What Workers Say: Decades of Struggle and How to Make Real Opportunity Now

by Roberta Iversen

What have jobs really been like for the past 40 years and what do the workers themselves say about them? In What Workers Say, Roberta Iversen shows that for employees in labor market industries—like manufacturing, construction, printing—as well as those in service-producing jobs, like clerical work, healthcare, food service, retail, and automotive—jobs are often discriminatory, are sometimes dangerous and exploitive, and seldom utilize people’s full range of capabilities. Most importantly, they fail to provide any real opportunity for advancement. What Workers Say takes its cue from Studs Terkel’s Working, as Iversen interviewed more than 1,200 workers to present stories about their labor market jobs since 1980. She puts a human face on the experiences of a broad range of workers indicating what their jobs were and are truly like. Iversen reveals how transformations in the political economy of waged work have shrunk or eliminated opportunity for workers, families, communities, and productivity. What Workers Say also offers an innovative proposal for compensated civil labor that could enable workers, their communities, labor market organizations, and the national infrastructure to actually flourish.

197 pages, Hardcover

Published June 17, 2022

Reviews

[cliff · Rating 4 out of 5]

short and subject-centered, an interesting proposal in 'compensated civil labor' that i am thinking a lot about and how it might fit in contemporary society or what changes need to occur for it to be a viable option for income... read this for a class and had a chance to speak with the author