Main Street Squeeze, 3 new books on the way

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3690/main_street_squeeze/

Features > May 23, 2008

By David Moberg

Pick your metaphor for the current state of American workers: Are they squeezed? Caught? Crunched? Three new books — by two top-notch national journalists and a leading progressive economist — exploit these images to convey how average Americans are losing out in today’s economy. And despite varied but overlapping prescriptions for new policies, none of the three offers an easy way out.

In The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Knopf, 2008), New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse pulls together some key statistics and compelling personal stories to depict the “broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers,” blue- and white-collar alike, over the past three decades.



Growing inequality costs workers dearly. For example, if the distribution of income today were the same as it was in 1979 (and if the economy had grown at the same rate as it has since then), the average family among the bottom four-fifths of Americans would now be earning $8,000 more each year than it actually does. At the same time, life has become more insecure for most of these working families, with health insurance, pensions and education — as well as the broader social safety net — becoming less generous and more precarious.

Greenhouse’s reporting goes beyond these increasingly familiar inequities to the pressures that workers experience on the job. Wal-Mart managers lock janitors into its buildings overnight. Major companies like Taco Bell force employees to work off the clock or manipulate their time records to cheat them out of pay. Manufacturers like Landis Plastics minimize safety precautions at the cost of workers’ lives and limbs.

Decades ago, Greenhouse argues, managers thought the “happy worker” was good for business, but now, he says, they employ a “bullying model” to “manage by fear.” Workers at the bottom fare worst, but even middle managers suffer from bullies above who are pushing them to cut costs and crush workers.

FULL story at link.

[Sherman A1]

1. Unfortunately, us squeezed workers

won't be able to afford to buy the books.

Perhaps they will be available at the local library, if we can walk or ride our bikes there to get one.

[Earth Bound Misfit]

2. K & R n/t