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The Big Squeeze: Tough Times For The American Worker (2008)

by Steven Greenhouse(Favorite Author)

3.83 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1400044898 (ISBN13: 9781400044894)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Knopf

review 1: A shocking tour of America's punishing world of work—and a call for a return to fairness and decency.Times are tough and getting tougher for the American worker. It used to be that for an honest day's work you'd get a decent day's pay, a deal that in the three decades after World War II made America's middle class the most dynamic and prosperous in the world. But no longer. As Steven Greenhouse shows in this illuminating and often moving survey of the American workplace, in recent years wages have stagnated, benefits have shrunk or disppeared entirely, job security has given way to job anxiety, hours are longer and work is often more dangerous—even as corporate profits and economic growth have soared.How did we get here? Globalization, immigration, Wall Street's profit... more mania, the rise of Wal-Mart, the decline of labor unions, anti-worker government policies—there's more than one factor at play, but the bottom line is that most American workers, all across the country, have been squeezed dry. Greenhouse tells the often wrenching stories of software engineers, hotel housekeepers, call-center workers and janitors working hard but scraping by (if that), deprived of the means to live a life of dignity. But he also shows that it doesn't have to be this way. There are companies—Costco and Patagonia among them—who do right by their workers. And there are government policies—like raising the minimum wage, enforcing workplace regulations, going after union busters—that would hugely improve the lot of the American worker.The Big Squeeze is at once a grim accounting of a national crisis, a ringing call for reform and a constructive manifesto for change.
review 2: Mainly interviews but some useful data also. Written from a mainstream liberal point of view, and this is where some of my criticisms come in. at the end his solutions are only in terms of legislation or what political leaders can do, no emphasis on worker organizing or actions. the author is the labor reporter for the New York Times.his solution for the inadequacies of the labor movement is to simply have the state regulate them even more closely...which means he's completely missed the ways the government is controlled by employers. he wants Congress to pass laws requiring unions to spend 25% of budget on organizing, 5% on education, to give examples. but this is a paternalistic approach that would deny to workers control over their own organizations. he also thinks unions need to be more "cooperative" with employers. but in fact that is the traditional "business union" approach and it doesn't work. it leads to sell outs. the reasons unions have shrunk is not because union officials are not willing to "cooperate" but because the employers have decided they don't need the union leaders. less

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