The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse Knopf, 2008, 345 pp., $25.95 Love the Work, Hate the Job: Why America’s Best Workers Are Unhappier Than Ever by David Kusnet Wiley & Sons, 2008, 270 pp., …
John Hoerr’s Harry, Tom, and Father Rice
Jack Metzgar’s Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered, an excerpt from which appears below, is a combination of memoir, labor history, and meditation on the importance of unions in transforming the lives of industrial workers in the 1950s. It is the story …
More baloney is written and spoken around “employee involvement” (EI) than any other issue in American business. But it’s a mistake to dismiss this movement as “just baloney.” Twenty years of experimentation and more than a decade of careful academic …
At a recent educational conference of the Machinists union (IAM), I asked several groups of local officers and staff how many of their locals were involved in “employee involvement” (EI) or “labor-management cooperation” (LMC) programs. An overwhelming majority said they …
They had a merry Christmas in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. For the first time in three years, the holiday passed without a steel mill being shut down. The unemployment rate was about 14 percent, nearly double the national average but well below …
Steel in the United States is a “mature” industry, and our political-economic discourse, like other aspects of American culture, is particularly ill-equipped to deal with maturity and aging. Steel’s best years are behind it. It has not been “profitable” by …
