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Steven Greenhouse is the best of a highly
endangered species—a labor beat reporter for a mass circulation newspaper.
Last year staff cuts eliminated Nancy Cleeland’s excellent labor
coverage from the Los Angeles Times. Randy Furst at the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune was long ago reassigned to more general reporting. Steve
Franklin remains at the Chicago Tribune, and Randy Heaster is still in
place at the Kansas City Star, but there are few others.
I noticed the volume of Greenhouse’s articles
in The New York Times had declined considerably over the last year or
so and was concerned that he too might be in phase-out mode. I was
pleased to discover a better explanation for how he had been spending
his time when his new book was published a few weeks ago. It was time
well spent.
Others have looked at various aspects of
tough times for American workers. The seminal work of the postwar
period was Michael Harrington’s "The Other America,"
published in 1962, calling attention to a large "underclass,"
left behind by the general trends of prosperity during the Fifties and
Sixties.
More recently, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a best-seller,
"Nickel and Dimed," based on her living on earnings from
low-wage jobs in various parts of the country. Not as widely read, Beth
Shulman’s "The Betrayal of Work" also focused on the working
poor.
Others have dealt with problems faced by the
"middle class," such as "The Two-Income Trap" by
Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. Kim Moody’s "U.S. Labor
In Trouble and Transition," published last year, is a tour de
force examination of organized labor.
But none have been so comprehensive in describing
the predicament of working people today, and explaining how we got in
to this mess, as Greenhouse does.
As far as I know, he is not a radical of any
kind. He is weakest on offering solutions. But he does for contemporary
America what Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels did in his classic
work, "The Condition Of the Working Class In England In
1844."
The American working class is taking a
beating the likes of which have not been seen since the Great
Depression of the 1930s. Greenhouse describes this well in an opening
chapter nutshell:
"The squeeze on the American worker has
meant more poverty, more income inequality, more family tensions, more
hours at work, more time away from the kids, more families without
health insurance, more retirees with inadequate pensions, and more
demands on government and taxpayers to provide housing assistance and
health coverage. Twenty percent of families with children under six
live below the poverty line, and 22 million full-time workers do not
have health insurance.
"Largely as a result of the squeeze, the
number of housing foreclosures and personal bankruptcies more than
tripled in the quarter century after 1979. Economic studies show that
income inequality in the United States is so great that it more closely
resembles the inequality of a third world country than that of an
advanced industrial nation."
Greenhouse gets to the heart of the matter
right away. He notes that if wages had kept pace with the growth in
productivity over the past 30 years workers would be earning an average
of $58,000 per year. Instead, last year’s number was $36,000. "The
nation's economic pie is growing," he says, "but corporations
by and large have not given their workers a bigger piece."
In addition to grim statistics, Greenhouse presents
case studies spanning the spectrum of the most diverse working class in
the world. He brings us a human dimension not so easily quantified.
Loss of dignity, anxiety, and despair are also part of our story. Some
families break up under the pressures while others pull together as
never before.
While Greenhouse obviously genuinely cares
for the people he tells us about, these are not just sob stories. He
does a masterful job in explaining how their predicament fits in to the
globalization stage of capitalism in the USA.
Among other things, Greenhouse looks at:
• The brutality used to defeat union
organizing drives at a Landis Plastics plant in upstate New York, and a
nursing home in North Miami.
• A 10-month strike at Tyson’s pepperoni
plant in Jefferson, Wis., that, despite a united union workforce and
solid community support, was ultimately lost because of the company’s
ability to bring in outside permanent replacements while keeping
profits flowing in from other plants.
• Examples of the "contingency"
workers, created in the 1980s, which Greenhouse describes: "...
for corporate America they’re essentially a disposable workforce,
discarded as soon as they are not needed anymore."
• A number of instances of shocking treatment
of workers at Wal-Mart, Sam’s Clubs, and other low-price merchandisers.
• The closing of the Maytag refrigerator
plant in Galesburg, Ill., long noted for its high productivity and
quality work, with their production offshored to plants in Korea and
Mexico.
• The software engineers at WatchMark who
were expected to train their outsourced replacements, flying in from
India, as a condition for receiving severance pay.
The plight of undocumented immigrant workers,
"the lowest rung," is woven in to a number of these stories
as well as a stand-alone chapter. But so are samples of former solid
citizens of the "middle class," middle-aged white and African
American—with mortgages and kids in college—who, after devoting decades
of loyal service to corporations, find themselves out of work with no
marketable job skills.
A chapter, "Starting Out Means A Steeper
Climb," describes the challenges facing youth entering the job
market. "The Not So Golden Years" looks at the precarious
security of the retired.
Greenhouse misses little in his examination
of American workers. He has used his investigative reporting skills to
give us a readable scholarly socio-economic landmark. It deserves a
read by every serious labor movement activist.
But this valuable book that helps us to
understand our world is not so useful in figuring out how to change it
as well. Greenhouse has high praise for some companies—such as
Costco—for not trying to squeeze the last drop from their workforce.
Costco makes a handsome profit while rewarding their workers with better
wages and benefits than the competition.
There is no doubt that Costco workers see
their employer—the main competitor of Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Clubs—as fair,
and as a result, work productively. But such anomalies usually don’t
last long. Ben & Jerry’s utopian experiment with ice cream is today
part of Unilever.
Workers at American Axle used to love their
boss, Dick Dauch. They busted their butts and gave contract concessions
to make his declared goal to save American jobs a success. But when the
UAW surrender at the Big Three offered Dauch new opportunities, he
didn’t hesitate to offshore nearly half of Axle’s jobs and to slash
wages and benefits by more than 50 percent for those remaining—perhaps
the most vicious one-shot Big Squeeze yet.
Greenhouse also has illusions, nurtured by
New Deal mythology, in the ability of American capitalism to "lift
all boats." While Greenhouse’s solutions to our quandary are
inadequate, he broadens and deepens our understanding of the forces
leading to our plight. That’s a prerequisite for figuring out an
intelligent response for ourselves. We are grateful for that.
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