Labor & Industrial Relations

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet.

As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl," trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at $675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test.

So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the wonks who brought us welfare reform?" Nah. Even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month's rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week, and still almost winds up in a shelter. As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humor and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are so cheap as measured by the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless. With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit--where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --Lesley Reed

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Borzoi Books)

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.

The Working Poor: Invisible in America

The Working Poor examines the "forgotten America" where "millions live in the shadow of prosperity, in the twilight between poverty and well-being." These are citizens for whom the American Dream is out of reach despite their willingness to work hard. Struggling to simply survive, they live so close to the edge of poverty that a minor obstacle, such as a car breakdown or a temporary illness, can lead to a downward financial spiral that can prove impossible to reverse. David Shipler interviewed many such working people for this book and his profiles offer an intimate look at what it is like to be trapped in a cycle of dead-end jobs without benefits or opportunities for advancement. He shows how some negotiate a broken welfare system that is designed to help yet often does not, while others proudly refuse any sort of government assistance, even to their detriment. Still others have no idea that help is available at all.

"As a culture, the United States is not quite sure about the causes of poverty, and is therefore uncertain about the solutions," he writes. Though he details many ways in which current assistance programs could be more effective and rational, he does not believe that government alone, nor any other single variable, can solve the problem. Instead, a combination of things are required, beginning with the political will needed to create a relief system "that recognizes both the society's obligation through government and business, and the individual's obligation through labor and family." He does propose some specific steps in the right direction such as altering the current wage structure, creating more vocational programs (in both the public and private sectors), developing a fairer way to distribute school funding, and implementing basic national health care.

Prepare to have any preconceived notions about those living in poverty in America challenged by this affecting book. --Shawn Carkonen

“Nobody who works hard should be poor in America,” writes Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

They perform labor essential to America’s comfort. They are white and black, Latino and Asian--men and women in small towns and city slums trapped near the poverty line, where the margins are so tight that even minor setbacks can cause devastating chain reactions. Shipler shows how liberals and conservatives are both partly right–that practically every life story contains failure by both the society and the individual. Braced by hard fact and personal testimony, he unravels the forces that confine people in the quagmire of low wages. And unlike most works on poverty, this book also offers compelling portraits of employers struggling against razor-thin profits and competition from abroad. With pointed recommendations for change that challenge Republicans and Democrats alike, The Working Poor stands to make a difference.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life

Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself

Combining the astute social analysis of Alvin Tofflers The Third Wave and Faith Popcorns The Popcorn Report, this book boldly predicts the death of the conventional job and describes the Brave New World of the self-employed society.Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the organizing principle of society: people are what they do. But at the dawning of the new millennium, Americans are waking up to the fact that commitment to a traditional corporate structure does not guarantee personal validation or financial security. In what is one of the fastest growing movements today, people are rejecting the idea of corporate loyalty to explore more creative ways of making a living. This book addresses this movement and is a must-have for the millions investigating free agency.

The Organization Man is history. Taking his place is America's new economic icon: the "free agent"--the job-hopping, tech-savvy, fulfillment-seeking, self-reliant, independent worker. Already 30 million strong, these new "dis-organization" men and women are transforming America in ways both profound and exhilarating. Are you ready for . . . · The Peter-Out Principle: Successor to the famous "Peter Principle," this new rule decrees that when the fun peters out, the talented walk out. · Unschooling: Individual-centered learning like homeschooling and apprenticeships will threaten Ivy League colleges and end high school as we know it. · Individual Public Offerings: The upper echelon of free agents will issue these new "IPOs," or stock . . . in themselves.· E-tirement: When Americans reach age sixty-five, more will enter a new stage of life. Working as full-time, part-time, and anytime free agents, they'll be finding and executing work over the Internet.· Just-in-time Politics: This political version of just-in-time manufacturing will challenge the present two-party system.· The Feminine Century: Women are free agency's early adopters. Many analysts estimate that by the year 2005, half of all businesses will be run by women. In this landmark book, Daniel H. Pink offers the definitive account of this revolution in work. He shows who these free agents are--from the marketing consultant down the street to the home-based "mompreneur" to the footloose technology contractor--and why they've forged a new path. His entertaining and provocative account of the new frontier of work reveals how free agents are shaking up all of our institutions--from politics to education to the family.

The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage

A landmark eyewitness exposÂŽ of how China's factory economy competes for Western business by selling out its workers, its environment, and its future

In The China Price, acclaimed Financial Times correspondent Alex Harney uncovers the truth about how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world. What she has discovered is a brutal, Hobbesian world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact an unseen and unconscionable toll in human misery and environmental damage.

In a way, Harney shows, what goes on in China is inevitable. In a country with almost no transparency, where graft is institutionalized and workers have little recourse to the rule of law, incentives to lie about business practices vastly outweigh incentives to tell the truth. Harney reveals that despite a decade of monitoring factories, outsiders all too often have no idea of the conditions under which goods from China are made. She exposes the widespread practice of using a dummy or model factory as a company's false window out to the world, concealing a vast number of illegal factories operating completely off the books. Some Western companies are better than others about sniffing out such deception, but too many are perfectly happy to embrace plausible deniability as long as the prices remain so low. And in the gold-rush atmosphere that's infected the country, in which everyone is clamoring to get rich at once and corruption is rampant, it's almost impossible for the Chinese government's own underfunded regulatory mechanisms to do much good at all.

But perhaps the most important revelation in The China Price is how fast change is coming, one way or another. A generation of Chinese flocked from the rural interior of the country to its coastline, where its factory work largely is, in the largest mass migration in human history. But that migration has slowed dramatically, in no small part because of widespread disenchantment with the way of life the factories offer. As pollution in China's industrial cities worsens and their infrastructure buckles, and grassroots activism for more legal recourse grows, pressures are mounting on the system that will not dissipate without profound change. Managing the violence of that change is the greatest challenge China faces in the near future, and managing its impact on the world economy is the challenge that faces us all.

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

Studs Terkel records the voices of America. Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happinesses on the job. Once again, Terkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives.... In the first trade paperback edition of his national bestseller, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel presents "the real American experience" (Chicago Daily News)--"a magnificent book . . .. A work of art. To read it is to hear America talking." (Boston Globe).

Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work For All Of Us

"They work full time in the richest nation on earth, yet they can't make ends meet. They can't make ends meet because their wages are too low. They are health care aides who can't afford health insurance. They work in the food industry, but depend on food banks to help feed their children. They are child care teachers who don't make enough to save for their own children's education. . . . They care for the elderly, but they have no pensions."-from Raise the Floor

A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it. But millions of people make up the working poor in the U.S. Rooted in powerful new research and personal narratives, Raise the Floor makes the case for a livable minimum wage and shows how good wages are good business.

Raise the Floor illustrates how the current annual minimum wage income of $10,712 a year just doesn't add up. For example, to make ends meet, two parents with two children would have work more than three full-time minimum wage jobs-66 hours a week-leaving little time for sleep, family outings, religious services, or participating in community activities with their kids.

In a January 2002 poll of likely voters, Americans overwhelmingly identified raising the minimum wage as key to stimulating the economy. By a resounding 77 percent, these voters favored increasing the minimum wage to $8 an hour-the amount a single, full-time worker needs to meet minimum needs.

Raise the Floor is written in a lively, readable style and includes boxed quotes from folks in all walks of life who recognize the need for practical solutions to ending poverty. Documented with 60 tables and charts.

Motivating and Preparing Black Youth for Success

Asks and answers the questions how can we reduce the dropout rate? Why does the motivation to learn decline as the age increases for most youth? Are we training or educating students? How can we identify and develop their talents? Read this very interesting book for some startling answers!