The Betrayal of Work

Publisher's description: An astonishing 35 million Americans work full time but do not make a living. They are nursing home workers, poultry processors, pharmacy assistants, ambulance drivers, child care workers, data entry keyers, janitors. Indeed, one in four American workers lives in or near poverty. Despite the great wealth of the United States, these low-wage workers have lower living standards than do similar workers in most other industrial nations, and over the last twenty years their wages have declined. For several years, Beth Shulman traveled across the country talking to low-wage workers, and in The Betrayal of Work she tells the moving stories of people like Sara, a single mother of three who earns $6.10 an hour, with no sick pay or vacation pay, after working almost a decade at a nursing home in Alabama. For Sara and others like her, writes Shulman, the basic promise of American society--if you work hard, you and your family can make a decent living--has been broken. Americans do seem to be paying renewed attention to low-wage work--as interest in Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed makes clear--attention that is sure to increase as Congress begins debate over the extension of welfare reform next year. The Betrayal of Work moves the conversation forward, providing the fullest portrait of America's working poor, and dispelling a number of myths along the way: that lower unemployment has meant better living conditions for the poor; that making bad jobs into good jobs requires impossibly difficult measures; that low-wage work is ubiquitously low-skill work. With a far-reaching argument about what we must do to restore fairness to the American economic order, The Betrayal of Work is sure to be one of the most talked-about public policy books of the year.