Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor

"A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic." --The New York Times Book Review

We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation's landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power.

Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation's most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America's future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers' collective power can be--and is being--rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century.

Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead.

A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick

Author: Steven Greenhouse
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 08/06/2019
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.63lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.50w x 1.70d
ISBN: 9781101874431


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 03/01/2019 pg. 95
Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2019 pg. 66
Library Journal 07/01/2019 pg. 75
Booklist 06/01/2019 pg. 8
Publishers Weekly 09/02/2019
Choice 11/01/2019

About the Author
STEVEN GREENHOUSE was a reporter for The New York Times from 1983 to 2014 and covered labor and the workplace for nineteen years there. He also served as a business and economics reporter and a diplomatic and foreign correspondent. He has been honored with the Society of Professional Journalists Deadline Club award, a New York Press Club award, a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Reporting, and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism for his last book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.


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