The End of Loyalty
The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Having a good, stable job used to be the bedrock of the American Dream. Not anymore.
In this richly detailed and eye-opening book, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers. Through the stories of four major employers -- General Motors, General Electric, Kodak, and Coca-Cola -- he shows how big businesses once took responsibility for providing their workers and retirees with an array of social benefits. At the height of the post-World War II economy, these companies also believed that worker pay needed to be kept high in order to preserve morale and keep the economy humming. Productivity boomed.
But the corporate social contract didn't last. By tracing the ups and downs of these four corporate icons over seventy years, Wartzman illustrates just how much has been lost: job security and steadily rising pay, guaranteed pensions, robust health benefits, and much more. Charting the Golden Age of the '50s and '60s; the turbulent years of the '70s and '80s; and the growth of downsizing, outsourcing, and instability in the modern era, Wartzman's narrative is a biography of the American Dream gone sideways.
Deeply researched and compelling, The End of Loyalty will make you rethink how Americans can begin to resurrect the middle class.
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize in current interestA best business book of the year in economics, Strategy+Business
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wartzman, a senior advisor at the Drucker Institute, documents the deterioration of company-employee loyalty at some of America s corporate giants in this insightful economic history. Identifying the great American dream as having a good job a dream that s increasingly precarious he notes driving for Uber as a perfect example of many jobs in the U.S. today that involve no real, long-term commitment between employer and employee. He cites dismal statistics about many Americans being unprepared for retirement due to low pay, poor pension benefits, and increased medical costs, all while corporate earnings climb to historic highs. In order to understand how this came to pass, he examines four companies General Electric, General Motors, Kodak, and Coca-Cola over the past 70 years. He identifies a combination of factors as responsible for weakening the corporate social compact: globalization, company-wide spates of downsizing, ineffective unions, and more. Perhaps most significant is the elevation of shareholders over employees.This impeccably written treatise asserts that it s imperative for Americans to share our prosperity more broadly once again and reinstitute a stronger social contract between corporate executives and the workers who make a company successful.
