Social Labor

Today's ways of working are not working - even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. "Flexible" work policies and corporate lip service about "work-life balance" don't come close to fixing the problem.

As the daughter of Sir Alfred Whitford, Kat has a certain set of responsibilities. Chasing her wayward sister, Ellie, to Nazi-occupied Paris was never supposed to be one of them. Now accustomed to the luxurious lifestyle that her Nazi boyfriend provides, Ellie has no intention of going back to the shackled life their parents dictate - but Kat will stop at nothing to bring her sister home.

In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protesters bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was underway - Democrats were at war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story of when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was forever changed.

Elected officials answer to public employees. Basic tools of good government have been eliminated. There's no accountability, detailed union entitlements make government largely unmanageable and unaffordable, and public policies are driven by what is good for public employees, not what is good for the public. Public unions keep it that way by brute political force—harnessing the huge cohort of public employees into a political force dedicated to preventing the reform of government. The solution, Howard argues, is not political but constitutional.

When the local iron mine began hiring women in 1975, Lois Jenson, a single mother on welfare, didn't think twice about accepting the grueling but well-paid job. What she hadn't considered was that she was entering a male-dominated society that fiercely resisted the inclusion of women, a prejudice born out in the brutal harassment of every female miner.

Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End Factories. On an autumn day in 1944, Ethel Alleyne walked the short distance from her house to Tate & Lyle’s refinery on the shining curve of the Thames. Looking up at the giant gates, Ethel felt like she had been preparing for this moment all her life. She smoothed down her frizzy hair, scraped a bit of dirt off the corner of her shoe and strode through. She was quite unprepared for the sight that met her eyes …

For more than a century, the interplay between private, investor-owned electric utilities and government regulators has shaped the electric power industry in the United States. Provision of an essential service to largely dependent consumers invited government oversight and ever more sophisticated market intervention. The industry has sought to manage, coopt, and profit from government regulation. In The Power Brokers, Jeremiah Lambert maps this complex interaction from the late 19th century to the present day.

Author Stephen Birmingham, who chronicled the rise of Jewish immigrants to extraordinary wealth and success in Our Crowd, now turns his attention to the Irish. Real Lace tells the colorful and fascinating true stories of America’s most renowned Irish-Catholic families. Scions of courageous, driven, and resilient men and women who escaped starvation during Ireland’s terrible potato famine in the mid-19th century, they battled their way out of the slums of Boston and New York, overcoming prejudice and poverty to achieve great wealth, fame, and political power.

Before the rails bound a nation, before love defied all barriers, there was a foundation laid in quiet longing and impossible dreams. Xiulan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants serving the Hastings family, has grown up in the shadow of wealth and privilege, her every day intertwined with the grandeur of the estate. But within her heart lies a secret: an unspoken affection for Robert Hastings, the heir who left for the Civil War when she was just a girl. Now, as the household eagerly anticipates his return, Xiulan’s quiet admiration blossoms into something deeper—something dangerous. ...

Tracing a new labor movement sparked and sustained by low-wage workers from across the globe, "We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now" is an urgent, illuminating look at globalization as seen through the eyes of workers-activists: small farmers, fast-food servers, retail workers, hotel housekeepers, home-healthcare aides, airport workers, and adjunct professors who are fighting for respect, safety, and a living wage. Drawing on interviews with activists in many US cities and countries around the world.

In Programmed Inequality, Marie Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, labor problems grew into structural ones, and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.

Great Britain? is a much-needed antidote to the pervading sense that Britain is going backwards rather than forwards. It is both a clear-eyed and rigorous diagnosis of the problems facing our country – a unique toxicity of huge inequality and stagnant economic growth – and a hopeful case for reclaiming a different future: by building an investment nation of good work, resilient communities and secure homes, a society in which both burdens and prosperity are shared.

In the 1960s and '70s, class struggle surged in US industrial cities. Many leftists joined these struggles by going to work in the nation’s factories; among them was Noel Ignatiev. He labored in different factories during this period, and this memoir came from his experiences as an electrician in the blast furnace division of US Steel Gary Works. His firsthand account reveals the day-to-day workings of white supremacy, patriarchy, and the exploitation of labor. More so, though, we see the seeds of a new society sown in the workers’ on-the-job resistance.

The IWW’s members have been known for more than a century as the Wobblies, and no one knows how they got the name, although there are stories that an immigrant had trouble pronouncing the letters. The Wobblies quickly became a considerable force in American labor, and by far the most colorful union of its era, if not always particularly effective. This work tells the story of how they came about, the peak of their influence, and the lasting legacy they forged.

Having a good, stable job used to be the bedrock of the American Dream. Not anymore. In this richly detailed and eye-opening audiobook, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers. Through the stories of four major employers - General Motors, General Electric, Kodak, and Coca-Cola - he shows how big businesses once took responsibility for providing their workers and retirees with an array of social benefits.

Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future--to imagine a social order based on humans' fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time-- inequality, technology, the identity of "the West," democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest--he challenges the old assumptions about political life.

The death sentence of slavery is still a harrowing reality for far too many—both young and old—despite the improvements of the 21st century. Bruce Ladebu and his team are determined to rescue as many as possible, to bring slavery to an end, and to provide food, shelter, education, and freedom to as many of these oppressed people as they can. Out of the Slave Fields shares the heartfelt, true stories of child labor today and the rescuers who have made it their mission to get justice for children.

The legislative attack on public sector unionism that gave rise to the uproar in Wisconsin and other union strongholds in 2011 was not just a reaction to the contemporary economic difficulties faced by the government. Rather, it was the result of a longstanding political and ideological hostility to the very idea of trade unionism put forward by a conservative movement whose roots go as far back as the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The controversy in Madison and other state capitals reveals that labor's status and power has always been at the core of American conservatism.

Many of the United States' most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small businesses were founded by immigrants, generating trillions of dollars annually, employing millions of workers, and helping establish the United States as the most entrepreneurial, technologically advanced society on earth.

In a book that’s both accessible and enlightening, Rebecca Friedrichs recounts her 30-year odyssey as an elementary school teacher who comes face to face with the forces dividing and corrupting our schools and culture - state and national teachers’ unions. An exciting true story that features real-life testimonies of teachers, parents, and kids as well as political and social commentary, Rebecca’s journey leads her to the realization that the only hope for America’s schools and families is returning authority to parents and teachers while lessening the grip of state and national unions.