Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor Audiobook (Free)

From the longtime New York Times labor correspondent, an in-depth take a look at working men and women in the us, the challenges they face, and exactly how they could be re-empowered

Within an era when corporate profits have soared while wages have flatlined, millions of Americans are trying to find methods to improve their lives, and they are often turning to labor unions and worker action, whether #RedforEd teachers’ strikes or the Battle for $15. Wage stagnation, low-wage function, and blighted blue-collar neighborhoods about Beaten Down, UPSET: DAYS GONE BY, Present, and Future of American Labor have become an all-too-common element of modern-day America, and behind these styles is certainly a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in employee power.

Steven Greenhouse sees this decline reflected in a few of the very most pressing problems facing our nation today, including income inequality, declining social mobility, the gender pay space, and the concentration of political power in the hands from the wealthy. He rebuts the often-stated look at that labor unions are outmoded–or even harmful–by recounting a few of labor’s victories, and the efforts of many of today’s state-of-the-art and successful employee groups. He displays us the present day labor scenery through the stories of a large number of American workers, from G.M. workers to Uber drivers, and we observe how unions historically possess empowered–and lifted–the most marginalized, including young women garment employees in New York in 1909, black sanitation employees in Memphis in 1968, and resort housekeepers today. Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways that workers’ collective power can be–and is usually being–rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century.