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).

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 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.