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Working for Justice, which includes eleven case studies of recent low-wage worker organizing campaigns in Los Angeles, makes the case for a distinctive "L.A. Model" of union and worker center organizing. Networks linking advocates in worker centers and labor unions facilitate mutual learning and synergy and have generated a shared repertoire of economic justice strategies. The organized labor movement in Los Angeles has weathered the effects of deindustrialization and deregulation better than unions in other parts of the United States, and this has helped to anchor the city's wider low-wage worker movement. Los Angeles is also home to the nation's highest concentration of undocumented immigr...
In this unique and essential collection, Molly Ivins, Maureen Dowd, Maria Hinojosa, and a host of other frontline thinkers, journalists, and activists employ wit, outrage, and cold, hard facts to expose the "W Effect,"a comprehensive incursion into women's rights. In recent years, women around the globe have come under attack-both literally, in the case of war and punitive repression, and more subtly, in the case of eroded rights and economic power. Yet this dangerous trend has not, to date, been comprehensively documented and deconstructed-in part because women are finding it harder to gain access to the mainstream media. Both a harsh reality check and a hopeful starting point for new actio...
The way Americans live and work has changed significantly since the creation of the Social Security Administration in 1935, but U.S. social welfare policy has failed to keep up with these changes. The model of the male breadwinner-led nuclear family has given way to diverse and often complex family structures, more women in the workplace, and nontraditional job arrangements. Old Assumptions, New Realities identifies the tensions between twentieth-century social policy and twenty-first-century realities for working Americans and offers promising new reforms for ensuring social and economic security. Old Assumptions, New Realities focuses on policy solutions for today's workers—particularly ...
"Stereotypes of economically marginalized black and brown youth focus on drugs, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood. Families, schools, nonprofit organizations, and institutions in poor urban neighborhoods emphasize preventing such "risk behaviors." In The Making of a Teenage Service Class, Ranita Ray uncovers the pernicious consequences of concentrating on risk behaviors as key to targeting poverty. Having spent three years among sixteen black and Latina/o youth, Ray shares their stories of trying to beat the odds of living in poverty. Their struggles of hunger, homelessness, and untreated illnesses are juxtaposed with the perseverance of completing homework, finding jobs, and spending lon...
Based on extended interviews with maids, cocktail waitresses, cooks, laundry workers, dealers, pit bosses, and vice presidents, Casino Women is a pioneering look at the female face of corporate gaming.
In recent years, the German government has intentionally expanded the low-wage work sector in an effort to reduce exceptionally high levels of unemployment. As a result, the share of the German workforce employed in low-paying jobs now rivals that of the United States. Low Wage Work in Germany examines both the federal policies and changing economic conditions that have driven this increase in low-wage work. The new "mini-job" reflects the federal government's attempt to make certain low-paying jobs attractive to both employers and employees. Employers pay a low flat rate for benefits, and employees, who work a limited number of hours per week, are exempt from social security and tax contrib...
Temporary agencies place approximately two and a half million people in jobs each day in the United States. Every year, about twelve million people use these placement agencies to find temporary work. Many Americans, even those who desire permanent jobs, decide to enter the labor market through the portal of temporary agencies. Compared with the post-World War II era, when it was a marginal labor practice, temporary employment is today an entrenched feature of jobs and labor markets. How have temporary employment relationships become so widespread and normalized? In The Good Temp, Vicki Smith and Esther B. Neuwirth provide some novel answers to this question. Their provocative analysis is ba...
Examines the current state of workers' freedom to form unions and bargain collectively and looks at the obstacles facing America's workers who seek to organize into unions in the 21st century.
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This book challenges the widely held American belief in meritocracy_that people get out of the system what they put into it based on individual merit. The book first reviews each of the four components of merit--being talented, having the right attitude, working hard, and having high moral character_in terms of its impact on getting ahead. The book then identifies various non-merit factors that suppress, neutralize, or negate the effects of merit. These non-merit factors include the effects of inheritance as unequal starting points in the race to get ahead, the effects of who you know (social capital) and 'fitting in' (cultural capital), being at the right place at the right time (luck), unequal access to educational opportunities, decline in rates of self-employment and the prospects of being a 'self-made' person, and discrimination on the bases of race, sex, age, sexual orientation, physical disability, region, religion, and physical appearance. To more closely approximate a true meritocracy, societal-level reforms would be necessary. In the meantime, the myth of meritocracy is itself harmful because it unfairly exalts the rich and unfairly condemns poor.