Purchase
Tough Times for the American Worker
Knopf
April 2008
On Sale: April 15, 2008
384 pages ISBN: 1400044898 EAN: 9781400044894 Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
The Big Squeeze takes a fresh, probing, and often
shocking look at the stresses and strains faced by tens of
millions of American workers as wages have stagnated, health
and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security
has shriveled.
Going behind the scenes, Steven
Greenhouse tells the stories of software engineers in
Seattle, hotel housekeepers in Chicago, call center workers
in New York, and janitors in Houston, as he explores why, in
the world’s most affluent nation, so many corporations are
intent on squeezing their workers dry. We meet all kinds of
workers: white collar and blue collar, high tech and low
tech, middle income and low income; employees who stock
shelves during a hurricane while locked inside their store,
get fired after suffering debilitating injuries on the job,
face egregious sexual harassment, and get laid off when
their companies move high-tech operations abroad. We also
meet young workers having a hard time starting out and
seventy-year-old workers with too little money saved up to
retire.
The book explains how economic, business,
political, and social trends—among them globalization, the
influx of immigrants, and the Wal-Mart effect—have fueled
the squeeze. We see how the social contract between
employers and employees, guaranteeing steady work and good
pensions, has eroded over the last three decades, damaged by
massive layoffs of factory and office workers and Wall
Street’s demands for ever-higher profits. In short, the
post–World War II social contract that helped build the
world’s largest and most prosperous middle class has been
replaced by a startling contradiction: corporate profits,
economic growth, and worker productivity have grown strongly
while worker pay has languished and Americans face
ever-greater pressures to work harder and
longer.
Greenhouse also examines companies that are
generous to their workers and can serve as models for all of
corporate America: Costco, Patagonia, and the casino-hotels
of Las Vegas among them. Finally, he presents a series of
pragmatic, ready-to-be-implemented suggestions on what
government, business, and labor should do to alleviate the
squeeze.
A balanced, consistently revealing
exploration of a major American crisis.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|