Labor's Hard Times

...On the one hand, he accuses racist and sexist union leaders of turning away potential members, of tyrannizing members rather than enlisting them as active participants, and of protecting their members at the expense of the nonunion majority...

...Worse, while examining labor’s present share of our “modern economy,” judged by Harvard economist Lawrence Katz as the “worst we’ve seen,” Greenhouse betrays an unfamiliarity with economic and labor history...

...Despite the racism, sexism and corruption that have plagued unions, he should have noted as well the role the labor movement has played in bettering material conditions for nonwhite and women workers, in weaving a sounder social safety net for nonunion workers, and in securing the passage of major civil rights legislation...

...In making Wal-Mart his primary villain, Greenhouse further evinces shallow knowledge...

...His book also fits squarely in the company of several recent volumes that have examined the plight of contemporary workers, the widening gap in income and wealth between the superrich and most other people, and the impact of globalization on this country’s economy...

...He also associates the labor movement with corruption and autocracy, faults that demand greater government regulation of unions...

...He did not assume the menial jobs Ehrenreich undertook to write Nickel and Dimed...

...its capitalists remind one of Dickens’ Mr...

...I will do whatever I have to do to make money...

...Read it, too, if you enjoy sad or uplifting stories about individuals who have drowned or survived in stormy economic seas...

...The Wal-Mart model offered wages insufficient to support a family decently, no job security, no workplace due process, health insurance that was too costly and inadequate, and paltry 401(k) pension plans for the minority who participated in them...

...He restates the conventional wisdom about why inequality has grown, wages and income have stagnated, and hard times have befallen the nation...

...labor consists of the following: a higher minimum wage...

...Greenhouse’s competence in economics pales in comparison to Reich’s and especially Krugman’s...

...industry flourished then and workers gained a small yet growing share of rising productivity...

...Reviewed by Melvyn Dubofsky Distinguished professor emeritus of history and sociology, SUNY Binghamton THIS BOOK’S TITLE echoes that of a Raymond Chandler mystery...

...TURNING from the splendors of the mid-century social contract and the sins of Wal-Mart to the broader canvas of economic change, Greenhouse stumbles...

...The truly great modern economic exception was “the not so golden age” (Reich’s words) from 1948 to 1973, when Western economies did well, real wages and incomes rose, stable employment became the norm, and economic inequalities diminished...

...A century ago corporate managers, financiers and investors were as focused on profits as they are today...

...In fact, The Big Squeeze is best read in conjunction with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal, Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism, and Louis Uchitelle’s The Disposable American...

...Greenhouse’s prescription for curing what ails U.S...

...Greenhouse, the labor beat reporter for the New York Times, seeks to carry on the tradition of three distinguished predecessors, Louis Stark, A. H. (Abe) Raskin and William Serrin...

...On the other hand, he indicts those same leaders for refusing to adjust to more productive technologies, for fighting employers instead of allying with them in a common effort to preserve the health of business enter prises, and for refusing to relinquish job protections and material gains they have won for their members...

...Yet he treats the toil of the Wal-Mart employees, home health aides, janitors, hotel housekeepers, and diverse low-wage factory and service workers he meets with a respect for its intrinsic worth that Ehrenreich, an educated professional slumming among lesser breeds, dismisses with disdain...

...A better one could have been borrowed from Charles Dickens’ novel about life and labor in mid-19th century industrial England, Hard Times...

...Apparently he is not conscious of the fact that coupling union corruption and public regulation has historically been the preferred ploy of antiunion politicians and businesspeople aiming to weaken decent and democratic unions along with corrupt and autocratic ones...

...As one worker told him, “I don’t consider any job a lousy job...

...Yet he narrates the stories of workers victimized by the “new economy” with an empathy absent from their cooler, more abstract analyses...

...and comprehensive national health insurance...

...GM and Ford, in collaboration with the United Automobile Workers and the Federal gover nment, created a post-World War II “social contract” that guaranteed rising real incomes, job security, family health insurance, and pensions that together with Social Security provided a dignified retirement...

...a tighter safety net, combined with publicly financed job training and alternative public employment for workers displaced by “free trade...

...Read this book carefully if you want to learn about working people today in the United States...

...Moreover, when Greenhouse attributes many of today’s ills, including diminished union power, outsourcing, increasing world commerce, and immigration to globalization, he not only fails to realize that the first era of finance capitalism was 1897-1914, but that U.S...

...Gradgrind, for whom life was about the calculus of the bottom line—leaving workers with no choice but to root, hog, or die...

...He simply has no idea why globalization now affects workers detrimentally...

...a more equitable tax system...

...Even his modest objectives, however, have little chance of being achieved without the presence of a stronger and more politically influential labor movement...

...What distinguished Wal-Mart from its corporate forebears was Walton’s combining modern tools of commerce with rural Southern cultural ways to spread the gospel of low-cost, exploited labor nationwide...

...Not only does Steven Greenhouse’s account of what has befallen working people in the United States since the mid-1970s recall the miseries suffered by the English workers of Dickens’ Preston in the hungry 1840s...

...Where once Chandler’s managers expanded their enterprises South, bringing higher wages, greater benefits and even unions, Sam Walton and his heirs reversed the dynamics, spreading lower wages, lesser benefits and unionfree enter prise from the rural South to the North and West...

...Take with a grain of salt, though, the analysis and advice of an author who refers to automobile workers, steel workers and construction workers, and to the jobs they do, as middle-class...

...a secure, stable income in retirement...

...Crediting Sam Walton with the notion that the best way to make money is “by selling more goods instead of selling goods for more,” he ascribes to the Arkansas retailer a policy that had always been central to a national economy built on mass production and mass consumption...

...WalMart, the author contends, signifies all that is wrong with the current economy and its treatment of labor...

...Repeatedly he refers to the contemporary economy as having evolved from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism—or, as he puts it, “from ‘managerial capitalism’ to ‘investor capitalism.’” He seems unaware that the term “financial capitalism” came into wide currency at the turn of the 20th century to describe how J.P...

...Although a mainstream liberal who buys hook, line and sinker the romantic Left critique of trade unionism, he links it to a Right-wing analysis of the movement...

...Like the historian Nelson Lichtenstein, he portrays Wal-Mart as the anti-General Motors/ Ford Motors model...

...For those whose stories Greenhouse relates, misery derives not from the tasks circumstance compels them to perform but from how little they earn doing essential labor, the instability of their employment, and the utter disregard in which they are held by their employers...

...GREENHOUSE is scarcely better at explaining the labor movement’s plight...

...And he offers scant hope that such a movement will emerge and grow...

...Today’s economy fits far better within the long duration of capitalism...

...Perhaps Greenhouse never read Harvey Swados’ essay, “The Myth of the Happy Worker,” written during the apogee of union power—a moment when nearly everyone was middle-class in income and consumption habits, but not in the actual work they performed...

...Morgan and Wall Street used their control of money and credit to create corporate oligopolies managed by men more skilled at finance and law than at industrial production and innovation...

...Back in 1977 the dean of business historians, Alfred D. Chandler Jr., in his magisterial The Visible Hand, showed how corporate managers developed “throughput,” the process of producing the greatest quantity of product at the lowest per unit cost in order to increase market share and profits...