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Steven Greenhouse is the best of a highly endangeredspecies-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
declined considerably over the last year or so and was concerned that he
too may 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
& 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 thirty years workers would be earning an average of 58,000
dollars 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, 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.
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Among other things, Greenhouse looks at:
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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 ten-month strike at Tyson's pepperoni plant in
Jefferson, Wisconsin that, despite a united union
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workforce, and solid community support, was ultimately lost because of
the company's ability to bring inoutside permanent replacements while
keeping profits flowing in from other plants;
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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;
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the closing of the Maytag refrigerator plant in
Galesburg, Illinois, long noted for its high
productivity and quality work, with their production
offshored to plants in Korea and Mexico;
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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
fifty 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. |