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The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Borzoi Books) | 
 enlarge | Author: Steven Greenhouse
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $15.36
You Save: $10.59 (41%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 19114
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.7 x 1.3
ISBN: 1400044898
Dewey Decimal Number: 331.0973
EAN: 9781400044894
ASIN: 1400044898
Publication Date: April 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The Big Squeeze takes a fresh, probing, and often shocking look at the stresses and strains faced by tens of millions of American workers as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security has shriveled.
Going behind the scenes, Steven Greenhouse tells the stories of software engineers in Seattle, hotel housekeepers in Chicago, call center workers in New York, and janitors in Houston, as he explores why, in the world’s most affluent nation, so many corporations are intent on squeezing their workers dry. We meet all kinds of workers: white collar and blue collar, high tech and low tech, middle income and low income; employees who stock shelves during a hurricane while locked inside their store, get fired after suffering debilitating injuries on the job, face egregious sexual harassment, and get laid off when their companies move high-tech operations abroad. We also meet young workers having a hard time starting out and seventy-year-old workers with too little money saved up to retire.
The book explains how economic, business, political, and social trends—among them globalization, the influx of immigrants, and the Wal-Mart effect—have fueled the squeeze. We see how the social contract between employers and employees, guaranteeing steady work and good pensions, has eroded over the last three decades, damaged by massive layoffs of factory and office workers and Wall Street’s demands for ever-higher profits. In short, the post–World War II social contract that helped build the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class has been replaced by a startling contradiction: corporate profits, economic growth, and worker productivity have grown strongly while worker pay has languished and Americans face ever-greater pressures to work harder and longer.
Greenhouse also examines companies that are generous to their workers and can serve as models for all of corporate America: Costco, Patagonia, and the casino-hotels of Las Vegas among them. Finally, he presents a series of pragmatic, ready-to-be-implemented suggestions on what government, business, and labor should do to alleviate the squeeze.
A balanced, consistently revealing exploration of a major American crisis.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 A Great Read and an Important Book about Workers August 25, 2008
I read a lot of books on the economy and workers, and unfortunately too many of them are plodding and overstuffed with statistics. That's why the Big Squeeze was such a pleasant surprise. It's a wonderfully big-hearted book, and it's also a terrific read. It's the best book on American workers that I've read in recent decades (or at least it's a tie with Barbara Ehrenreich's wonderful Nickel and Dimed).
The Big Squeeze is unusual because it tells very moving, very human stories about two dozen individual workers -- the software engineer who has to train the worker from India who was to replace her, the "temp" whose company keeps her as a temp for 10 years, the Air Force veteran who works for three retailers in a row that erase hours from employee time cards to save money. Depressing, but very gripping stuff.
What's also impressive about The Big Squeeze is it sees the trees and the forest. Better than any other book that I've read, it explains in detail how American workers are being systematically squeezed--on wages, health insurance, pensions, job security, pressure to work harder and smarter. The book also examines in a intelligent and accessible way the many complex forces that are causing this squeeze, e.g. globalization, Wall Street's push for greater profits. The book deals with some complicated matters, but it moves quickly, never getting bogged down.
Greenhouse tells one eloquent story after another about how Americans are being squeezed at work. With things getting worse for the nation's workers, Barack Obama and John McCain should be required to read this book so they could see what's really happening in the American economy.
 More establishment apologist drivel for more govt. July 27, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Selective statistics have a very long history of being fabricated to deceive.
Anyone who calls for MORE regulation and hampering of an already long UNFREE, UNHAMPERED market by govt, reveals their total ignorance and reject the very foundations of liberty we cast OFF KGIII's lesser oppressions to achieve.
Our current problems stem precisely because Govt privileges the few at the little seen disbursement of costs upon the many. In no way is this in line with the General Welfare clause that insists ALL govt spending benefits ALL taxpayers equally, as a battleship would, and bridges to nowhere or midnight B-Ball never will.
One can easily see the praises come primarily from establishment parrot commercial reviewers. The praises from individuals just show how duped the establishment has made them.
See if this sinks in any:
Jean-Baptiste Say
"[The different ways of producing] all consist in taking a product in one state and putting it into another in which it has more utility and value ... in one way or another, from the moment that one creates or augments the utility of things, one augments their value, one is exercising an industry, one is producing wealth.
The productive power of industry is limited only by ignorance and by the bad administration of states. Spread enlightenment and improve governments, or, rather, prevent them from doing harm; and there will be no limit that can be assigned to the multiplication of wealth.
But personal interest is no longer a safe criterion if individual interests are not left to counteract and control each other.
If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority (governments) to ward off the effects of competition, it acquires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community; it can then make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its private profit; which tax it commonly shares with the authority that thus unjustly lends its support.
The legislative body has great difficulty in resisting the importunate demands for this kind of privileges; the applicants are the producers that are to benefit thereby, who can represent with much plausibility that their own gains are a gain to the industrious classes, and to the nation at large, their workmen and themselves being members of the industrious classes, and of the nation."
THIS is exactly what ails our society - a highly corrupt, counter-productive, overly concentrated, over-powerful, over-spending, unconstitutional Govt, that operates to enrich it's oligarchic few off the backs and lives of common men who actually produce.
And Greenspan explains the PRECISE mechanism how:
Alan Greenspan - "Gold and Economic Freedom" 1967
"An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other. . . . This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
And so does Keynes via his admired Lenin:
John Maynard Keynes
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency - "By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some....The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose."
Those who choose to remain the gullible sheep 100 yrs of compulsory indoctrination has produced - please sell me YOUR barbaric relics, GOLD, and keep on keepin on with that ignorant faith in samaritan benevolent Govt that loves YOU more than it's own enrichment!
W, Clintons, Obama are ALL CFR/NWO puppets whether actual members or not.
The new bosses? Same as the old bosses. Especially when they all belong to the same power elite clubs who plan our futures and the world's in total secrecy outside of govt where no sunlight prevails.
This author is just another overpaid socialist govt shill. Catch his book presentation on C-Span booknotes and see for yourselves. What blatant crap!!
 The future looks mighty grim for the beleagured American worker. July 20, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I imagine that many conservative talk show hosts who have heard of or even read "The Big Squeeze" will dismiss out of hand Steven Greenhouse's new book as just more predictable liberal negativity. After all, according to Sean Hannity on one recent afternoon program it is possible for everyone to become rich in America if they are just willing to work hard enough. This is hogwash, Mr. Hannity. Everyone is not cut out to be an enterpreneur or a stockbroker. The reality is that in America today 10% of the population controls nearly 50% of the wealth. The gap between the richest Americans and the rest of us has been increasing at a alarming rate. Good paying jobs are being shipped to other nations and millions of Americans employed in retail or service industries are being forced to work in miserable conditions just to scrape by. "The Big Squeeze" is about the sobering new realities facing an ever increasing number of American workers today. And for the most part what Steven Greenhouse has discovered is not a pretty picture.
It would appear that the American worker is under attack from all directions. Over the past two decades the U.S. has been inundated by millions of illegal aliens from places like Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti. The presence of these additional workers helps to depress blue collar wages in this country and places a strain on the public services we all have to pay for like schools and hospitals. Meanwhile, despite that fact that Americans are among the most productive workers in the world U.S. corporations have accelerated the outsourcing of good paying white collar jobs to places like Pakistan and India where workers are happy to work for a fraction of what his American counterpart makes. Greenhouse spotlights a number of instances where American workers were actually forced to suffer the indignity of training their foreign replacements or else risk losing their severance packages. This one hits especially close to home because my wife found herself in just this situation a few years ago.
As the grip of "The Big Squeeze" gets tighter and tighter, increasing numbers of Americans are forced to accept lower paying positions at outfits like Wal-Mart and Family Dollar. Steven Greenhouse hightlights a whole host of appalling working conditions too numerous to mention here that employees at these retailers are forced to endure. To me the most disturbing one was that in many smaller stores Wal-Mart employees working the overnight shift were actually locked in the store with no manager present and with absolutely no ability to get out in case of an emergency! How can they get away with that?? In the course of "The Big Squeeze" Greenhouse does give kudos to both the discount retailer Costco and the accounting firm Ernst and Young. He praises these companies for the value they place on their employees and cites them as models for other companies to follow. Greenhouse also believes that if the challenges facing American workers today are ever to be reversed then labor unions must play a major role, particularly with those doing lower-paying jobs like janitors and nursing home workers.
For most Americans, what Steven Greenhouse has to say in "The Big Squeeze" will really come as no surprise. The problems outlined in this book are myriad and the implications for most workers are quite frightening. Steven Greenhouse argues that America should take a second look at globalization and perhaps make some adjustments along the way. "The Big Squeeze" is a highly readable and informative book. Recommended!
 Easy read, with Liberal viewpoints July 10, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Book is easy to read. Author presents lots of examples of how our American middle class is being squeezed out, and the increasing differential between the poor and the rich, or upper class. His answers are dissapointing unless you are left wing liberal. He places blame on the awful big/greedy companies. Thinks the era of the 50's/60's was our best because we had big Unions to get benefits for workers. His answer now is basically for the government to contol most everything, and to return to the area of big Union representation. Never mind much of our American industry is crippled in the global economy due to the huge legacy costs to workers brought on by the Unions before we had to compete in a global economy. Yes, we have big problems today, but this is not the answer that will solve things.
A Compelling Account of Capitalism Run Amok! July 8, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Greenhouse's focus is to ask "Why, in the world's most affluent nation, are so many corporations intent on squeezing their workers dry?" Corporate profits, economic growth, and worker productivity have grown strongly, while pay has languished. Median income for non-elderly households in 2006 was $2,375 lower in real terms than six years prior. Income inequality now more closely resembles a 3rd-world country than an advanced nation - if it was the same as in 1979, the bottom 80% would receive $8,000 more in yearly income.
Almost one-fourth of the workforce earns less than $10/hour, and generally also lack benefits. Health costs now account for 16% of GDP, up from 5% in 1960. Meanwhile, the proportion covered by pensions (especially defined-benefit - eg. IBM) is declining, and large corporations (eg. United, Delta, and U.S. airlines, LTV and Bethlehem Steel) are defaulting on existing obligations.
Corporations flaunt overtime laws (eg. Wal-Mart, Target), and even fail to pay workers for all their time worked (H-P, Wal-Mart). Circuit City has twice replaced its longer-term workers earning higher salaries with new recruits at lower pay scales, while Microsoft, H-P, and others make the term "temporary" workers an oxymoron in a bid to deny benefits to large numbers of long-term employees.
Three decades ago employer-provided health insurance protected 70% of private-sector workers - now it is down to 55%, and their coverage is no longer as extensive. "Independent contractor" status is extensively exploited (saves Social Security, etc. payments) by eg. FedEx, and their use of the tactic is expanding (to FedEx LTL) despite adverse court rulings.
What fuels these actions? Greenhouse answers - takeover threats, deregulation (airlines, trucking), pressure from jobs lost through automation (also used to create an environment of close supervision), outsourcing, streamlining (eg. delayering, eliminating overheads), increasing costs of employer-funded health care (especially vs. non-coverage by Asian firms), and the "Wal-Mart" effect (low employee pay and benefits; forcing suppliers in the same direction).
There are few heroes in "The Big Squeeze." The most obvious is Costco - higher pay, benefits, sales, and profits/employee than Wal-Mart and Sam's Club, while much lower employee turnover and shrinkage. Greenhouse also suggests Las Vegas casinos (courtesy of strong employee unions) and Timberland shoes - however, both are exempt from strong commodity-like or foreign competition and thus not as impressive as Costco's achievements.
Don't economists agree that globalization to the max is good for us? Not all - Paul Samuelson, Nobel Prize winner in economics, says: "If you don't believe (offshoring) changes the average wages in America, then you believe in the truth fairy."
Unions used to be a strong offsetting force vs. management. However, just 7.5% of private sectors are now in unions - the lowest rate since 1901. Yet, 53% of non-management, non-union workers say they would like to join. What holds them back? Greenhouse suggests that one reason is the 2,000+ "union-avoidance" consultants 9Only 100 in the 1960s).
Greenhouse also suggests a need to improve organizing tactics, and offers the SEIU's approach to organizing janitors in Houston as a good example. They began by getting elected officials who were pension-fund overseers with large real-estate holdings to urge Houston building owners to press cleaning contractors to cooperate. The SEIU also promised not to begin bargaining until at least 55% of the employees' contractors were organized (no "unfair" disadvantages). Finally, they leveraged their strength by picketing opposing janitorial firms with work in other cities.
Greenhouse's Recommendations: Increased Social Security taxes (to ensure its stability), increased income taxes on those with higher incomes (benefited most from globalization), changing health care to a single-payer system (much less overhead), and working to restrain health care costs.
Reading "The Big Squeeze" sometimes hurts as one sees how people are taken advantage of. My only criticism is that Greenhouse does not lay enough blame at the feet of globalization.
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