WBR: The Big Squeeze
Steven Greenhouse covers the labor beat for the New York Times, and The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker is his summary of the state of working America. It’s not a pretty picture. He describes a world of layoffs, unionbusting, sexual harassment, workplace injuries, and broken promises. These issues are what I work on professionally, so little of it was news to me, but Greenhouse brings the abstract issues to life with individual stories. And even I was surprised at the ubiquity with which Greenhouse found that store managers forged timekeeping records and forced workers to work off the clock in order to cheat them of overtime and keep labor costs down.
Unfortunately, while the topic is important, I have trouble imagining anyone reading it all the way through but those who are already convinced. The unremitting grimness of the book is only slightly broken by a chapter on model employers, such as Costco, Patagonia, and Cooperative Home Care Associates. The last chapter of the book offers some possible solutions, all of which would be positive steps, but which either don’t seem up to the magnitude of the challenge (enforcing wage and hour laws more strongly) or are far easily said than done (expand health coverage to all while bringing costs under control).
June 19th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Elizabeth, how do you feel about the Tom Friedman perspective (which I guess 100 years ago was the Wobbly perspective): that this is all about international competition, and until workers are handled uniformly internationally there will always be incredible pressure on employers to screw them?
In the computer industry we directly see what happens when domestic costs grow too high: the work goes overseas. I worry about changes in labor law in California and what they will do to computer professionals there.
What do you think of Greenhouse’s suggested steps? I’m surprised that he’s not mentioning the American educational system, which I personally think is a prime culprit in a lot of job loss to overseas.