Working Over Time : WHEN WORK DISAPPEARS: The World of the New Urban Poor.<i> By William Julius Wilson (Knopf: $26; 352 pp.)</i> : RESTORING PROSPERITY: How Workers and Managers Are Forging a New Culture of Cooperation. <i> By Wellford W. Wilms (Times Business: $25; 288 pp.)</i>

I wonder what presidential candidates will see when they look out upon the audiences that will gather to hear them speak on Labor Day. President Clinton and former Sen. Bob Dole will likely share the stump with workers and perhaps even march in union parades. Union leaders will pretend to have a power, a voting bloc, they no longer possess. There will be the pretense, shared for just one day, that politics at the national level is really a blue-collar affair and that presidential politicians have more in common with labor than they do with the nation’s overcompensated CEOs.

And, in the peculiarly entrapped rhetoric of their stump speeches, both Clinton and Dole will no doubt endorse change, which, in political terms, is like endorsing the inevitable return of the seasons. But when the candidates look into the crowd, they will be looking into the face of change itself, change more sweeping and unsettling than anything ever dreamed of in a Republican or a Democratic caucus. Will they see it?

The two books under review here--”Restoring Prosperity: How Workers and Managers Are Forging a New Culture of Cooperation,” by Wellford W. Wilms, a professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and “When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor,” by William Julius Wilson, the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government--are books about the changes inscribing themselves across America. Their subjects are very different, but they share important assumptions and conclusions. Each is essential reading for candidates and voters alike.

Wilms and a team of graduate students spent five years working off and on at four manufacturing companies: Douglas Aircraft, Hewlett-Packard’s Santa Clara division, USS-Posco (a joint venture between USX and the South Korean steelmaker Posco) and Nummi (a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota). “Restoring Prosperity” is a highly readable, often dramatic report on the extent to which those companies were able to overcome the adversarial culture that is traditional in manufacturing and to create a new working partnership between labor and management.

In “When Work Disappears,” Wilson’s research was conducted over eight years among “ghetto poverty census tracts” in Chicago. His rather more stately book begins with the same scenario as Wilms’--a steady loss of manufacturing jobs in America and the fact that “economic growth today does not necessarily produce good jobs.” But Wilson’s larger purpose is to correlate those changes with what he calls “the world of the new urban poor” and to demonstrate that “joblessness is more strongly associated with poverty than in previous years.”

There is an apparent ambiguity in that last sentence of Wilson’s. On the surface, it seems to state the obvious: When you’re out of work, you’re out of money. But his point is a subtler and more meaningful one, and it reveals a shift in the character of this nation’s poorest neighborhoods. “In the 1950s,” Wilson writes, “employment rates were high. People were poor, but they were still working. Ghetto neighborhoods were as highly segregated as they are now, but people were working.” Today, those same districts are characterized not only by chronic poverty but also by chronic joblessness. Among the working poor, all the bonds that reinforce a community remain intact. But among the jobless poor, Wilson suggests, community simply dissolves.

Overwhelmingly, the jobs that have been lost to city dwellers over the last few decades are manufacturing jobs. Some jobs have moved to the suburbs, some have moved overseas and some have been eliminated by new technologies. One group left unemployed by this loss of jobs is young black males, many of whose fathers worked in the kinds of industries Wilms has studied. Saying that 3 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared between 1979 and 1992, Wilms concludes, “The facts are that there are simply not enough high-wage manufacturing jobs to go around and that the impact of this predicament has been absorbed mainly by the young and poor families.”

Both Wilson and Wilms argue that these are broad systemic changes, so deep and pervasive that they essentially defy the will of an individual to overcome them. What really hinders America’s ability to accommodate change successfully and equitably, Wilms and Wilson suggest, is this nation’s belief in individualism. The central message of both books is that the social costs of our faith in individualism are too high and that the rewards of individualism are by no means greater than the rewards of cooperative enterprise.

In fact, from their very different perspectives, “Restoring Prosperity” and “When Work Disappears” offer closely reasoned attacks on what one might call the argument for individual initiative.

Of the four companies Wilms and his research group studied, the most successful at ending traditional hostility between labor and management was Nummi, a joint venture auto plant in Fremont, Calif. Nummi’s success “ultimately stemmed from the creation of a new ‘third’ culture that . . . gave guidance to day-to-day behavior,” Wilms writes. “The culture that emerged was neither completely American nor completely Japanese.” This culture did not emerge without pain, nor was it necessarily stable--what culture is?--when it finally did emerge. But for it to emerge at all--for the Fremont plant to go online, for its cars and light trucks to win quality awards, as they did--labor and management had to concede what, historically, they have always seemed unable to concede: that they were all in it together.

To make this concession, workers and managers at Nummi needed to overcome what Wilms calls the “Horatio Alger-like philosophy” in the American workplace, “where luck, pluck and personal responsibility define the winners.” Near the end of “Restoring Prosperity,” Wilms concludes that it’s possible, in the words of one union official, to “balance collective rights against those of the individual” in the workplace. Wilms had seen it happen at Nummi. “Such a balance,” he writes, “can be struck voluntarily, but can it be reinforced by popular will? Perhaps. But in America, where individualism still reigns, such a new social and legal structure can only follow a massive cultural change.” He believes that to survive, indeed to profit from, the shifts in the American economy, Americans have first to reform the antiquated culture of mass production, a culture rooted in individualism, which reproduces, almost unwittingly, the adversarial conditions that prevailed in late 19th and early 20th century factories.

Wilms shows the reader how, historically, the impasse in American manufacturing came about. Wilson, in turn, shows the reader how the crisis among urban blacks came about. Contrary to what most Americans seem to believe, ghettos were not created by a failure of will on the part of their inhabitants. As Wilson reminds us, it took systematic redlining by the Federal Housing Authority and insurance companies; urban renewal and heavily subsidized construction of new highways to the suburbs; the demise of city services and the increasing isolation of poor, segregated neighborhoods; racism and ignorance; and, ultimately, the widespread belief that there has been a failure of will among ghetto inhabitants, who, in the end, many Americans seem to feel, deserve anything they get.

Wilson demonstrates, often with withering cogency, that the bootstrap argument, so beloved of Americans, simply does not apply to the residents of ghetto neighborhoods. (Nor does it apply to anyone else in quite the naive way many people seem to imagine.) The problems inner-city blacks face are not individual problems, he says, but structural problems with nearly impenetrable roots. Wilson refutes the bootstrap credo, and he does so in a way that annuls, point by point, the ordinary articles of faith concerning welfare recipients. For instance, he quotes a 1987 study by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, which found “that there was no conclusive evidence to support the prevailing common beliefs that welfare discourages individuals from working, breaks up two-parent families or affects the childbearing rates of unmarried women, even young unmarried women.”

It’s easy to overemphasize the cultural conflict between the urban poor and the residents of suburban America. Wilson argues that there is extensive cultural overlap and that what conflict there is takes perhaps a different shape than one might imagine. He quotes a survey taken in 1980: “Most Americans believe that opportunity for economic advancement is widely available, that economic outcomes are determined by individuals’ efforts and talents (or their lack) and that in general economic inequality is fair.”

But Wilson concludes after extensive interviews in Chicago’s Black Belt that “the beliefs of inner-city residents bear little resemblance to the blanket media reports asserting that values have plummeted in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods or that people in the inner city have an entirely different value system.” He writes: “What is so striking is that despite the overwhelming joblessness and poverty, black residents in inner-city ghetto neighborhoods actually verbally endorse, rather than undermine, the basic American values concerning individual initiative.” The difference between perception and reality does not lie in the underlying beliefs, he says. It lies in the clarity with which the inner-city poor discern the structural roots of their problems, a clarity the majority of Americans do not share. As Wilson says, “The tragic nature and social causes of such problems are lost on a public that holds truly disadvantaged groups, such as inner-city blacks, largely responsible for their plight.”

On the Labor Day stump, the presidential candidates will tenderly allude to our basic American rights. But as a society changes, the rights it incorporates also change. In this society, what matters, too, are the extended rights, the ones that arise from our collective wealth and from the conviction that we are all in this together. Those rights include, among others, the right to a sustaining job and, as both authors argue in their summations, the right to an education that actually leads to a sustaining job. The very systemic causes that have isolated and penalized urban blacks--a collapse in education and job networks--are capable of isolating and penalizing any group, any class, once work disappears.

Perhaps now, as a broader cross-section of America’s work force is displaced by turbulence in the global economy, there may be a slightly clearer understanding of the limits to individualism and of the abyss that opens beneath the unemployed. “Restoring Prosperity” and “When Work Disappears” will do a great deal to enhance that understanding.