A timely and well-researched study.
A professor of social policy chronicles her interviews with workers about the state of the American labor market.
The work that many Americans do in such areas as manufacturing, health care, food service, and retail are also the jobs that “seldom enable families and communities to thrive,” especially during economic downturns or other catastrophic events like the pandemic. In this book, Iversen probes the nature of working- and middle-class jobs via interviews with workers from a variety of different social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds. Once considered the “land of opportunity,” the U.S. has seen “a decoupling of wages from productivity in virtually all…industries” since the 1970s. An interview with a Latina working mother named Tisha, for example, reveals the slow growth in income in the manufacturing sector between the late 1990s and the 2000s. Indeed, the best job she could get kept her just 22% above the federal income poverty level. Translating those wages in 2019 dollars, Iversen concluded that even a $15-per-hour minimum wage would likely not help workers on the lower end of the economic spectrum prosper. Alex and John, a gay middle-aged couple who worked, respectively, in real estate and architecture and lived through the Great Recession, offer perspectives as educated professionals. Both men experienced unemployment and, later, partial employment as contractors. Iversen suggests that the kinds of community and small-business organizations they joined could be transformed into “generative sites for compensated civil labor,” providing one way for workers—who will continue to be replaced by machines—to earn comfortable, living wages. This book will appeal to sociologists, social policy researchers, and anyone interested in how the predicaments of American workers may actually contain answers to how to navigate the uncertain waters of a rapidly evolving workplace.
A timely and well-researched study.Pub Date: June 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4399-2237-8
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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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