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Tough Times for the American Worker
Anchor
February 2009
On Sale: February 10, 2009
384 pages
ISBN: 1400096529
EAN: 9781400096527
Paperback
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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largest and most prosperous middle class has been replaced
by a startling contradiction: corporate profits, economic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.
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