A forceful and thought-provoking call to diversify the workforce with marginalized groups.
DeLong discusses the philosophy behind and practicalities of hiring workers from marginalized groups.
The author begins his text with some sobering facts about the current American workplace: The Bureau of Labor Statistics, he notes, has forecast a labor shortage in the near future—there will be about 12 million new jobs by 2030, but only nine million new entrants coming into the workforce (“You do the math,” he says). At the same time, only about 41%of the United States’ more than 11 million working-age adults with disabilities are currently in the workforce. In these pages, DeLong offers anecdotes drawn from his long experience advocating on behalf of marginalized workers and lays out practical advice for recruiting, hiring, and retaining members of three major categories of such employees: the formerly incarcerated, people with disabilities, and refugees. Tapping into this talent pool, the author stresses, takes “courage, patience, finesse, and flexibility,” and he fills these chapters with insights about the realities of the project. Writing about hiring immigrants, he cites the Congressional Budget Office’s projection that within 20 years, the immigrant workforce will be the only segment of the population still growing. “To survive and grow in the future,” DeLong writes, “most organizations must become more effective at hiring, training, and employing foreign-born workers.” The author maintains a tone of authoritative empathy throughout, the perfect register for overcoming the initial resistance he’s likely to encounter, and he insistently reminds his readers to consider the human element of the approaches he’s proposing. “It’s not about making it a huge corporate initiative,” he writes. “The thing may start with a mother, brother, cousin, or a friend who sees the challenge that a person they love can’t get a job.” Employers and potential co-workers will find DeLong’s book to be full of fascinating ideas.
A forceful and thought-provoking call to diversify the workforce with marginalized groups.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780988868625
Page Count: 326
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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