Author: Marc Doussard
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816685657
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Critics on the left and the right typically agree that globalization, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the expansion of the service sector have led to income inequality and rising numbers of low-paying jobs with poor working conditions. In Degraded Work, Marc Doussard demonstrates that this decline in wages and working conditions is anything but the unavoidable result of competitive economic forces. Rather, he makes the case that service sector and other local-serving employers have boosted profit with innovative practices to exploit workers, demeaning their jobs in new ways—denying safety equipment, fining workers for taking scheduled breaks, requiring unpaid overtime—that go far beyond wage cuts. Doussard asserts that the degradation of service work is a choice rather than an inevitability, and he outlines concrete steps that can be taken to help establish a fairer postindustrial labor market. Drawing on fieldwork in Chicago, Degraded Work examines changes in two industries in which inferior job quality is assumed to be intrinsic: residential construction and food retail. In both cases, Doussard shows how employers degraded working conditions as part of a successful and intricate strategy to increase profits. Arguing that a growing service sector does not have to mean growing inequality, Doussard proposes creative policy and organizing opportunities that workers and advocates can use to improve job quality despite the overwhelming barriers to national political action.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 3978
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Author: Jason Resnikoff
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053214
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
Labor's End traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, Labor's End challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace.
Author: Edward Granter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317157028
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Critical Social Theory and the End of Work examines the development and sociological significance of the idea that work is being eliminated through the use of advanced production technology. Granter’s engagement with the work of key American and European figures such as Marx, Marcuse, Gorz, Habermas and Negri, focuses his arguments for the abolition of labour as a response to the current socio-historical changes affecting our work ethic and consumer ideology. By combining history of ideas with social theory, this book considers how the 'end of work' thesis has developed and has been critically implemented in the analysis of modern society. This book will appeal to scholars of sociology, history of ideas, social and cultural theory as well as those working in the fields of critical management and sociology of work.
Author: David R. Gaskell
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1560329920
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 763
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Book Description
"The CD contains data and descriptive material for making detailed thermodynamic calculations involving materials processing"--Preface.
Author: Amal Amireh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136712607
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
This book studies the representations of working-class women in canonical and popular American fiction between 1820 and 1870. These representations have been invisible in nineteenth century American literary and cultural studies due to the general view that antebellum writers did not engage with their society's economic and social relaities. Against this view and to highlight the cultural importance of working-class women, this study argues that, in responding to industrialization, middle class writers such as Melville, Hawthorne, Fern, Davies, and Phelps used the figures of the factory worker and the seamstress to express their anxieties about unstable gender and class identitites. These fictional representations were influenced by, and contributed to, an important but understudied cultural debate about wage labor, working women, and class.
Author: Kalasia S. Ojeh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100385737X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
An Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois examines the historical contributions to social science and the continuing relevance of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois in an accessible manner. The first volume of its kind, it places the theories of Du Bois in context, showing how the socio‐racial environment in which he grew up and came of age influenced the development of his thought. In addition to covering well‐known concepts such as double consciousness, the veil, and religious fatalism, the authors discuss Du Bois’ uncoined theories emanating from the Atlanta University Studies, as well as his contributions to the development of Black sociology and research methodology. A groundbreaking contextualization and summary of the importance of Du Bois’ work to sociology and sociological theory, this book constitutes a much‐needed resource for scholars and students seeking to understand this scholar’s significance to the social sciences beyond the elementary level.
Author: Chandran Kukathas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415229982
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Author: Jon Cruddas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509540806
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
Does work give our lives purpose, meaning and status? Or is it a tedious necessity that will soon be abolished by automation, leaving humans free to enjoy a life of leisure and basic income? In this erudite and highly readable book, Jon Cruddas MP argues that it is imperative that the Left rejects the siren call of technological determinism and roots it politics firmly in the workplace. Drawing from his experience of his own Dagenham and Rainham constituency, he examines the history of Marxist and social democratic thinking about work in order to critique the fatalism of both Blairism and radical left techno-utopianism, which, he contends, have more in common than either would like to admit. He argues that, especially in the context of COVID-19, socialists must embrace an ethical socialist politics based on the dignity and agency of the labour interest. This timely book is a brilliant intervention in the highly contentious debate on the future of work, as well as an ambitious account of how the left must rediscover its animating purpose or risk irrelevance.
Author: Illinois Farmers' Institute
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 510
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