Books from Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze

Here is a list of books mentioned by Greenhouse in The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, in case you want to learn more:

• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
• The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream by Jacob S. Hacker
• Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit by Nelson Lichtenstein
• The Other America: Poverty in the United States by Michael Harrington
• The Organization Man by William H. Whyte
• In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters & Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
• Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great by Al Dunlap
• Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution by Michael Hammer and James Champy
• Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy by Bill Gates
• The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce by Peter Cappelli
• Lean and Mean: Why Large Corporations Will Continue to Dominate the Global Economy by Bennett Harrison
• The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head
• White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Reward in Corporate America by Jill Andresky Fraser
• The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences by Louis Uctitelle
• War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back by Lou Dobbs
• Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company by Andy Grove
• Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself by Daniel Pink
• Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price by Greg Spotts
• Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard
• The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work by Arlie Russell Hochschild
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman (click here to read my posts about this book)
• Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz
• The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez by Jimmy Breslin
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (click here to read my posts about this book)
• Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, NoBenefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers--And How to Fight Back by Anya Kamenetz
• Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead by Tamara Draut
• Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation by William Strauss

Not sure if I will actually read any of these.

I feel quite certain that labor relations must change if the United States is to remain competitive and the envy of the world, but reading about how poorly fellow Americans are treated just makes me sad.

Not sure how that change will be created but I do feel like the companies in Bo Burlingham's Small Giants: Companies that Choose to be Great Instead of Big (one of my favorite books) are good examples of how companies should be run -- for best profitability, happiness (click here to read a bit about this book) and likelihood for creating the "City on the Hill in which prosperity and fairness reigned" (as Greenhouse said on page 78).

Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker

Finally finished reading Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (click here to view all my posts about this book).

While this book was educational, it was also a bit too depressing for my taste. It was quite smart of Greenhouse to put his chapter about the companies that treat their workers well (chapter nine, Taking the High Road) where he did; if it had been any later I was considering not finishing this book.

And I pretty much always finish a book I start.

I was relieved when I finally got to chapter sixteen, Lifting All Boats, with Greenhouse's recommendations categorized as follows:

• fighting wage stagnation
• cracking down on wage theft
• safeguarding the safety net
• curing an unhealthy health care system
• increasing retirement security
• putting some movement back into the labor movement
• grappling with globalization
• easing the climb upward
• respect as a remedy

So my final thoughts....this book is good. I'm glad I read it. But if you aren't used to hearing about terrible working conditions and wages, be prepared to be sad.

The Opt-Out Revolution

After reading what Steven Greenhouse has to say about Lisa Belkin's October 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story titled "The Opt-Out Revolution" I decided to take a break from reading The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker and re-read this article about highly successful Princeton-educated women leaving their careers to raise families.

I remember when I first read it when it was published and feeling for the first time that my own belief that success should be defined by joyfulness and a happy family (and not by one's accomplishments and career) was perhaps shared by other educated women.

It was such a relief.

Anyway, it was good to re-read this article. Now back to reading The Big Squeeze.

Wal-Mart & Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze

I read several more chapters of Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker last night (click here to view all my posts about this book). It is a good book. But it is so sad to read about how average working class Americans are treated, particularly those working at Wal-Mart.

The first half of chapter six, Leaner and Meaner, focuses on the yelling, screaming, cursing, bullying tactics used by managers at Wal-Mart and other companies to decrease costs and thus increase net profits. But the most interesting part of this chapter was learning how computers, which increase productivity by allowing routine tasks to get completed more quickly, decrease costs because of the ease in which they allow for monitoring of employees, cheating workers on payroll, and other shrewd tactics.

Chapter seven, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, discusses corporations' increasing reliance on temporary workers, consultants / independent contractors, and permatemps (click here to read about Jean Capobianco's story as a FedEx driver, or here to read my previous post about that NYTimes article) while chapter eight, Wal-Mart, the Low-Wage Colossus, is all about the evil ways of the world's largest retailer and the world's largest company:

It is three times as large as the world's second-largest retailer, Carrefour of France. Its sales are greater than the combined sales of Target, Sears, JCPenny, Kohl's Safeway, Albertsons, and Kroger. ... It is the nation's largest grocer, and will have 35 percent of the nation's food market and 25 percent of the pharmacy market by the end of this decade, according to Retail Forward, a consulting firm. Wal-Mart already sells one-third of the nation's disposable dipers, toothpaste, shampoo, laundry detergent, paper towels, and nonprescription drugs, and some say it could soon caputre a 50 percent share for those products. It is the biggest customer of Walt Disney and Procter & Gamble and accounts for 28 percent of Dial's sales, 24 percent of Del Monte's, and 23 percent of Revlon's. Wal-Mart also accounts for 15 percent of the nation's single-copy magazine sales and nearly 20 percent of all sales of CDs, videos, and DVDs.

The tactics listed by Greenhouse include: end-of-shift lock-in, internal banishment, child labor, slashing schedules, overnight lock-ins, missed breaks, shaving time, hiring illegal immigrants, and sex discrimination (read David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) to learn more about how Wal-Mart uses tax-financing and other tactics to increase profits).

Thankfully, it looks like the next chapter of this book, Taking the High Road, is about Costco and how it treats its workers better than Wal-Mart. More on this depressing and eye-opening book later...

The Big Squeeze by Steven Greenhouse

Just got through chapter five, The Rise and Fall of the Social Contract, from Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (click here to view all my posts about this book).

The background about the post-war business atmosphere in America and Walter Reuther's (president of General Motors division of the United Auto Workers) negotiations with Charles E. Wilson (president of General Motors) that helped to create the social contract that started to collapse for blue-collar workers in the 1980s and for white-collar workers in the 1990s provided an educational break from the heart-wrenching from the first few chapters.

Stories of Jefferson, Wiscosin's Chuck Moehling (a Tyson Foods pepperoni plant worker); of Birmingham, Alabama-native and former worker at North Miami Sam's Club Farris Cobb; of Bartlesville, Oklahoma-native Drew Pooters, a career retail worker and manager; and Dominican Republic immigrant Julia Ortiz fighting for wages at least equal to the federal minimum wage.

Expect to read more about this book...

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker

I've read just a few chapters of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by New York Times labor and workplace correspondent Steven Greenhouse (click here to view all my posts about this book).

So far, much of the data is the same as from David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) and Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else.

And the chapters of this book, like Johnston's book, each read like separate articles/essays with a common theme. But what is different from Johnston's books is the human aspect -- Johnston tells the stories of hard-working men and women (and their families) and their struggle as employees of mostly big corporations to join the middle class.

In that sense, this book is a lot like what I would expect of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), which I wrote a short paragraph about here.

Looking forward to reading more of The Big Squeeze, particularly once I get to where Greenhouse discusses examples of employers who treat their employees well.

Click here to view the table of contents or click here to to download a PDF excerpt.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

A few days ago, I finished reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Even though it was well written and the plot was captivating, I had a hard time reading The Jungle. You just felt so sad for all the characters; Jurgis & Ona Rudkus; Marija Berczynskas & Tamoszius Kuszleika; Teta Elzbieta; Dede Antanas; and all the little children.

The graphic descriptions of the inhumane working conditions, of the disgusting meatpacking industry, of the problems of non-English speaking immigrants, it just made me want to stop reading.

I can see how this book outraged the public when it was published in 1906 and led to the passage of pure food laws.

Even with the pure food laws, it is clear from reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore’s Dilemma that we still don't know what goes into our food. We think "free-range" is a clear enough term but most of us don't what it really means. We can read the ingredients of a product, but how many of us know that citric acid, lactic acid, glucose, fructose, malodextrin, ethanol, sorbitol, manitol, xanthan gum, dextrins, and monosodium glutamate (among many other common ingredients) are corn-processed additives!

Even though it did not succeed in converting Americans to socialism, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle continues to ring true today. Can you imagine the public outrage and the call for change that would happen if we all knew the truth of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO)?

I am eager to read Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (a non-fiction book about the problems facing American workers -- click here to view all my posts about this book), to learn about the problems facing the modern poor and the middle class alike.

More Library Books

I went to the library today with the intention of return a few books and leaving empty handed. As usual, I proved incapable of resisting the lure of more books and I left with seven more (seems to be about what I can justify borrowing on a whim without feeling like I've gone completely overboard).

I'm sure I did overdo it but since I need to read one for a book club and I've already written about my interest in all the others, I don't feel too silly.

I checked out:

• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (National Book Award for Fiction winner 1962)
• Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy (click here to view all my posts about this book)
• In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan (click here to view all my posts about this book)
• Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics by Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (click here to view all my posts about this book)
• The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse (click here to view all my posts about this book)
• The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine by Sherwin B. Nuland (click here to view all my posts about this book)
• White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters by Robert Schlesinger (click here to view all my posts about this book)

I first heard about Cullen Murphy's Are We Rome? about a year ago at the Harvard Bookstore in Harvard Square and my interest in this book was renewed when someone in I.O.U.S.A. compared the United States to Rome. As a loyal reader of The Atlantic, I have great respect for Murphy who was their managing editor for two decades. I have high expectations for this book and hope I will not be disappointed. Click here to read an excerpt.

And I suppose the Democratic and Republican National Conventions have once again piqued my interest in speechwriters, so naturally White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters by Robert Schlesinger caught my eye.

With all the talk of tough times, economically, for the average American and the outrage over the recently released GAO data that most U.S. Corporations pay no income tax, I just couldn't resist picking up Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. I hope it provides new information and doesn't overlap too much with David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) and Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else.

And like most Americans, all I know about Joe Biden I've learned from reading the news (in my case the New York Times) these past few weeks. It hasn't added up to much. I hope to get a better sense of the Democratic Nominee for Vice President from his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics.

I tried to keep myself to just five books but when I saw Nuland's The Uncertain Art sitting on the shelf, I had to borrow it -- it's been a few months since I've read any books related to medicine or the human body and as a scientist I am compelled to reading science books. And all the talk about our nation's broken health care system makes this book about medicine from a doctor's perspective all the more irresistible.



And as I was about to leave, I saw Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto which I've wanted to read since January when I read Janet Maslin's review titled "Obsessed With Nutrition? That’s an Eating Disorder" and published January 3, 2008 in the NYTimes Book Review). I suppose my new gardening hobby (influenced by reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and Bill McKibben's Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future) has made me even more interested in learning about food and nutrition. Click here to read the introduction of In Defense of Food on the author’s website or here to read the first chapter on the NYTimes Book Review website.

Alright, I think I've spent enough time trying to justify my borrowing way too many books -- I've got to get to reading now! My book club's discussion of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer is scheduled to start in three days!

NYTimes.com - A Book Club Courts Liberals

I've just heard about the new Progressive Book Club in Motoko Rich's "A Book Club Courts Liberals" published June 16, 2008 in the New York Times.

Members can join and buy three books at $1 apiece in exchange for the obligation to buy four books over the next two years.

Members of the Progressive Book Club will be offered a slate of books each month, reviewed and chosen by a panel that includes the novelists Michael Chabon, Erica Jong and Barbara Kingsolver; John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine; and Todd Gitlin, the author and a journalism and sociology professor at Columbia University.

The offerings for June include:

• The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse (click here for my entries on this book)
• Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It by Elizabeth Royte (click here for my entry on this book)
• Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy by Jeffrey Feldman
• Mudbound, a novel by Hillary Jordan
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (click here for my entries on this book)
• Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
• Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy
• Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America by Steven Waldman (click here for my entry on this book)

The club will also offer about 200 older titles such as:

• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Common Sense by Thomas Paine
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• Oil! by Upton Sinclair
• The End of Nature by Bill McKibben

I doubt I'll join -- I've been trying to limit my book purchases by borrowing books from my local library -- but it seems like it'll be a good place to check for new books.

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse

Last month, I wrote about Steven Greenhouse's latest book The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker after reading this NYTimes.com article adapted from the book.

I thought of this book again when I visited the New York Times Book Review and read Robert H. Frank's review titled "Labor Pains" published May 25, 2008.

I haven't checked it out at the library yet but after reading David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) (click here to read my other entries on this book), I'm even more interested in The Big Squeeze.

Will write more when I get around to reading this book!

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse

Just read this NYTimes.com article adapted from Steven Greenhouse's new book The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. Chapter One is available here on the NYTimes.com website or here on the author's website.

Greenhouse, a labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times, examines the stresses and strains faced by workers at companies like FedEx and Wal-Mart (as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security has become virtually nonexistent), and points to Patagonia and Costco and even the casino-hotels of Las Vegas as models for corporate America.

Patagonia sounds like an awesome company to work for! Isn't that everyone's dream to be able to go to work wearing whatever you want, take long lunch breaks or leave early to enjoy life, and to get paid to do volunteer work? Okay, probably not, but it certainly is part of my dream.

On the other hand, FedEx has hired most of its drivers as "independent contractors" to increase the company's earnings. If the same people were employees, they'd have to pay benefits, social security, and would not be able to fire people simply for missing work due to illness.

Reading about this book makes me think of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001). The author left her usual journalist job and spent 1999 and 2000 working jobs paying $7/hour (less than half of a living wage and what millions of low-skilled Americans make). She worked as a waitress in Key West, FL, as a cleaning woman and a nursing home aide in Portland, ME, and in a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, MN and found that it is nearly impossible for such Americans to lift themselves to middle class.

It also makes me think of Small Giants: companies that choose to be great instead of big by Bo Burlingham, which describes several privately held businesses that have become "giants" in their field without becoming huge corporations. These companies all seemed to honestly care about their employees and the community. I think that many publicly traded companies are focused too much on growth and return -- rightfully so since they are obligated to do what is best to increase returns for shareholders -- and I think the world would be a better place if companies instead aimed to do what's best for the community (owners, employees, existing customers, and potential customers).

I highly recommend Small Giants and plan to add The Big Squeeze to my list of books to read.

Funny, even Wal-Mart sells The Big Squeeze.