A thoughtful consideration of work and the workaday world that brings the class struggle to the fore.
A sociologist shows how the pandemic has changed the world of work irrevocably, but there’s more to be done.
“Work is a scam. We spend far too much time doing it, and most people aren’t paid anything close to the amount of value their labor creates.” So writes McCallum in this timely follow-up to Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream. Meanwhile, the rich profit from that scam—one reason, notes the author, is that they have been working so vigorously to create a narrative by which working-class Americans aren’t working hard enough. That’s not at all the case, McCallum insists. With the pandemic and its unfair demands on those classified as “essential workers”—health care workers, to be sure, but also truck drivers and meat packers—the result was a “Great Reassessment” that became a “Great Resignation” that “helped fuel the Great Discontent,” with its rejection of low-wage jobs on the part of those who were able to search for something better. Much of that essential work, especially that which involved caregiving, has barely been valued at all, considered unskilled and compensated accordingly; given demographics, that caregiving work is only going to expand. “As the so-called invisible hand of the market attempts to push us off an ecological cliff,” writes McCallum, “it’s the invisible hands of the behind-the-scenes care workers that are propping up our care infrastructure.” Reasonably enough, the author calls for a revised Green New Deal package of programs that considers care workers to be essential workers indeed—and that includes a Medicare-for-all component to boot. Meanwhile, he notes, the capitalists aren’t sitting still. While some have accepted that in order to rebuild the labor market, they’ll have to pay more, others are pushing the “gig economy,” hiring scabs, and otherwise attempting to shore up an old, utterly broken status quo.
A thoughtful consideration of work and the workaday world that brings the class struggle to the fore.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1990-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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