate-degree professional from an affluent upbringing; she had a high school diploma and a working-class background. She did not condescend, but she did judge, and with enough affection to be regarded warmly by those she tried to assist. At Caroline, she directed more understanding than blame. “When you are a depressed person,” Brenda observed, “you can’t get motivated.”
    Like many laborers stuck at low levels, Caroline was the victim of many factors: appearance, yes, but also a heavy burden of childhood, marital, and educational handicaps that included difficulty reading and writing. All her deficiencies intertwined with the injustices and the ruthlessness of the free market. At times, personal trials distracted her so intensely that she could not concentrate on her work. And so, as the country’s economic power rushed forward, she was caught in a back eddy of stagnant wages and limited horizons. The recession that followed the boom made little difference at her lowly position; she continued to move laterally among hermodest jobs, from store to factory to store. Her pattern mirrored the broader experience of low-income single parents nationwide, whose employment rate and hourly wages barely changed during the recession. 2
    Caroline’s father had been a school janitor and her