Jobless Poverty: A New Form of Social Disclocation

In this chapter by William Julius Wilson, he introduces to us the jobless poverty of today and the jobless poverty of the last. He introduces to us statistics that back up his study. Wilson believed that inner-city joblessness is an extreme and severe problem them is sometimes over shadowed when the main point is focused on poverty and its consequences on being in poverty and or being poor. He focuses his work on the joblessness of the inner city.

This joblessness does not include people who are not employed by companies, or other places, but it also focuses on other types of “employment” such as street hustlers, drug dealers, black market, and unpaid housework jobs, such as babysitting, stay at home mom, ect. I thought Wilson brought about extremely good statistics in his research. He stated that in 1990 in the inner-city ghetto of Chicago, only 1 in 3 adults aged sixteen and older held a job in the ghetto poverty areas of Chicago. In the tracts of the nation’s one-hundred largest cities, for every ten adults who did not hold a job in a typical week in 1990 were only six employed persons.
What I liked about this article is he parallels the effects of joblessness with the way you live you live your life and the self discipline you have for yourself on the job, and outside of the job. A person who lacks a successful job or the absence of regular employment, that individual may be involved, in my opinion, in more petty crimes, violent crimes, ect. Your family life, and life in general become less coherent. If you grow up in the inner city of Detroit, not a breadwinner of the family, where none of your family members graduated from college, and only one of your family members has a job, you are more than likely going to become less coherent of caring about getting a job, or graduating from school. You will not be determined to be on time for a job, you are probably not going to have many goals in life, and your aspects of daily life will go down the tubes.(Not to their fault at all). If you are born into a steady upper middle class family with a steady breadwinner in the family and in a upper middle class neighborhood you are more likely to succeed and care about goals. If most individuals in your neighborhood are employed and have disciplined habits that are reflected of their jobs and goals, you are likely to want to succeed just like them. You have a sense of the recognition of the hierarchy of the neighborhood. If you see the rewards (material and nonmaterial) associated with hard work(the American way), and responsibility, it will thrive you to do well in everything you do. I absolutely agree with Wilson when he talks about this in this chapter. The external factors, the factors we can’t control, has a huge effect on how we are brought up, and how we see ourselves and the other people around us. If you are brought up on the streets of the city you are going to have a hard time moving up that social ladder and getting out of that life, rather than if you are born into a white, prestige family that has the money and resources to send you to the best schools. This has a huge factor on the jobless poverty. You must take this into consideration, and I thought Wilson did it well in his findings and research.