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Beaten Down, Worked Up

The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor

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From longtime New York Times labor correspondent, an in-depth and stirring look at working people in America, the challenges they face, and the ways in which they can be re-empowered.

In an era when corporate profits have soared while wages have flatlined, millions of Americans are searching for ways to improve their lives, and they’re often turning to labor unions and worker action, whether #RedforEd teachers’ strikes or the Fight for $15. Wage stagnation, low-wage work, and blighted blue-collar communities have become an all-too-common part of modern-day America, and behind these trends is a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. This decline is reflected in some of the most pressing problems facing our nation today, including income inequality, declining social mobility, the gender pay gap, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy. In his sweeping, robust new work, Steven Greenhouse rebuts the often-stated view that labor unions are outmoded—or even harmful—by recounting some of labor’s victories, and the efforts of several of today’s most innovative and successful worker groups. He shows us the modern labor landscape through the stories of dozens of American workers, from G.M. workers to Uber drivers, and we see how unions historically have empowered—and lifted—the most marginalized, including young women garment workers in New York in 1909, black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, and hotel housekeepers today. Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century.
 
“Superb, important and eminently readable. . . . A searing indictment of how labor’s decline magnified inequality and injustice in the U.S. Much recommended.” —Nicholas D. Kristof, op-ed columnist, The New York Times, and author of Tightrope
 
“In this riveting account of the rise and fall of organized labor, Steven Greenhouse tells the stories of courageous men and women who put their jobs and often their lives on the line to help American workers gain the income and the dignity they deserve. After World War II, when more than a third of American workers in the private sector belonged to labor unions, workers had enough power to demand that wages keep up with productivity gains. The consequence was the greatest middle class in the history of the world. But over the past forty years, as union membership has declined, America’s middle class has waned. Greenhouse outlines how a worker’s movement could be rekindled, and why it must be. Deeply inspiring and profoundly important.” —Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor and author of The Common Good
 
“Greenhouse probably knows more about what is happening in the American workplace than anybody else in the country. . . . He achieves a near-impossible task, producing a page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes, without overcondensing or oversimplifying, and with plausible suggestions for the future. . . . Great nonfiction requires great characters, and Greenhouse has the gift of portraiture. He is able to draw a complex, human portrait of a worker with a minimum of words, making the reader greedy for more details, not just about the policies but about the people. And he has both the newspaper writer’s ability to find the one or two individuals whose personal stories exemplify a larger point, and the historian’s ability to make what has already happened seem unlikely. He is skilled at homing in on the moments of the highest uncertainty, and transforming them into stories with quick and destabilizing twists and turns. . . . Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —Zephyr Teachout, The New York Times Book Review

“What I fear is that the there is a systematic effort to wipe clean our national memory of the capacity and benefits of workers acting collectively and building strong unions. Greenhouse’s book helps us remember that labor unions really did build the middle class, raise the dignity of workers, and civilize workplaces. It also gives us reason to believe that, as labor activist Rose Schneiderman poetically framed it, workers still ‘must have bread’ but “must have roses, too.” 
—Robert Bruno, Perspectives on Work

“[A] comprehensive primer on a subject that is intimately intertwined with our collective history. . . . It is obvious that Beaten Down, Worked Uprepresents a monumental–and mostly successful–attempt to connect all the dots and thus provide a clear context for the ongoing societal debate about the efficacy of the labor movement and its place in contemporary culture. . . . If you are concerned about the future, and especially our economic prospects, this is one you’ll definitely want to add to your reading list. Highly recommended.” —Aaron Hughey, Bowling Green Daily News

“Bold. . . . Greenhouse equates strong unions, or at least worker power, with democracy itself, and he sees very few limits on what a successful and healthy labor movement could achieve.” 
—Shelia McClear, The New Republic

“Powerful. . . . A combination of labor union history in America, investigative reporting about how rapacious employers and Republican governance have diminished labor unions, and an agenda for the revitalization of unions across the country. . . . A clearly written, impressively researched, and accomplished follow-up to The Big Squeeze.” Kirkus (starred review)

“An invaluable read for anyone interested in understanding one of the more shameful aspects of America’s status quo: the persistence of a working poor who, for the most part, work far harder than the rest of us yet live in a state of perpetual economic uncertainty, if not outright destitution.” —Sarah Carr, The Washington Post

Beaten Down, Worked Up should be read by every American concerned about our nation’s rising inequality and what should be done about it.” —Cristina Tzintzún, co-founder of the Workers Defense Project and founder of Jolt

“Steven Greenhouse’s riveting reporting and storytelling reminds a new generation why workers’ and unions’ concerns must be restored to the center of our politics and workplaces.” —Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher, The Nation

“This is the one book you should read if you want to understand why so many American workers say they would vote to join a union if they could.” —Leo W. Gerard, former International President, United Steelworkers

“Steven Greenhouse has been a paragon of labor reporting for decades. This crucial book—comprehensive, deeply informed and empathic—is something of a culmination of his efforts, capturing both the outrage of exploitation and the excitement of new movements. It's an inspiring, richly-sourced account of what American work and workers really mean today.”
—Alissa Quart, author of Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America

“Steve Greenhouse is himself an integral part of labor union history. He covered the work place for The New York Timesfor nearly twenty years, and set a masterful standard for his field. Greenhouse well knows that organized labor had a major part in turning America into a middle-class nation, and once it lost influence, income inequality soared. In this exceptional book, he tells us the story of labor in America by highlighting the key victories and defeats of labor unions from its high point of influence in the 1950s to its depths since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Can a reinvigorated union movement reverse inequality? He finds green shoots of hope today, such as the movement for a $15 minimum wage.” —Jeff Madrick, author of Age of Greed
 
“Greenhouse presents a sympathetic but critical survey of American labor . . . this lively and informative read will appeal to those interested in the current challenges facing American workers.” —Charles K. Piehl, Library Journal

“Inspirational. . . . This collection will satisfy readers who seek an introduction to labor history or ideas about how American workers can regain some power.” —Publishers Weekly

“Compelling. . . . Greenhouse [has] . . . a journalistic flair for personal stories often absent from academic accounts. An inspired read.” —The Independent

“Greenhouse . . . has provided a human dimension to the tale of income inequality, wage stagnation, and employer disrespect for workers. . . . Informative.” —Mark Levine, Booklist
One

Losing Our Voice

 
Throughout Mary Coleman’s six years as a cook at a Popeyes restaurant in Milwaukee, she remained stuck at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. One afternoon, when she arrived for her shift after an hour-long bus commute, her manager told her to go home without even clocking in. Business was slow, he said, and she wasn’t going to be paid for the day.

*

For ten years, Keith Barrett worked as a behind-the-scenes software engineer at Disney World in Orlando, helping monitor computers that handled ticket sales and hotel reservations. One day, Barrett and 250 fellow tech workers were stunned to receive layoff notices—Disney was replacing them with guest workers from India on temporary work visas. Many of the laid-off workers grew even more upset when Disney told them they wouldn’t receive any severance unless they agreed to train their replacements.

*

Jamie Workman became pregnant while working as a CVS cashier in Rocklin, California, northeast of Sacramento. Her eight-hour shifts soon became tiring and painful because she had to stand the whole time; her feet and legs became swollen. At one point, her shift supervi­sor gave her a stool to sit on for a few hours, but then the store manager ordered her to stop using it, telling her that cashiers weren’t allowed to sit.

*

Most mornings Jorge Porras reported to his car-wash job in Santa Fe at 8:15 a.m., as instructed, but his boss often didn’t let him clock in until 11:00, sometimes not until noon, whenever customers began lining up. Many days his boss paid him for six hours of work, even though he had worked nine and a half. One day, when the heavy chain that pulled the cars forward got stuck, Porras tried fixing it, but the chain suddenly lurched forward and cut off the top of his right ring finger. That injury forced Porras to miss two weeks of work, during which he didn’t receive any wages or workers’ compensation. When he and several co-workers complained about the unpaid hours and unsafe conditions, the car-wash owner fired them.

*

Patricia Hughes, a licensed practical nurse, came down with severe pneumonia while caring for a paraplegic in Thornton, Colorado. Coughing, vomiting, and with a 103 fever, Hughes called her manager to say she needed to miss work for two days. “I told him I was so weak that there was no way I could care for and move the patient,” she said. “He responded, ‘If you don’t come in tomorrow, don’t bother ever com­ing back.’ ” Too sick to work the next day, Hughes was fired, and as a result of losing that job, she was evicted from her apartment.

*

John Billington, proud of his 4.9 rating as an Uber driver in Los Ange­les, was shocked when Uber suddenly chopped its L.A. fares from $2.50 a mile to $1 a mile. As a result, his average weekly gross income fell from over $1,500 to around $750, and that’s before subtracting the cost of gas, auto insurance, maintenance, and depreciation on his car. “Uber dic­tates everything,” Billington said. “We don’t get any input. It’s unfair.”

*

After seventeen years of teaching, Laura Fox, an elementary school music teacher in a suburb of Phoenix, was having such a hard time mak­ing ends meet that she took a twenty-hour-a-week job at McDonald’s. Fox, whose school district hadn’t raised pay in a decade, often worked at McDonald’s until 11:30 p.m., arrived home around midnight, and woke up at 6:30 to get ready for school. “Some days I was exhausted,” she said. “I work to teach the people who are going to be the future of society. It makes me feel disrespected that they pay teachers so little.”

*

A week after graduating from college in North Carolina, Desmond Anthony moved to New York to pursue a career as an actor. To sup­port himself, he took a job as a sales clerk and cashier at the Express clothing store in Herald Square. At first his boss assigned him thirty hours of work each week, but after several months his hours were cut to just twelve or fifteen, and some weeks he was assigned no hours at all. Working fifteen hours a week, Anthony earned around $500 a month, not enough to cover his $800 monthly rent, let alone the sev­eral hundred dollars more needed for phone, subway, and food. Some days he went hungry, and some weeks he had to ask his parents for money. Anthony repeatedly urged his boss to assign him more hours, but instead of giving him more hours, the store hired more part-time workers, giving it more flexibility to plug workers into its ever-changing schedule. Anthony quit in frustration.

 

 
In the United States, a country that by many measures is the world’s richest, life has taken a wrong turn for millions of workers. For far too many, the land of opportunity has turned into a land of downsized hopes and shrunken mobility. Many Americans who struggle to pay each month’s bills, who juggle two or three jobs, who bounce from one low-paid gig job to another, ask what has happened to this land of vaunted opportunity, a nation famed for its Horatio Alger credo: if you work hard, you will get ahead.

As the stories above make clear, something is fundamentally broken in the way many American employers treat their workers. Too often employers fail to show workers basic respect, too often they fail to heed workers’ most fundamental concerns, too often workers are badly underpaid or cheated out of wages. Too often employers show utter contempt for the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But something else is also fundamentally awry: corporate profits and the stock market have repeatedly climbed to new records in recent years, while wages for the typical American worker have either flatlined or inched up only slightly, after factoring in inflation. (The wage pic­ture finally brightened recently when the job market tightened with the unemployment rate falling below 4 percent.) The share of national income going to business profits has climbed to its highest level since World War II, while workers’ share of income (employee compensation, including benefits) has slid to its lowest level since the 1940s. Indeed, labor’s share of national income has fallen at a faster rate in the United States than in any other major industrial nation since 1995. Little won­der that the income of the richest 1 percent has risen to its highest level since the 1920s. With so much of the policy talk in Washington focused on cutting taxes for corporations and the very wealthy when those two groups have done splendidly in recent years, it’s palpable that the nation’s priorities—and sense of fairness—are badly out of whack. While it’s great to see workers pampered and paid well at elite corpora­tions like Google and Facebook, we shouldn’t forget the painful truth that four in ten American adults say they simply don’t have the money to pay an unexpected $400 expense, according to the Federal Reserve. Forty million Americans—one in eight—suffer from food insecurity, that is, a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

For decades, the United States was the world’s economic beacon, the country with the largest and richest middle class, a land of rising wages and broad prosperity. But now millions of Americans are wondering what happened to that golden age of prosperity, to John F. Kennedy’s exhortation that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” American workers’ pent-up frustration about stagnant wages and shuttered factories was a big factor in the 2016 election. That frustration helped push millions of blue-collar workers to vote for Donald Trump, a billionaire who wooed and wowed them by promising “to bring back the jobs,” rev up manu­facturing, and get tough on Mexico and China. Blue-collar whites gave Trump the margins he needed to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and, with those states, overall victory.

Though candidate Trump campaigned as a champion of workers, his administration has repeatedly sided with business over workers. It has scrapped numerous job safety regulations, pushed to take away health coverage from millions of families, and rolled back a rule that extended overtime pay to millions more workers. In a boon to Wall Street, the Trump administration has maneuvered to kill a rule requiring Wall Street firms to act in the worker’s, not the investment firm’s, best inter­ests when managing retirement funds—a move that could potentially cost many workers tens of thousands of dollars. (Trump’s tough trade actions have helped some steel, aluminum, and auto workers, but he has taken those actions in a blundering, blunderbuss way that has hurt many other workers and alienated and angered Canada and many other longtime allies.)

Trump’s appointees have also moved aggressively to undermine the institution that is traditionally the biggest champion of workers: organized labor. Not only have his appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued numerous rulings to weaken unions and make it harder for workers to organize, but his administration has pushed hard to undercut federal employees’ unions (even order­ing a wage freeze for federal workers). Taking the extraordinary step of reversing the previous administration’s position before the Supreme Court, Trump’s Justice Department urged the high court to issue two rulings that seriously hurt labor. One delivered a severe blow to the nation’s public-employee unions, and the other, in a significant slap at workers’ rights, permitted companies to bar workers from bringing class actions against wage theft, racial or sex discrimination, or other wrongdoing by employers. Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, cast the deciding vote in both 5–4 cases. It’s plainly demagogic for President Trump to promote himself as a good friend of the American worker when his administration and appointees are pushing, in myriad ways large and small, to hobble labor unions and workers’ ability to speak up.
© Michael Lionstar

STEVEN GREENHOUSE was a reporter for The New York Times from 1983 to 2014 and covered labor and the workplace for nineteen years there. He also served as a business and economics reporter and a diplomatic and foreign correspondent. He has been honored with the Society of Professional Journalists Deadline Club award, a New York Press Club award, a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Reporting, and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism for his last book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.

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About

From longtime New York Times labor correspondent, an in-depth and stirring look at working people in America, the challenges they face, and the ways in which they can be re-empowered.

In an era when corporate profits have soared while wages have flatlined, millions of Americans are searching for ways to improve their lives, and they’re often turning to labor unions and worker action, whether #RedforEd teachers’ strikes or the Fight for $15. Wage stagnation, low-wage work, and blighted blue-collar communities have become an all-too-common part of modern-day America, and behind these trends is a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. This decline is reflected in some of the most pressing problems facing our nation today, including income inequality, declining social mobility, the gender pay gap, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy. In his sweeping, robust new work, Steven Greenhouse rebuts the often-stated view that labor unions are outmoded—or even harmful—by recounting some of labor’s victories, and the efforts of several of today’s most innovative and successful worker groups. He shows us the modern labor landscape through the stories of dozens of American workers, from G.M. workers to Uber drivers, and we see how unions historically have empowered—and lifted—the most marginalized, including young women garment workers in New York in 1909, black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, and hotel housekeepers today. Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century.
 
“Superb, important and eminently readable. . . . A searing indictment of how labor’s decline magnified inequality and injustice in the U.S. Much recommended.” —Nicholas D. Kristof, op-ed columnist, The New York Times, and author of Tightrope
 
“In this riveting account of the rise and fall of organized labor, Steven Greenhouse tells the stories of courageous men and women who put their jobs and often their lives on the line to help American workers gain the income and the dignity they deserve. After World War II, when more than a third of American workers in the private sector belonged to labor unions, workers had enough power to demand that wages keep up with productivity gains. The consequence was the greatest middle class in the history of the world. But over the past forty years, as union membership has declined, America’s middle class has waned. Greenhouse outlines how a worker’s movement could be rekindled, and why it must be. Deeply inspiring and profoundly important.” —Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor and author of The Common Good
 
“Greenhouse probably knows more about what is happening in the American workplace than anybody else in the country. . . . He achieves a near-impossible task, producing a page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes, without overcondensing or oversimplifying, and with plausible suggestions for the future. . . . Great nonfiction requires great characters, and Greenhouse has the gift of portraiture. He is able to draw a complex, human portrait of a worker with a minimum of words, making the reader greedy for more details, not just about the policies but about the people. And he has both the newspaper writer’s ability to find the one or two individuals whose personal stories exemplify a larger point, and the historian’s ability to make what has already happened seem unlikely. He is skilled at homing in on the moments of the highest uncertainty, and transforming them into stories with quick and destabilizing twists and turns. . . . Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —Zephyr Teachout, The New York Times Book Review

“What I fear is that the there is a systematic effort to wipe clean our national memory of the capacity and benefits of workers acting collectively and building strong unions. Greenhouse’s book helps us remember that labor unions really did build the middle class, raise the dignity of workers, and civilize workplaces. It also gives us reason to believe that, as labor activist Rose Schneiderman poetically framed it, workers still ‘must have bread’ but “must have roses, too.” 
—Robert Bruno, Perspectives on Work

“[A] comprehensive primer on a subject that is intimately intertwined with our collective history. . . . It is obvious that Beaten Down, Worked Uprepresents a monumental–and mostly successful–attempt to connect all the dots and thus provide a clear context for the ongoing societal debate about the efficacy of the labor movement and its place in contemporary culture. . . . If you are concerned about the future, and especially our economic prospects, this is one you’ll definitely want to add to your reading list. Highly recommended.” —Aaron Hughey, Bowling Green Daily News

“Bold. . . . Greenhouse equates strong unions, or at least worker power, with democracy itself, and he sees very few limits on what a successful and healthy labor movement could achieve.” 
—Shelia McClear, The New Republic

“Powerful. . . . A combination of labor union history in America, investigative reporting about how rapacious employers and Republican governance have diminished labor unions, and an agenda for the revitalization of unions across the country. . . . A clearly written, impressively researched, and accomplished follow-up to The Big Squeeze.” Kirkus (starred review)

“An invaluable read for anyone interested in understanding one of the more shameful aspects of America’s status quo: the persistence of a working poor who, for the most part, work far harder than the rest of us yet live in a state of perpetual economic uncertainty, if not outright destitution.” —Sarah Carr, The Washington Post

Beaten Down, Worked Up should be read by every American concerned about our nation’s rising inequality and what should be done about it.” —Cristina Tzintzún, co-founder of the Workers Defense Project and founder of Jolt

“Steven Greenhouse’s riveting reporting and storytelling reminds a new generation why workers’ and unions’ concerns must be restored to the center of our politics and workplaces.” —Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher, The Nation

“This is the one book you should read if you want to understand why so many American workers say they would vote to join a union if they could.” —Leo W. Gerard, former International President, United Steelworkers

“Steven Greenhouse has been a paragon of labor reporting for decades. This crucial book—comprehensive, deeply informed and empathic—is something of a culmination of his efforts, capturing both the outrage of exploitation and the excitement of new movements. It's an inspiring, richly-sourced account of what American work and workers really mean today.”
—Alissa Quart, author of Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America

“Steve Greenhouse is himself an integral part of labor union history. He covered the work place for The New York Timesfor nearly twenty years, and set a masterful standard for his field. Greenhouse well knows that organized labor had a major part in turning America into a middle-class nation, and once it lost influence, income inequality soared. In this exceptional book, he tells us the story of labor in America by highlighting the key victories and defeats of labor unions from its high point of influence in the 1950s to its depths since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Can a reinvigorated union movement reverse inequality? He finds green shoots of hope today, such as the movement for a $15 minimum wage.” —Jeff Madrick, author of Age of Greed
 
“Greenhouse presents a sympathetic but critical survey of American labor . . . this lively and informative read will appeal to those interested in the current challenges facing American workers.” —Charles K. Piehl, Library Journal

“Inspirational. . . . This collection will satisfy readers who seek an introduction to labor history or ideas about how American workers can regain some power.” —Publishers Weekly

“Compelling. . . . Greenhouse [has] . . . a journalistic flair for personal stories often absent from academic accounts. An inspired read.” —The Independent

“Greenhouse . . . has provided a human dimension to the tale of income inequality, wage stagnation, and employer disrespect for workers. . . . Informative.” —Mark Levine, Booklist

Excerpt

One

Losing Our Voice

 
Throughout Mary Coleman’s six years as a cook at a Popeyes restaurant in Milwaukee, she remained stuck at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. One afternoon, when she arrived for her shift after an hour-long bus commute, her manager told her to go home without even clocking in. Business was slow, he said, and she wasn’t going to be paid for the day.

*

For ten years, Keith Barrett worked as a behind-the-scenes software engineer at Disney World in Orlando, helping monitor computers that handled ticket sales and hotel reservations. One day, Barrett and 250 fellow tech workers were stunned to receive layoff notices—Disney was replacing them with guest workers from India on temporary work visas. Many of the laid-off workers grew even more upset when Disney told them they wouldn’t receive any severance unless they agreed to train their replacements.

*

Jamie Workman became pregnant while working as a CVS cashier in Rocklin, California, northeast of Sacramento. Her eight-hour shifts soon became tiring and painful because she had to stand the whole time; her feet and legs became swollen. At one point, her shift supervi­sor gave her a stool to sit on for a few hours, but then the store manager ordered her to stop using it, telling her that cashiers weren’t allowed to sit.

*

Most mornings Jorge Porras reported to his car-wash job in Santa Fe at 8:15 a.m., as instructed, but his boss often didn’t let him clock in until 11:00, sometimes not until noon, whenever customers began lining up. Many days his boss paid him for six hours of work, even though he had worked nine and a half. One day, when the heavy chain that pulled the cars forward got stuck, Porras tried fixing it, but the chain suddenly lurched forward and cut off the top of his right ring finger. That injury forced Porras to miss two weeks of work, during which he didn’t receive any wages or workers’ compensation. When he and several co-workers complained about the unpaid hours and unsafe conditions, the car-wash owner fired them.

*

Patricia Hughes, a licensed practical nurse, came down with severe pneumonia while caring for a paraplegic in Thornton, Colorado. Coughing, vomiting, and with a 103 fever, Hughes called her manager to say she needed to miss work for two days. “I told him I was so weak that there was no way I could care for and move the patient,” she said. “He responded, ‘If you don’t come in tomorrow, don’t bother ever com­ing back.’ ” Too sick to work the next day, Hughes was fired, and as a result of losing that job, she was evicted from her apartment.

*

John Billington, proud of his 4.9 rating as an Uber driver in Los Ange­les, was shocked when Uber suddenly chopped its L.A. fares from $2.50 a mile to $1 a mile. As a result, his average weekly gross income fell from over $1,500 to around $750, and that’s before subtracting the cost of gas, auto insurance, maintenance, and depreciation on his car. “Uber dic­tates everything,” Billington said. “We don’t get any input. It’s unfair.”

*

After seventeen years of teaching, Laura Fox, an elementary school music teacher in a suburb of Phoenix, was having such a hard time mak­ing ends meet that she took a twenty-hour-a-week job at McDonald’s. Fox, whose school district hadn’t raised pay in a decade, often worked at McDonald’s until 11:30 p.m., arrived home around midnight, and woke up at 6:30 to get ready for school. “Some days I was exhausted,” she said. “I work to teach the people who are going to be the future of society. It makes me feel disrespected that they pay teachers so little.”

*

A week after graduating from college in North Carolina, Desmond Anthony moved to New York to pursue a career as an actor. To sup­port himself, he took a job as a sales clerk and cashier at the Express clothing store in Herald Square. At first his boss assigned him thirty hours of work each week, but after several months his hours were cut to just twelve or fifteen, and some weeks he was assigned no hours at all. Working fifteen hours a week, Anthony earned around $500 a month, not enough to cover his $800 monthly rent, let alone the sev­eral hundred dollars more needed for phone, subway, and food. Some days he went hungry, and some weeks he had to ask his parents for money. Anthony repeatedly urged his boss to assign him more hours, but instead of giving him more hours, the store hired more part-time workers, giving it more flexibility to plug workers into its ever-changing schedule. Anthony quit in frustration.

 

 
In the United States, a country that by many measures is the world’s richest, life has taken a wrong turn for millions of workers. For far too many, the land of opportunity has turned into a land of downsized hopes and shrunken mobility. Many Americans who struggle to pay each month’s bills, who juggle two or three jobs, who bounce from one low-paid gig job to another, ask what has happened to this land of vaunted opportunity, a nation famed for its Horatio Alger credo: if you work hard, you will get ahead.

As the stories above make clear, something is fundamentally broken in the way many American employers treat their workers. Too often employers fail to show workers basic respect, too often they fail to heed workers’ most fundamental concerns, too often workers are badly underpaid or cheated out of wages. Too often employers show utter contempt for the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But something else is also fundamentally awry: corporate profits and the stock market have repeatedly climbed to new records in recent years, while wages for the typical American worker have either flatlined or inched up only slightly, after factoring in inflation. (The wage pic­ture finally brightened recently when the job market tightened with the unemployment rate falling below 4 percent.) The share of national income going to business profits has climbed to its highest level since World War II, while workers’ share of income (employee compensation, including benefits) has slid to its lowest level since the 1940s. Indeed, labor’s share of national income has fallen at a faster rate in the United States than in any other major industrial nation since 1995. Little won­der that the income of the richest 1 percent has risen to its highest level since the 1920s. With so much of the policy talk in Washington focused on cutting taxes for corporations and the very wealthy when those two groups have done splendidly in recent years, it’s palpable that the nation’s priorities—and sense of fairness—are badly out of whack. While it’s great to see workers pampered and paid well at elite corpora­tions like Google and Facebook, we shouldn’t forget the painful truth that four in ten American adults say they simply don’t have the money to pay an unexpected $400 expense, according to the Federal Reserve. Forty million Americans—one in eight—suffer from food insecurity, that is, a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

For decades, the United States was the world’s economic beacon, the country with the largest and richest middle class, a land of rising wages and broad prosperity. But now millions of Americans are wondering what happened to that golden age of prosperity, to John F. Kennedy’s exhortation that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” American workers’ pent-up frustration about stagnant wages and shuttered factories was a big factor in the 2016 election. That frustration helped push millions of blue-collar workers to vote for Donald Trump, a billionaire who wooed and wowed them by promising “to bring back the jobs,” rev up manu­facturing, and get tough on Mexico and China. Blue-collar whites gave Trump the margins he needed to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and, with those states, overall victory.

Though candidate Trump campaigned as a champion of workers, his administration has repeatedly sided with business over workers. It has scrapped numerous job safety regulations, pushed to take away health coverage from millions of families, and rolled back a rule that extended overtime pay to millions more workers. In a boon to Wall Street, the Trump administration has maneuvered to kill a rule requiring Wall Street firms to act in the worker’s, not the investment firm’s, best inter­ests when managing retirement funds—a move that could potentially cost many workers tens of thousands of dollars. (Trump’s tough trade actions have helped some steel, aluminum, and auto workers, but he has taken those actions in a blundering, blunderbuss way that has hurt many other workers and alienated and angered Canada and many other longtime allies.)

Trump’s appointees have also moved aggressively to undermine the institution that is traditionally the biggest champion of workers: organized labor. Not only have his appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued numerous rulings to weaken unions and make it harder for workers to organize, but his administration has pushed hard to undercut federal employees’ unions (even order­ing a wage freeze for federal workers). Taking the extraordinary step of reversing the previous administration’s position before the Supreme Court, Trump’s Justice Department urged the high court to issue two rulings that seriously hurt labor. One delivered a severe blow to the nation’s public-employee unions, and the other, in a significant slap at workers’ rights, permitted companies to bar workers from bringing class actions against wage theft, racial or sex discrimination, or other wrongdoing by employers. Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, cast the deciding vote in both 5–4 cases. It’s plainly demagogic for President Trump to promote himself as a good friend of the American worker when his administration and appointees are pushing, in myriad ways large and small, to hobble labor unions and workers’ ability to speak up.

Author

© Michael Lionstar

STEVEN GREENHOUSE was a reporter for The New York Times from 1983 to 2014 and covered labor and the workplace for nineteen years there. He also served as a business and economics reporter and a diplomatic and foreign correspondent. He has been honored with the Society of Professional Journalists Deadline Club award, a New York Press Club award, a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Reporting, and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism for his last book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.

stevengreenhouse.com

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