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This book shines a spotlight on the causes and consequences of working poverty, revealing how the lives of low-wage workers are affected by differences in health care, labor, and social welfare policy in the United States and Canada. Dan Zuberi's conclusions are based on survey data, eighteen months of participant observation fieldwork, and in-depth interviews with seventy-seven hotel employees working in parallel jobs on both sides of the border. Two hotel chains, each with one union and one non-union hotel in Seattle and Vancouver, provide a vivid crossnational comparison because they are similar in so many regards, the one major exception being government policy.Zuberi demonstrates how la...
Public schools are among the most important institutions in North American communities, especially in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. At their best, they enable students to overcome challenges like poverty by providing vital literacy and numeracy skills. At their worst, they condemn students to failure, both economically and in terms of preparing them to be active participants in a democratic society. In Schooling the Next Generation, Dan Zuberi documents the challenges facing ten East Vancouver elementary schools in diverse lower-income communities, as well as the ways their principals, teachers, and parents are overcoming these challenges. Going beyond the façade of standardized test scores, Zuberi identifies the kinds of school and community programs that are making a difference and could be replicated in other schools. At the same time, he calls into question the assumptions behind a test score-driven search for "successful schools." Focusing on early literacy and numeracy skills mastery, Schooling the Next Generation presents a slate of policy recommendations to help students in urban elementary schools achieve their full potential.
Experts discuss improving job quality in low-wage industries including retail, residential construction, hospitals and long-term healthcare, restaurants, manufacturing, and long-haul trucking. Americans work harder and longer than our counterparts in other industrialized nations. Yet prosperity remains elusive to many. Workers in such low-wage industries as retail, restaurants, and home construction live from paycheck to paycheck, juggling multiple jobs with variable schedules, few benefits, and limited prospects for advancement. These bad outcomes are produced by a range of industry-specific factors, including intense competition, outsourcing and subcontracting, failure to enforce employmen...
This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art analysis of the critically important links between migration and security in a globalising world, and presents original contributions suggesting innovative and emerging frontiers in the study of the securitization of migration. Experts from different fields reflect on their respective conceptualisations of the migration-security nexus, and consider how an interdisciplinary and multifaceted dialogue can stimulate and enrich our understanding of the securitisation of migration in the contemporary world.
"Years after the Great Recession, the economy is still weak, and an unprecedented number of workers have sunk into long spells of unemployment, increasingly unlikely to get another good job in their lifetimes. Based on a careful crossnational comparison, "Cut Loose" describes the experiences of American and Canadian unemployed workers and the impact of the different social policies meant to help them. It focuses on a historically important group: autoworkers. Their well-paid factory jobs built a strong middle class in the decades after World War II. But today, they find themselves lost and beleaguered in a changed economy of greater inequality and risk, one that favors the well-educated--or ...
The global financial crisis and recession have placed great strains on the free market ideology that has emphasized economic objectives and unregulated markets. The balance of economic and noneconomic goals is under the microscope in every sector of the economy. It is time to re-think the objectives of the employment relationship and the underlying assumptions of how that relationship operates. Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives develops a fresh, holistic framework to fundamentally reexamine U.S. workplace regulation. A new scorecard for workplace law and public policy that embraces equity and voice for employees and economic efficiency will reveals significant deficiencies in our current...
The simple act of going to work every day is an integral part of all societies across the globe. It is an ingrained social contract: we all work to survive. But it goes beyond physical survival. Psychologists have equated losing a job with the trauma of divorce or a family death, and enormous issues arise, from financial panic to sinking self-esteem. Through work, we build our self-identity, our lifestyle, and our aspirations. How did it come about that work dominates so many parts of our lives and our psyche? This multi-disciplinary encyclopedia covers curricular subjects that seek to address that question, ranging from business and management to anthropology, sociology, social history, psy...
Each year, hospital-acquired infections, prescribing and treatment errors, lost documents and test reports, communication failures, and other problems have caused thousands of deaths in the United States, added millions of days to patients' hospital stays, and cost Americans tens of billions of dollars. Despite (and sometimes because of) new medical information technology and numerous well-intentioned initiatives to address these problems, threats to patient safety remain, and in some areas are on the rise. In First, Do Less Harm, twelve health care professionals and researchers plus two former patients look at patient safety from a variety of perspectives, finding many of the proposed solut...
Choose your hours, choose your work, be your own boss, control your own income. Welcome to the sharing economy, a nebulous collection of online platforms and apps that promise to transcend capitalism. Supporters argue that the gig economy will reverse economic inequality, enhance worker rights, and bring entrepreneurship to the masses. But does it? In Hustle and Gig, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle shares the personal stories of nearly eighty predominantly millennial workers from Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit, and Kitchensurfing. Their stories underline the volatility of working in the gig economy: the autonomy these young workers expected has been usurped by the need to maintain algorithm-approved accep...
Named one of the Best Business Books of 2007 by Library Journal The Missing Class gives voice to the 54 million Americans, including 21 percent of the nation's children, who are sandwiched between poor and middle class. While government programs help the needy and politicians woo the more fortunate, the "Missing Class" is largely invisible and ignored. Through the experiences of nine families, Katherine Newman and Victor Tan Chen trace the unique problems faced by individuals in this large and growing demographic-the "near poor." The question for the Missing Class is not whether they're doing better than the truly poor-they are. The question is whether these individuals, on the razor's edge of subsistence, are safely ensconced in the Missing Class or in danger of losing it all. The Missing Class has much to tell us about whether the American dream still exists for those who are sacrificing daily to achieve it.