Steven Greenhouse

Steven Greenhouse is the labor and workplace reporter for the New York Times and author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. His first book, The Big Squeeze is an in-depth account of how American companies have squeezed millions of workers by clamping down on wages, cutting benefits, weakening job security and violating wage and hour laws.

Based in New York City, he has covered workplace issues for the Times since late 1995 and is one of the few remaining full-time labor reporters in the country. In that position, he has written about wage trends, labor unions, immigrant workers, child labor, and the way major corporations treat—and mistreat—their workers. He has done investigative exposés about Wal-Mart locking in its workers at night, abysmal housing conditions for the nation’s farm workers, and Toys “R” Us and other companies cheating workers by secretly erasing hours from their time cards.

Greenhouse began at the New York Times in September 1983 as a business reporter, covering the steel industry and other basic industries. He next spent two-and-a-half years in Chicago, writing about the Midwest’s economy during a time of plant closings and large-scale layoffs. From 1987 to 1992, he was based in Paris as the newspaper’s European economics correspondent. There he wrote about a range of topics, including the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, Western Europe’s welfare state, industrial giants like Nestle and Fiat, French culture, and Poland’s transition from Communism to capitalism.

In 1992, he became a correspondent in the Times Washington bureau, covering the Federal Reserve and economic policy and later the State Department and foreign policy. After nearly four years in Washington, he asked to cover labor and workplace issues, largely because he was eager to return to reporting about flesh-and-blood people.

He has appeared on National Public Radio, PBS (“The News Hour”), MSNBC, CNN, and the BBC.

A native of Massapequa, N.Y., he attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. After earning a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he went to work for the Bergen Record in New Jersey. In 1982, he graduated first in his class from the New York University School of Law. He served as a law clerk for Federal District Court Judge Robert L. Carter in Manhattan, who had helped argue Brown v. Board of Education before the United States Supreme Court.

His son, Jeremy, is a student at Tufts University, and his daughter, Emily, is a member of Wesleyan’s class of 2008. Both hope to be journalists. He lives with his wife, Miriam Reinharth, in Pelham, N.Y.

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