Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor

by Steven Greenhouse Narrated by Fred Sanders

Overview

“A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.”*-The New York Times Book Review

We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation's landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power.*

Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation's most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America's future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers' collective power can be-and is being-rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century.

Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead.*

A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick

Editorial Reviews

SEPTEMBER 2019 - AudioFile

In a laconic conversational voice, Fred Sanders narrates Greenhouse’s rich history of organized labor in the U.S. The author recounts the central role that unions have played throughout the last two centuries, weaving together the social, economic, technological, legal, and international threads that led to the power unions once attained. Despite their membership decline in the 21st century, Greenhouse believes unions still play a pivotal role in employee/employer relations. Sanders’s voice is gentle overall, and he maintains a steady cadence when Greenhouse is covering background and details. During critical commentary he provides more emphasis. L.E. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

The New York Times Book Review - Zephyr Teachout

…[an] engrossing, character-driven, panoramic new book on the past and present of worker organizing…Greenhouse probably knows more about what is happening in the American workplace than anybody else in the country, having covered labor as a journalist for two decades. He achieves a near-impossible task, producing a page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes, without overcondensing or oversimplifying, and with plausible suggestions for the future. This is labor history seen from the moments when that history could have turned out differently.

Publishers Weekly

09/02/2019

Greenhouse, a former labor reporter for the New York Times, offers an inspirational greatest-hits look at the past, present, and future of American workers’ movements. He argues that a decline in the power of organized labor has been both cause and consequence of several other blights over the past 40 years, including income inequality; wage stagnation; the proliferation of low-security, low-wage jobs; and the rise of a political culture dominated by corporations and billionaires. Greenhouse kicks off with a series of illustrative, diverse “profiles in courage”; there’s Clara Lemlich and the garment workers’ strikes in turn-of-the-last-century New York City, or United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther’s efforts to lift auto workers and others into the postwar middle class from the 1930s on. The author follows them with episodes from labor’s subsequent stagnation and embattlement, through which he considers the effects of deregulation, globalization, automation, the rise of “investor capitalism,” anti-labor politics, and “labor’s self-inflicted wounds” (corruption, complacency, ambivalence about social justice movements). Greenhouse ends with some recent labor successes—including the “Fight for $15” and the profitable, harmonious relationship between workers and management at the hospital chain Kaiser Permanente—and suggestions for a broadly revivified labor movement. This collection will satisfy readers who seek an introduction to labor history or ideas about how American workers can regain some power. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick 

“Greenhouse probably knows more about what is happening in the American workplace than anybody else in the country. . . He achieves a near-impossible task, producing a page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes, without overcondensing or oversimplifying, and with plausible suggestions for the future. . . Great nonfiction requires great characters, and Greenhouse has the gift of portraiture. He is able to draw a complex, human portrait of a worker with a minimum of words, making the reader greedy for more details, not just about the policies but about the people. And he has both the newspaper writer’s ability to find the one or two individuals whose personal stories exemplify a larger point, and the historian’s ability to make what has already happened seem unlikely. He is skilled at homing in on the moments of the highest uncertainty, and transforming them into stories with quick and destabilizing twists and turns. . . Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.”—Zephyr Teachout, The New York Times Book Review

"What I fear is that the there is a systematiceffort to wipe clean our national memory of the capacity and benefits ofworkers acting collectively and buildingstrong unions. Greenhouse’s book helps us remember that labor unions really did build the middle class, raise the dignity of workers, and civilize workplaces. It also gives us reason to believe that, as labor activist Rose Schneiderman poetically framed it, workers still “must have bread” but “must have roses, too.”—Robert Bruno, Perspectives on Work

“[A] comprehensive primer on a subject that is intimately intertwined with our collective history. . . It is obvious that “Beaten Down, Worked Up” represents a monumental–and mostly successful–attempt to connect all the dots and thus provide a clear context for the ongoing societal debate about the efficacy of the labor movement and its place in contemporary culture. . . If you are concerned about the future, and especially our economic prospects, this is one you’ll definitely want to add to your reading list. Highly recommended.”—Aaron Hughey, Bowling Green Daily News

“Bold. . . Greenhouse equates strong unions, or at least worker power, with democracy itself, and he sees very few limits on what a successful and healthy labor movement could achieve.”—Shelia McClear, The New Republic

“Powerful . . . A combination of labor union history in America, investigative reporting about how rapacious employers and Republican governance have diminished labor unions, and an agenda for the revitalization of unions across the country. . .  A clearly written, impressively researched, and accomplished follow-up to The Big Squeeze.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“An invaluable read for anyone interested in understanding one of the more shameful aspects of America’s status quo: the persistence of a working poor who, for the most part, work far harder than the rest of us yet live in a state of perpetual economic uncertainty, if not outright destitution.”—Sarah Carr, The Washington Post

“Superb, important and eminently readable. . . a searing indictment of how labor’s decline magnified inequality and injustice in the U.S. Much recommended.”—Nicholas D. Kristof, op-ed columnist, The New York Times, and author of Tightrope

“Greenhouse presents a sympathetic but critical survey of American labor . . . this lively and informative read will appeal to those interested in the current challenges facing American workers.” —Charles K. Piehl, Library Journal

“Inspirational. . . This collection will satisfy readers who seek an introduction to labor history or ideas about how American workers can regain some power.”—Publisher’s Weekly

“Compelling. . . Greenhouse [has]. . . a journalistic flair for personal stories often absent from academic accounts. An inspired read.”—The Indypendent

“Greenhouse . . . has provided a human dimension to the tale of income inequality, wage stagnation, and employer disrespect for workers . . . Informative.” —Mark Levine, Booklist

“In this riveting account of the rise and fall of organized labor, Steven Greenhouse tells the stories of courageous men and women who put their jobs and often their lives on the line to help American workers gain the income and the dignity they deserve. After World War II, when more than a third of American workers in the private sector belonged to labor unions, workers had enough power to demand that wages keep up with productivity gains. The consequence was the greatest middle class in the history of the world. But over the past forty years, as union membership has declined, America’s middle class has waned. Greenhouse outlines how a worker’s movement could be rekindled, and why it must be. Deeply inspiring and profoundly important.” —Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor and author of The Common Good

“Beaten Down, Worked Up should be read by every American concerned about our nation’s rising inequality and what should be done about it." —Cristina Tzintzún, co-founder of the Workers Defense Project and founder of Jolt

“Steven Greenhouse’s riveting reporting and storytelling reminds a new generation why workers’ and unions’ concerns must be restored to the center of our politics and workplaces.” —Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher, The Nation

"This is the one book you should read if you want to understand why so many American workers say they would vote to join a union if they could." —Leo W. Gerard, former International President, United Steelworkers

“Steven Greenhouse has been a paragon of labor reporting for decades. This crucial book—comprehensive, deeply informed and empathic—is something of a culmination of his efforts, capturing both the outrage of exploitation and the excitement of new movements. It's an inspiring, richly-sourced account of what American work and workers really mean today.” —Alissa Quart, author of Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America

“Steve Greenhouse is himself an integral part of labor union history. He covered the work place for The New York Times for nearly twenty years, and set a masterful standard for his field. Greenhouse well knows that organized labor had a major part in turning America into a middle-class nation, and once it lost influence, income inequality soared. In this exceptional book, he tells us the story of labor in America by highlighting the key victories and defeats of labor unions from its high point of influence in the 1950s to its depths since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Can a reinvigorated union movement reverse inequality?  He finds green shoots of hope today, such as the movement for a $15 minimum wage.” —Jeff Madrick, author of Age of Greed

SEPTEMBER 2019 - AudioFile

In a laconic conversational voice, Fred Sanders narrates Greenhouse’s rich history of organized labor in the U.S. The author recounts the central role that unions have played throughout the last two centuries, weaving together the social, economic, technological, legal, and international threads that led to the power unions once attained. Despite their membership decline in the 21st century, Greenhouse believes unions still play a pivotal role in employee/employer relations. Sanders’s voice is gentle overall, and he maintains a steady cadence when Greenhouse is covering background and details. During critical commentary he provides more emphasis. L.E. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-05-12
The subtitle says it all in a powerful book from an author who is "deeply concerned about what is happening to many American workers."

Former longtime New York Times reporter Greenhouse (The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, 2008) offers a combination of labor union history in America, investigative reporting about how rapacious employers and Republican governance have diminished labor unions, and an agenda for the revitalization of unions across the country. Throughout the narrative, the author circles back to the puzzle at the foundation of the book: Given how clearly labor unions improved employment conditions for hundreds of millions of laborers, why did those benefitting surrender to the corporate-government plan to eliminate those unions? With copious evidence, Greenhouse demonstrates that unionized workers received—and still receive from existing unions—not only improved wages, but also safer work conditions, predictable schedules, more comprehensive insurance, improved retirement benefits, increased paid vacation periods, and much more. As he notes, while it's true that some union leaders were guilty of corruption and/or indifference, for the most part, they have protected workers more avidly than corporate executives, who are more beholden to stockholders than employees. In many cases, corporate lobbyists prevail; as a result, the negotiating arena is no longer equitable for unions. Before a closing chapter recommending numerous alterations in laws and regulations, the author demonstrates how other nations, especially in Europe, have instituted much more equitable systems. "Europeans," he writes, "often deride America's $7.25-an-hour minimum wage as McJobs, while McDonald's workers in highly unionized Denmark average more than $20 an hour." Greenhouse's message is unambiguous: "In no other industrial nation do employers fight so hard to defeat, indeed quash, labor unions." Throughout the book, the author interweaves positive examples of labor-management collaborations that lead to a more productive workforce. These bits of hope come from anecdotes about culinary workers unionizing in Las Vegas, fast-food workers advocating for an increased minimum wage, and public school teachers going on strike.

A clearly written, impressively researched, and accomplished follow-up to The Big Squeeze.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169154313
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/06/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

One

Losing Our Voice

 
Throughout Mary Coleman’s six years as a cook at a Popeyes restaurant in Milwaukee, she remained stuck at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. One afternoon, when she arrived for her shift after an hour-long bus commute, her manager told her to go home without even clocking in. Business was slow, he said, and she wasn’t going to be paid for the day.

*

For ten years, Keith Barrett worked as a behind-the-scenes software engineer at Disney World in Orlando, helping monitor computers that handled ticket sales and hotel reservations. One day, Barrett and 250 fellow tech workers were stunned to receive layoff notices—Disney was replacing them with guest workers from India on temporary work visas. Many of the laid-off workers grew even more upset when Disney told them they wouldn’t receive any severance unless they agreed to train their replacements.

*

Jamie Workman became pregnant while working as a CVS cashier in Rocklin, California, northeast of Sacramento. Her eight-hour shifts soon became tiring and painful because she had to stand the whole time; her feet and legs became swollen. At one point, her shift supervi­sor gave her a stool to sit on for a few hours, but then the store manager ordered her to stop using it, telling her that cashiers weren’t allowed to sit.

*

Most mornings Jorge Porras reported to his car-wash job in Santa Fe at 8:15 a.m., as instructed, but his boss often didn’t let him clock in until 11:00, sometimes not until noon, whenever customers began lining up. Many days his boss paid him for six hours of work, even though he had worked nine and a half. One day, when the heavy chain that pulled the cars forward got stuck, Porras tried fixing it, but the chain suddenly lurched forward and cut off the top of his right ring finger. That injury forced Porras to miss two weeks of work, during which he didn’t receive any wages or workers’ compensation. When he and several co-workers complained about the unpaid hours and unsafe conditions, the car-wash owner fired them.

*

Patricia Hughes, a licensed practical nurse, came down with severe pneumonia while caring for a paraplegic in Thornton, Colorado. Coughing, vomiting, and with a 103 fever, Hughes called her manager to say she needed to miss work for two days. “I told him I was so weak that there was no way I could care for and move the patient,” she said. “He responded, ‘If you don’t come in tomorrow, don’t bother ever com­ing back.’ ” Too sick to work the next day, Hughes was fired, and as a result of losing that job, she was evicted from her apartment.

*

John Billington, proud of his 4.9 rating as an Uber driver in Los Ange­les, was shocked when Uber suddenly chopped its L.A. fares from $2.50 a mile to $1 a mile. As a result, his average weekly gross income fell from over $1,500 to around $750, and that’s before subtracting the cost of gas, auto insurance, maintenance, and depreciation on his car. “Uber dic­tates everything,” Billington said. “We don’t get any input. It’s unfair.”

*

After seventeen years of teaching, Laura Fox, an elementary school music teacher in a suburb of Phoenix, was having such a hard time mak­ing ends meet that she took a twenty-hour-a-week job at McDonald’s. Fox, whose school district hadn’t raised pay in a decade, often worked at McDonald’s until 11:30 p.m., arrived home around midnight, and woke up at 6:30 to get ready for school. “Some days I was exhausted,” she said. “I work to teach the people who are going to be the future of society. It makes me feel disrespected that they pay teachers so little.”

*

A week after graduating from college in North Carolina, Desmond Anthony moved to New York to pursue a career as an actor. To sup­port himself, he took a job as a sales clerk and cashier at the Express clothing store in Herald Square. At first his boss assigned him thirty hours of work each week, but after several months his hours were cut to just twelve or fifteen, and some weeks he was assigned no hours at all. Working fifteen hours a week, Anthony earned around $500 a month, not enough to cover his $800 monthly rent, let alone the sev­eral hundred dollars more needed for phone, subway, and food. Some days he went hungry, and some weeks he had to ask his parents for money. Anthony repeatedly urged his boss to assign him more hours, but instead of giving him more hours, the store hired more part-time workers, giving it more flexibility to plug workers into its ever-changing schedule. Anthony quit in frustration.

 

 
In the United States, a country that by many measures is the world’s richest, life has taken a wrong turn for millions of workers. For far too many, the land of opportunity has turned into a land of downsized hopes and shrunken mobility. Many Americans who struggle to pay each month’s bills, who juggle two or three jobs, who bounce from one low-paid gig job to another, ask what has happened to this land of vaunted opportunity, a nation famed for its Horatio Alger credo: if you work hard, you will get ahead.

As the stories above make clear, something is fundamentally broken in the way many American employers treat their workers. Too often employers fail to show workers basic respect, too often they fail to heed workers’ most fundamental concerns, too often workers are badly underpaid or cheated out of wages. Too often employers show utter contempt for the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But something else is also fundamentally awry: corporate profits and the stock market have repeatedly climbed to new records in recent years, while wages for the typical American worker have either flatlined or inched up only slightly, after factoring in inflation. (The wage pic­ture finally brightened recently when the job market tightened with the unemployment rate falling below 4 percent.) The share of national income going to business profits has climbed to its highest level since World War II, while workers’ share of income (employee compensation, including benefits) has slid to its lowest level since the 1940s. Indeed, labor’s share of national income has fallen at a faster rate in the United States than in any other major industrial nation since 1995. Little won­der that the income of the richest 1 percent has risen to its highest level since the 1920s. With so much of the policy talk in Washington focused on cutting taxes for corporations and the very wealthy when those two groups have done splendidly in recent years, it’s palpable that the nation’s priorities—and sense of fairness—are badly out of whack. While it’s great to see workers pampered and paid well at elite corpora­tions like Google and Facebook, we shouldn’t forget the painful truth that four in ten American adults say they simply don’t have the money to pay an unexpected $400 expense, according to the Federal Reserve. Forty million Americans—one in eight—suffer from food insecurity, that is, a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

For decades, the United States was the world’s economic beacon, the country with the largest and richest middle class, a land of rising wages and broad prosperity. But now millions of Americans are wondering what happened to that golden age of prosperity, to John F. Kennedy’s exhortation that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” American workers’ pent-up frustration about stagnant wages and shuttered factories was a big factor in the 2016 election. That frustration helped push millions of blue-collar workers to vote for Donald Trump, a billionaire who wooed and wowed them by promising “to bring back the jobs,” rev up manu­facturing, and get tough on Mexico and China. Blue-collar whites gave Trump the margins he needed to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and, with those states, overall victory.

Though candidate Trump campaigned as a champion of workers, his administration has repeatedly sided with business over workers. It has scrapped numerous job safety regulations, pushed to take away health coverage from millions of families, and rolled back a rule that extended overtime pay to millions more workers. In a boon to Wall Street, the Trump administration has maneuvered to kill a rule requiring Wall Street firms to act in the worker’s, not the investment firm’s, best inter­ests when managing retirement funds—a move that could potentially cost many workers tens of thousands of dollars. (Trump’s tough trade actions have helped some steel, aluminum, and auto workers, but he has taken those actions in a blundering, blunderbuss way that has hurt many other workers and alienated and angered Canada and many other longtime allies.)

Trump’s appointees have also moved aggressively to undermine the institution that is traditionally the biggest champion of workers: organized labor. Not only have his appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued numerous rulings to weaken unions and make it harder for workers to organize, but his administration has pushed hard to undercut federal employees’ unions (even order­ing a wage freeze for federal workers). Taking the extraordinary step of reversing the previous administration’s position before the Supreme Court, Trump’s Justice Department urged the high court to issue two rulings that seriously hurt labor. One delivered a severe blow to the nation’s public-employee unions, and the other, in a significant slap at workers’ rights, permitted companies to bar workers from bringing class actions against wage theft, racial or sex discrimination, or other wrongdoing by employers. Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, cast the deciding vote in both 5–4 cases. It’s plainly demagogic for President Trump to promote himself as a good friend of the American worker when his administration and appointees are pushing, in myriad ways large and small, to hobble labor unions and workers’ ability to speak up.

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