Betrayal Of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans

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An astonishing 35 million Americans work full time but do not make a living. They are nursing home workers, poultry processors, pharmacy assistants, ambulance drivers, child care workers, data entry keyers, janitors. Indeed, one in four American workers lives in or near poverty. Despite the great wealth of the United States, these low-wage workers have lower living standards than do similar workers in most other industrial nations, and since the 1980s, their wages have declined. Sara,For several years, Beth Shulman travelled across America, talking to low-wage workers, and in here she tells the moving stories of people like a single mother of three who earns six dollars and ten cents an hour, with no sick pay or vacation pay, after working almost a decade at a nursing home in Alabama. For Sara and others like her, writes Shulman, the basic promise of American society - if you work hard, you and your family can make a decent living - has been broken. Americans do seem to be paying renewed attention to low-wage work - as interest in Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Nickel and Dimed" makes clear - attention that is sure to increase as Congress debates the extension of welfare reform. "The Betrayal of Work" moves the conversation forward, providing a full portrait of America's working poor, and dispelling a number of myths along the way: that lower unemployment has meant better living conditions for the poor; that making bad jobs into good jobs requires impossibly difficult measures; that low-wage work is ubiquitously low-skill work. With a far-reaching argument about what we must do to restore fairness to the American economic order.

Reviews

"A vital book." Thomas Oliphant, The Boston Globe

"A powerful book." E.J. Dionne, The Washington Post

"Shulman documents the personal storiesand explodes many of the mythsof Americas lowest-paid workers." Fortune

"Betrayal shows how working lives can get nasty fast." USA Today

"Must-reading for anyone who cares about the future of the American economy and American society." Hedrick Smith

Author Bio

Beth Shulman (19492010) was a labor lawyer, a former vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, a senior analyst at the Russell Sage Foundation, and the chair of National Employment Law Project board. She was the author of The Betrayal of Work (The New Press) and Good Jobs America.