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  • Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada
  • Irene Bloemraad
Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada By Dan Zuberi Cornell University Press, 2006. 230 pages. $49.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper)

What effect do relatively small differences in social policy have on the lives of the working poor? Comparing hotel workers in Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia, Dan Zuberi argues convincingly that government policies matter and can improve the lives of those toiling in low-skilled, low paying service jobs. According to Zuberi, these differences are apparent regardless of a common neoliberal welfare state in the United States and Canada, and despite claims that globalization, low skilled service work and large multinational corporations undermine the welfare state. In his words, "there is nothing inevitable about… rising levels of inequality and poverty. In countries experiencing growing poverty, what has been lacking is the collective will and imagination to live up to the democratic dream…" (12)

Zuberi rests his claims on a careful cross-national comparison. Seattle and Vancouver are arguably the most similar cities in the United States and Canada, located 120 miles apart and sharing a comparable Pacific Northwest climate, geography, history and economy. Zuberi seeks to hold constant corporate policy and certain workplace dynamics by interviewing workers in two pairs of hotels that belong to one of two multinational chains, "Globe Hotel" and "Hotel Deluxe." He conducted semi-structured interviews with workers in three departments in each hotel, housekeeping, maintenance/ engineering, and guest services, recruiting 77 participants through nonprobability convenience and snowball sampling. [End Page 370] The interviews asked about work conditions, compensation and benefits, the household's financial situation, union membership, health and health services, and the quality of the respondent's neighborhood, including availability of community services and perceptions of crime.

Differences That Matter wants to move the debate over poverty and social policy away from an exclusive focus on welfare programs. Zuberi consequently focuses on employed workers and considers their overall living conditions. He concludes that hotel workers in Vancouver better quality of life, greater security, more financial resources, better access to health care and relatively less stress than those working in Seattle. His interview data offer support, at times in poignant ways, for these conclusions, although the reader occasionally wishes for a clearer picture of how comparable his respondents are to other hotel workers in Seattle and Vancouver.

The book identifies four areas of social policy that drive cross-national differences: unions and labor policy; health insurance regimes; broad social welfare policies, and local investments in the urban infrastructure. Zuberi reports that in Vancouver, three times as many hotels are unionized as in Seattle, representing the majority of hotels in Vancouver compared to only a small proportion in Seattle. Zuberi studies a unionized and nonunionized hotel in each city, and he notes that while, as one might expect, wages are higher in the Seattle union hotel, in Vancouver wages are actually a bit higher in the nonunionized hotel. He attributes this to the wage floor established by widespread unionization in Vancouver, arguing that Canadian labor policies facilitate broad unionization and this in turn produces spillover effects across an industry.

On health care, Zuberi documents what others have shown: universal state-supported health insurance in Canada results in virtually total health coverage of the population, better health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality and lower individual outlays for health care. He is cautious about concluding that his Seattle respondents have objectively better health than those in Vancouver, but his interview material shows the potentially devastating financial repercussions of a lack of health care, as well as the mental stress accompanying no or limited insurance. Turning to a host of other social and urban policies, including unemployment insurance, childcare subsidies, government mandated vacation, maternity leave, job training, community services and the like, Zuberi paints a similar picture: In Vancouver, hotel workers and their families live a much more stable, middle class life than in Seattle. In Seattle, workers suffer greater insecurity and stress, often teetering between the working or lower middle class and the urban poor.

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