Main Street Squeeze

from In These Times:



Features > May 23, 2008
Main Street Squeeze
By David Moberg


Are they squeezed? Caught? Crunched? Three new books — by two top-notch national journalists and a leading progressive economist — exploit these images to convey how average

Americans are losing out in today’s economy. And despite varied but overlapping prescriptions for new policies, none of the three offers an easy way out.

In The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Knopf, 2008), New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse pulls together some key statistics and compelling personal stories to depict the “broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers,” blue- and white-collar alike, over the past three decades.

Growing inequality costs workers dearly. For example, if the distribution of income today were the same as it was in 1979 (and if the economy had grown at the same rate as it has since then), the average family among the bottom four-fifths of Americans would now be earning $8,000 more each year than it actually does. At the same time, life has become more insecure for most of these working families, with health insurance, pensions and education — as well as the broader social safety net — becoming less generous and more precarious.

Greenhouse’s reporting goes beyond these increasingly familiar inequities to the pressures that workers experience on the job. Wal-Mart managers lock janitors into its buildings overnight. Major companies like Taco Bell force employees to work off the clock or manipulate their time records to cheat them out of pay. Manufacturers like Landis Plastics minimize safety precautions at the cost of workers’ lives and limbs.

Decades ago, Greenhouse argues, managers thought the “happy worker” was good for business, but now, he says, they employ a “bullying model” to “manage by fear.” Workers at the bottom fare worst, but even middle managers suffer from bullies above who are pushing them to cut costs and crush workers.

Although Greenhouse may overstate the benefits for workers from the informal social contract between business, labor and government after World War II, the contrast of today’s conditions with that period is harshly instructive. In a quickly sketched account, he blames — with varying degrees of emphasis — the deterioration of standards on globalization, immigration, union-busting (as well as unions’ own shortcomings), declining enforcement of labor laws and the growing power of investors.

But Greenhouse does best when telling the stories of workers like Kathy Saumier, who courageously — though unsuccessfully — fought to form a union that could stop safety hazards, sex discrimination and exploitation at the upstate New York Landis factory. Or managers like Drew Pooters, who was morally offended by demands from superiors at two corporations where he worked — Toys “R” Us and Family Dollar — to cheat employees out of pay for work they had completed. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3690/main_street_squeeze/

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