Synopses & Reviews
"In this masterpiece of field research into the social processes that structure America's economy, Waldinger and Lichter unveil the most original and powerful theory ever advanced to explain how 'unskilled' immigrants have come to work at remarkably high rates while inner city blacks continue to languish. Like Wilson's
When Work Disappears and Massey and Denton's
American Apartheid,
How the Other Half Works will set the stage for a new era of poverty research. In its focus on Los Angeles as the quintessential suburban metropolis and as an exemplar of multi-ethnic America, it may also one day be seen as the founding text in a new LA School of Urban Sociology."and#151;Mitchell Duneier, author of
Sidewalk and
Slim's Table"How the Other Half Works is unreservedly one of the most important works on immigration and its relation to the social nature of work in contemporary America. Addressing several of the most vexing 'race' and labor issues of our time, it offers original and persuasive answers that challenge the prevailing wisdom of economists. Grounded in the best tradition of empirical sociology, the work is richly documented, vigorously argued, and clearly presented. With this landmark study, Roger Waldinger (working in tandem with co-author Michael Lichter) confirms his stature as the nation's leading sociologist of immigration."and#151;Orlando Patterson, author of The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis
"Based on detailed interviews with a sample of employers of low-wage labor in six Los Angeles industries, Waldinger and Lichter provide a vivid and informative account of social dynamics at the bottom of the labor market. The book builds and extends prior theories of immigration and labor and makes a compelling case for why a sociological standpoint is indispensable for the analysis of these processes."and#151;Alejandro Portes, co-author of Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America
"Waldinger and Lichter offer a lucid and penetrating look at the micro-social structure of hiring, firing, and earning in the modern, post-industrial economy. This book should be required reading for people who glibly use the term 'free market.'"and#151;Douglas S. Massey, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Synopsis
Years after the Great Recession, the economy is still weak, and an unprecedented number of workers have sunk into long spells of unemployment.
Cut Loose provides a vivid and moving account of the experiences of some of these men and women, through the example of a historically important group: autoworkers. Their well-paid jobs on the assembly lines built a strong middle class in the decades after World War II. But today, they find themselves beleaguered in a changed economy of greater inequality and risk, one that favors the well-educatedand#151;or well-connected.
Their declining fortunes in recent decades tell us something about what the white-collar workforce should expect to see in the years ahead, as job-killing technologies and the shipping of work overseas take away even more good jobs.and#160; Cut Loose offers a poignant look at how the long-term unemployed struggle in todayand#8217;s unfair economy to support their families, rebuild their lives, and overcome the shame and self-blame they deal with on a daily basis. It is also a call to actionand#151;a blueprint for a new kind of politics, one that offers a measure of grace in a society of ruthless advancement.
Synopsis
This highly accessible, engagingly written book exposes the underbelly of Californiaand#8217;s Silicon Valley, the most successful high-technology region in the world, in a vivid ethnographic study of Mexican immigrants employed in Silicon Valleyand#8217;s low-wage jobs. Christian Zlolniskiand#8217;s on-the-ground investigation demonstrates how global forces have incorporated these workers as an integral part of the economy through subcontracting and other flexible labor practices and explores how these labor practices have in turn affected working conditions and workersand#8217; daily lives. In Zlolniskiand#8217;s analysis, these immigrants do not emerge merely as victims of a harsh economy; despite the obstacles they face, they are transforming labor and community politics, infusing new blood into labor unions, and challenging exclusionary notions of civic and political membership. This richly textured and complex portrait of one community opens a window onto the future of Mexican and other Latino immigrants in the new U.S. economy.
Synopsis
"In a time when we have great need to understand Mexican immigrants and their place in U.S. society, Zlolniski offers a superior analysis of why and how advanced capitalist economies employ undocumented workers. After reading his book, we will never think again of immigration as something that exclusively comes from outside. The immigrants, too, have agency in his account, as he narrates and analyzes an important case of unionization, pointing to significant new possibilities in American life."and#151;Josiah Heyman, Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso
"Zlolniski makes a critical contribution to our understanding of the underside of advanced capitalism. He shows us its complexities: It is not only about misery, it is also about shaping subjective and political possibilities. If there is one concept that comes to mind it is the complexity of powerlessness."and#151;Saskia Sassen, author of Guests and Aliens
"This is a well-written and accessible ethnography of Mexican immigrants in Silicon Valley, the working poor who live in the shadow of affluence. Zlolniski presents a nuanced analysis of the thin line between formal and informal work, how families strategize and cope with the myriad challenges wrought by poverty, and the structural limitations to human agency. Zlolniski's perceptive ethnography illuminates hidden social worlds and struggles for dignity through collective action."and#151;Patricia Zavella, author of Women's Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley
"Stringing together multiple livelihoods, moving among wage labor, the informal economy, and political activism, the immigrants Zlolniski profiles refuse to submit completely to the structural cards stacked against them. In this important and carefully situated study, Zlolniski engages internationally relevant debates over the changing nature of work, the abandonment of employer liability, and the propensity for the media to construct myths that simplify and underestimate the hard work of immigrant families in Silicon Valley."and#151;David Griffith, author of Fishers at Work, Workers at Sea: a Puerto Rican Journey through Labor and Refuge
Synopsis
This concise overview of the labor movement in the United States focuses on why American workers have failed to develop the powerful unions that exist in other industrialized countries. Packed with valuable analysis and information,
Hard Work explores historical perspectives, examines social and political policies, and brings us inside today's unions, providing an excellent introduction to labor in America.
Hard Work begins with a comparison of the very different conditions that prevail for labor in the United States and in Europe. What emerges is a picture of an American labor movement forced to operate on terrain shaped by powerful corporations, a weak state, and an inhospitable judicial system. What also emerges is a picture of an American worker that has virtually disappeared from the American social imagination. Recently, however, the authors find that a new kind of unionismand#151;one that more closely resembles a social movementand#151;has begun to develop from the shell of the old labor movement. Looking at the cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas they point to new practices that are being developed by innovative unions to fight corporate domination, practices that may well signal a revival of unionism and the emergence of a new social imagination in the United States.
Synopsis
"Timely and smart, this book should be read by everyone interested in a possible revival of the American labor movement. The working week has gotten longer, more workers hold multiple jobs, gaps between the pay of workers and of CEOs have widened, and employers and their allies in government have attacked both unions and regulations to promote occupational health and safety. Fantasia and Voss demonstrate not only this bad news, but that new thinking and creative responses have made some headway too."and#151;Craig Calhoun, President, Social Science Research Council
"Fantasia and Voss make an important and persuasive argument for how and why U.S. employment and labor policies set the standard for pushing down wages, labor rights, and working conditions throughout the world. They put forward an enormous challenge to the U.S. labor movement, but one that needs to be met, not just for workers and unions in the U.S., but for their labor and community allies around the globe."and#151;Kate Bronfenbrenner, Director of Labor Education Research, Cornell University
"Fantasia and Vossand#8217;s long-awaited book offers a fresh and provocative perspective on the possibilities and limits of labor union revitalization in the U.S. They persuasively argue that the ascent of neoliberalism is both cause and consequence of organized laborand#8217;s decline, and contribute as well to the long-standing debate over American exceptionalism in the context of the new century. Hard Work is an exceptionally thoughtful overview of laborand#8217;s historical development and current dilemmas."and#151;Ruth Milkman, Director, UC Institute for Labor and Employment
Synopsis
This study exposes the human side of the decline of the U.S. auto industry, tracing the experiences of two key groups of General Motors workers: those who took a cash buyout and left the factory, and those who remained and felt the effects of new technology and other workplace changes. Milkman's extensive interviews and surveys of workers from the Linden, New Jersey, GM plant reveal their profound hatred for the factory regimeand#151;a longstanding discontent made worse by the decline of the auto workers' union in the 1980s. One of the leading social historians of the auto industry, Ruth Milkman moves between changes in the wider industry and those in the Linden plant, bringing both a workers' perspective and a historical perspective to the study.
Milkman finds that, contrary to the assumption in much of the literature on deindustrialization, the Linden buyout-takers express no nostalgia for the high-paying manufacturing jobs they left behind. Given the chance to make a new start in the late 1980s, they were eager to leave the plant with its authoritarian, prison-like conditions, and few have any regrets about their decision five years later. Despite the fact that the factory was retooled for robotics and that the management hoped to introduce a new participatory system of industrial relations, workers who remained express much less satisfaction with their lives and jobs.
Milkman is adamant about allowing the workers to speak for themselves, and their hopes, frustrations, and insights add fresh and powerful perspectives to a debate that is often carried out over the heads of those whose lives are most affected by changes in the industry.
Synopsis
"A profound exploration into the decline of factory labor in the U.S. . . . Hers is one of those rare books that brilliantly illuminates current transformations in the organization of work and work lives."and#151;Fred Block, author of
Postindustrial Possibilities"Part ethnography and part contemporary labor history, Milkman's wonderful book will be required reading for anyone concerned with the transformation American industry has undergone in the past twenty years and what this transformation has meant for American workers."and#151;David Brody, author of Workers in Industrial America
"Behind all of the statistics on downsizing, the shrinking of our industrial base, and the folly of short-sighted management is the human drama of working women and men and their unions, struggling for dignity, fairness, and security. In Farewell to the Factory, Ruth Milkman tells us the stories of workers in a New Jersey auto plant. Milkman's scholarship makes a valuable contribution to the national conversation on restoring the American Dream for working families."and#151;John J. Sweeney, President, AFL-CIO
"A fascinating case study of deindustrialization and restructuring by one of the leading social historians of the auto industry. The book is a great read and should be widely adopted in the classroom."and#151;Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley
"Milkman's impressive study probes the contemporary meaning of work, freedom and dignity in a fashion both sociologically rigorous and culturally evocative. Avoiding liberal nostalgia over the demise of industial America, Milkman deploys a magnificantly textured set of interviews to demonstrate that auto workers hated the chronic stress and humiliation of factory work even as they clung to its high pay and good benefits."and#151;Nelson Lichtenstein, author of The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor
Synopsis
The description of Africa as a continent in perpetual crisis, ubiquitous in the popular media and in policy and development circles, is at once obvious and obfuscating. This collection by leading ethnographers moves beyond the rhetoric of African crisis to theorize people's everyday practices under volatile conditions not of their own making. From Ghanaian hiplife music to the U.S. "diversity lottery" in Togo, from politicos in Côte d'Ivoire to squatters in South Africa, the essays in
Hard Work, Hard Times uncover the imaginative ways in which African subjects make and remake themselves and their worlds, and thus make do, get by, get over, and sometimes thrive.
Contributors: Beth A. Buggenhagen, Stephen Jackson, Anne-Maria Makhulu, Mike McGovern, Charles Piot , Dorothea E. Schulz, and Jesse Weaver Shipley
Synopsis
Social science has given us powerful and compelling studies of postcolonial failure, but it has not adequately recognized the poetics of survival that animates African being in hard times. This book provides a solid analysis of what these hard times are and the challenges they present, but it also foregrounds the poetic and imaginative ways in which African subjects seek a future outside the prison house of late capitalism.”Simon Gikandi, from the foreword
The contemporary refiguring of state and international structures has proliferated and amplified the social ecologies we used to call margins, and the myriad local forms of innovation, perseverance, and entropy that have emerged under these conditions place new demands on our attentiveness as ethnographers. In their finely detailed attention to marginal spaces across the African continent and beyond, the essays in this volume engage in the essential work of connecting these new historical moments with the new theories needed for comprehending them.”Jane I. Guyer, author of Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa
Synopsis
How the Other Half Works solves the riddle of America's contemporary immigration puzzle: why an increasingly high-tech society has use for so many immigrants who lack the basic skills that today's economy seems to demand. In clear and engaging style, Waldinger and Lichter isolate the key factors that explain the presence of unskilled immigrants in our midst. Focusing on Los Angeles, the capital of today's immigrant America, this hard-hitting book elucidates the other side of the new economy, showing that hiring is finding not so much "one's own kind" but rather the "right kind" to fit the demeaning, but indispensable, jobs many American workers disdain.
Synopsis
"I got my first job working in a toy store when I was 41 years old." So begins sociologist Christine Williams's description of her stint as a low-wage worker at two national toy store chains: one upscale shop and one big box outlet. In this provocative, perceptive, and lively book, studded with rich observations from the shop floor, Williams chronicles her experiences as a cashier, salesperson, and stocker and provides broad-ranging, often startling, insights into the social impact of shopping for toys. Taking a new look at what selling and buying for kids are all about, she illuminates the politics of how we shop, exposes the realities of low-wage retail work, and discovers how class, race, and gender manifest and reproduce themselves in our shopping-mall culture.
Despite their differences, Williams finds that both toy stores perpetuate social inequality in a variety of ways. She observes that workers are often assigned to different tasks and functions on the basis of gender and race; that racial dynamics between black staff and white customers can play out in complex and intense ways; that unions can't protect workers from harassment from supervisors or demeaning customers even in the upscale toy store. And she discovers how lessons that adults teach to children about shopping can legitimize economic and social hierarchies. In the end, however, Inside Toyland is not an anticonsumer diatribe. Williams discusses specific changes in labor law and in the organization of the retail industry that can better promote social justice.
Synopsis
"Why do white women shoppers more often refuse to check their bags at the counter than African American or Latina women shoppers do? Why do male shoppers act more annoyed at having to be in the store than their female counterparts? Based on her experiences working in two toy stores, Christine Williams offers a cornucopia of illuminating observations. By focusing on the various ways gender, race and class influence how we shop and sell, she exposes the concept and ideal of consumer citizenship. In this, Williams give us an important idea and an original angle of vision."Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of
The Commercialization of Intimate Life, and editor (with Barbara Ehrenreich) of
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy"In this brilliant book Williams lays bare the social complexities of shopping for toys in America. She describes how shopping and working in toy stores are shaped by race, class and gender, and how children are taught how to consume. This is sociology at its best-laying bare the intricate nature of everyday life, showing us how the world can be different and better, all the while documenting the human drama that swirls around us. This book will change the way you shop, and the way you think about consumerism, inequality and the nature of 21st century American life."Mary C. Waters, author of Ethnic Options: Choosing Ethnic Identities in America
"Williams doesn't just talk about consumption. She goes out and gets herself tough jobs selling toys, and comes back to tell the rest of us what selling and buying for kids are all about. Readers who care little about social scientific treatments of consumption will nevertheless learn from her lively account. Specialists will rapidly adopt her stories, observations, and arguments."Viviana Zelizer, author of The Purchase of Intimacy
"Christine Williams has really gotten inside the big box selling machines of our day to reveal for all of us the strange, perverse logic of work, authority and sales in a retail industry driven by ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies. Read this book and you'll never buy another toy without thinking about the men and women who put it on the shelf!"Nelson Lichtenstein, editor of Wal-Mart: the Face of 21st Century Capitalism
Synopsis
"
Cut Loose is the most powerful and poignant study of the effects of prolonged joblessness in todayand#8217;s economy that I have read. Chen uses his skills as an interviewer to elicit moving responses from laid-off autoworkers on the impact of long unemployment spells on their finances, family life, and physical and mental health. Readers of this blockbuster book will understand why the changing economy, with its increasing inequality, puts families who once had well-paid jobs on the assembly line at risk. Chenand#8217;s illuminating and accessible study, which serves as a call to action, is a must-read."and#151;William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University
"Cut Loose is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the costs of globalization on the ground and the efficacy of social policy for protecting citizens caught in the grip of profound economic change."and#151;Katherine Newman, co-author of Learning to Labor in the 21st Century
About the Author
Roger Waldinger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Post-industrial New York (1996), which won the Robert Park Award of the American Sociological Association, editor of Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America (California, 2001), and author of several other publications. Michael I. Lichter is Assistant Professor of Sociology, State University of New York at Buffalo.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Terms used in this book
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: What Empoyers Want
Chapter 3: Doing the Job: Skills and the Social Organization of Work
Chapter 4: The Language of Work
Chapter 5: Network, Bureaucracy, Exclusion
Chapter 6: Ethnic Networks and Social Closure
Chapter 7: Bringing the Boss Back In: Selection and Hiring Decisions
Chapter 8: Whom Employers Want
Chapter 9: Us and them
Chapter 10: Diversity and Conflict
Chapter 11: Black/Immigrant Competition
Chapter 12: How the other half works
Appendix: the Local and economic context
The six industries
Conclusions