"[Jones's] painstakingly researched volume is an invaluable antidote to those who argue that our shameful past has no relevance to our perplexing present." --David Kusnet, Baltimore Sun

Examines broad shifts in American work values from their Calvinist origins to present controversies involving work, welfare, and affirmative action.

In Dying to Work, Jonathan Karmel raises our awareness of unsafe working conditions with accounts of workers who were needlessly injured or killed on the job. Based on heart-wrenching interviews Karmel conducted with injured workers and surviving family members across the country, the stories in this book are introduced in a way that helps place them in a historical and political context and represent a wide survey of the American workplace, including, among others, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, hotel housekeepers, and river dredgers. Karmel’s examples are portraits of the lives and dreams cut short and reports of the workplace incidents that tragically changed the lives of everyone around them. Dying to Work includes incidents from industries and jobs that we do not commonly associate with injuries and fatalities and highlights the risks faced by workers who are hidden in plain view all around us. While exposing the failure of safety laws that leave millions of workers without compensation and employers without any meaningful incentive to protect their workers, Karmel offers the reader some hope in the form of policy suggestions that may make American workers safer and employers more accountable. This is a book for anyone interested in issues of worker health and safety, and it will also serve as the cornerstone for courses in public policy, community health, labor studies, business ethics, regulation and safety, and occupational and environmental health policy.

An award-winning sociologist reveals the unexpected link between overwork and inequality. Most Americans work too long and too hard, while others lack consistency in their hours and schedules. Work hours declined for a century through hard-fought labor-movement victories, but they've increased significantly since the seventies. Worked Over traces the varied reasons why our lives became tethered to a new rhythm of work, and describes how we might gain a greater say over our labor time -- and build a more just society in the process. Popular discussions typically focus on overworked professionals. But as Jamie K. McCallum demonstrates, from Amazon warehouses to Rust Belt factories to California's gig economy, it's the hours of low-wage workers that are the most volatile and precarious -- and the most subject to crises. What's needed is not individual solutions but collective struggle, and throughout Worked Over McCallum recounts the inspiring stories of those battling today's capitalism to win back control of their time.

This book brings to life the important but neglected story of African American postal workers and the critical role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. Historian Philip Rubio, a former postal worker, integrates civil rights, labor, and left movement histories that too often are written as if they happened separately. Centered on New York City and Washington, D.C., the book chronicles a struggle of national significance through its examination of the post office, a workplace with facilities and unions serving every city and town in the United States. Black postal workers--often college-educated military veterans--fought their way into postal positions and unions and became a critical force for social change. They combined black labor protest and civic traditions to construct a civil rights unionism at the post office. They were a major factor in the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike, which resulted in full collective bargaining rights for the major postal unions under the newly established U.S. Postal Service in 1971. In making the fight for equality primary, African American postal workers were influential in shaping today's post office and postal unions.

"The forces driving the first decades of the 21st century--globalization, technology, and unprecedented wealth mixed with jarring economic instability--are pushing the day of retirement later and later in life. The era of the aging worker is here. From the rice paddies of Japan to the heart of the American rust-belt, veteran international correspondent Joseph Coleman takes readers inside the lives of aging workers, exploring the factories, offices, and fields where they toil and the societies in which they live, giving the reader a front-row seat to the global older worker revolution. Profiles of individuals bring to life Coleman's exploration of how the United States--along with many countries around the world--deal with the rise of aging workforces. Throughout these stories, the author gives advice on how societies can best benefit from and assist their increasingly older population. Readers will come to know: --Michel Wattree, a retired French trucker who has found a second life as an elementary school bus driver and still nurses dreams of driving America's storied Route 66. --The aging crew of Japan's Yamashita Kogyosho, where for half a century they have crafted the world's fastest trains with their bare hands and hammers, exemplifies Japan's adaptive employment strategies that have helped the country deal with one of the oldest demographic compositions in the world. --Rita Hall, an unemployed hospital worker from Akron, Ohio, who hopes that a job training program will save her from spending the rest of her golden years in poverty-a fear shared by many who will far outlive their retirement savings. Amidst the stories of how these works are working hard to adapt, Unfinished Work probes the struggles of companies either unable or unwilling to accommodate the aging of their workforces and the quandaries of governments and policymakers eager to control pension pay-outs to retiring boomers, yet unsure how to keep them on the job. What emerges is a compassionate but clear-eyed portrait of a world in themidst of a slow-motion aging revolution that will have vast consequences for present and coming generations"--

Winner of the William G. Bowen Prize Named a "Triumph" of 2018 by New York Times Book Critics Shortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award The untold history of the surprising origins of the "gig economy"--how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of millions of working men and women in postwar America. Over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the institutions that insulated us from volatility have been swept aside by a fervent belief in the market. Now every working person in America today asks the same question: how secure is my job? In Temp, Louis Hyman explains how we got to this precarious position and traces the real origins of the gig economy: it was created not by accident, but by choice through a series of deliberate decisions by consultants and CEOs--long before the digital revolution. Uber is not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer to our growing problems goes deeper than apps, further back than outsourcing and downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our businesses should work. As we make choices about the future, we need to understand our past.

Publisher Description

American Work Values: Their Origin and Development examines the broad shifts in American work values from their European origins to the present. It analyzes shifts from work as salvation to work as opportunity and alienation, and concludes with a more recent focus on self-fulfilling employment in a context of industrial downsizing. Beginning with the Lutheran-Calvinist support of work for the glory of God, the book's focus shifts to the change in work values that occurred from early industrialization in America to the end of the Great Depression, a period characterized by both opportunity and alienation. The modern trends that followed led to the empowerment of employees even as that empowerment tested the values of such participation in a climate of rampant downsizing. The book also deals with the debates related to work and welfare that simmered during these transformations. Whether it involved policy-makers in sixteenth-century Europe or wonks in the Washington of 1996, controversy over public assistance to the deserving and undeserving poor remained a raging controversy that spilled over into the debate on affirmative action.

For more than a century the American farm, factory and frontier provided opportunities for physical workers to display their skill, win a bet, brag or perhaps just have some fun. Competitions that emphasized useful skills, like plowing, corn-husking, rock drilling, typesetting, and tree cutting, were common in the antebellum and post-Civil War periods, often drawing large crowds and the attention of sporting journals. For many years conventional American sports occurred in the workplace. This may help explain why the nicknames of so many prominent collegiate or professional sporting teams--Cornhuskers, Lumberjacks, Miners, Cowboys, Packers and Boilermakers--are also the occupations of 19th century worker-athletes. By examining the American experience with competitions among workers, this book provides a new understanding of the interrelated nature of occupation and leisure.