It is the cruel dilemma of the working poor: lousy, low-paying jobs make it impossible to break out of bad circumstances, and the bad circumstances are the reason for the lousy, low-paying jobs.

So millions work just to keep working. They will work and they will be poor in a country where hard work and poverty are not supposed to go together.

And they will be invisible to most of us.

“Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage,” writes David Shipler in the introduction to his The Working Poor: Invisible In America.

Shipler is a former New York Times reporter, a Pulitzer Prize winner who likes to take on topics that do not fit easily into tidy categories. His other books include Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land and A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.

He spent five years, off and on, talking with the working poor, getting as close to their lives as they would allow and studying the things that keep them in a daunting struggle to keep on going.

There are Southern farm workers and Northern garment workers, struggling single mothers, illegal immigrants and recovering addicts. And all work under a draining daily uncertainty.

“It’s a combination of low skills and the ruthlessness of the private marketplace,” said Shipler, during a telephone interview Monday. “And it is ruthless. You do have to be competitive to make your way in it.”

On the subject of ruthless, he points to aircraft mechanics who are laid off and their jobs outsourced. Then they are rehired by a separate contractor at lower pay with fewer benefits.

Shipler is at Roger Williams University in Bristol today. He will talk with students and faculty in morning and afternoon classes and speak at 7 tonight in the Campus Recreation Center Gymnasium. Tonight’s event is free and open to the public.

His book on the working poor has been read by all first year students, faculty and staff as part of the university’s Reading Across The Curriculum Program.

In previous campus appearances, Shipler says, he has talked with students who came from the very situations he writes about. But he says that society is generally not attuned to the situation of the working poor, a situation in which the “modest mishap” can have catastrophic consequences.

In the presidential campaign, John Edwards was the only candidate to talk about the problems of poverty, said Shipler. And now Edwards has other problems of his own to deal with.

So Shipler likes to raise questions. He likes to leave people asking about things they’ve probably stayed clear of for a very long time.

“In the larger society, are we interested in reducing poverty?” he asks. “To what extent are we likely to suffer from poverty in our midst?”

And if we choose to spend less on our children, asks Shipler, are we prepared to spend more on the prisons that will eventually house many of them?

He is a liberal, he confesses, and he tended to see the problem in terms of society’s failure in areas such as housing and health care and education. But there are individual and family failures that are part of the mix and they have to be considered, he said.

It is the kind of unwieldy, complex, impossible to define topic he prefers to confront.

“I’m on a quest to understand my country,” says Shipler.

And we can go along, for part of the way at least. We can read his book and consider his questions and perhaps come to know about people we’ve never stopped to notice before.

bkerr@projo.com