Beaten Down, Worked Up
The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
“A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review
We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power.
Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America’s future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century.
Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead.
A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greenhouse, a former labor reporter for the New York Times, offers an inspirational greatest-hits look at the past, present, and future of American workers' movements. He argues that a decline in the power of organized labor has been both cause and consequence of several other blights over the past 40 years, including income inequality; wage stagnation; the proliferation of low-security, low-wage jobs; and the rise of a political culture dominated by corporations and billionaires. Greenhouse kicks off with a series of illustrative, diverse "profiles in courage"; there's Clara Lemlich and the garment workers' strikes in turn-of-the-last-century New York City, or United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther's efforts to lift auto workers and others into the postwar middle class from the 1930s on. The author follows them with episodes from labor's subsequent stagnation and embattlement, through which he considers the effects of deregulation, globalization, automation, the rise of "investor capitalism," anti-labor politics, and "labor's self-inflicted wounds" (corruption, complacency, ambivalence about social justice movements). Greenhouse ends with some recent labor successes including the "Fight for $15" and the profitable, harmonious relationship between workers and management at the hospital chain Kaiser Permanente and suggestions for a broadly revivified labor movement. This collection will satisfy readers who seek an introduction to labor history or ideas about how American workers can regain some power.
