Labor Economics

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today, most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy - particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America's cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization.

Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price, and Profit by Karl Marx is a compelling introduction to Marxist economic theory, combining two of his most influential works. In Wage-Labour and Capital, Marx explores the relationship between labor and capital, illuminating how the commodification of labor under capitalism generates profit for capitalists at the expense of workers. In Value, Price, and Profit, Marx delves deeper into the mechanisms of capitalist economies, discussing the labor theory of value, the creation of surplus value, and the inherent exploitation of wage labor.

Participating in the economy is a part of everyday life; yet much of what is commonly accepted as fact is wrong. Keynesian schoolteachers and the liberal media have filled the world with politically correct errors that myth-busting professor Robert Murphy sets straight. Murphy explains hot topics like outsourcing (why it's good for Americans) and zoning restrictions (why they're not). Just like the other books in the P.I.G. series, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism pulls no punches.

Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s.

The shift toward automation is about to create a tsunami of unemployment. Not in the distant future - now. One recent estimate predicts 13 million American workers will lose their jobs within the next seven years - jobs that won't be replaced. In a future marked by restlessness and chronic unemployment, what will happen to American society? In The War on Normal People, Andrew Yang paints a dire portrait of the American economy. Rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation software are making millions of Americans' livelihoods irrelevant.

Want to recruit more members and contractors? Learn the vital skills and nuts and bolts you need to produce explosive growth for your union's future. Bigger Labor is the ultimate resource for building a more powerful Labor movement. Bigger Labor examines the components of the current construction organizing model and offers a more innovative approach. This book has enabled organizers to take back their industry, and it will show you the way too. You will discover how to Organize contractors. Recruit members. Maximize your time. Develop better listening skills.

In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano reveal the worst perpetrators screwing America's high-skilled workers, how and why they're doing it - and what we must do to stop them. In this audiobook, they will name names and expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class while aiding and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor.

For decades, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, booming banks, rising house prices, and cheap consumer goods propped up living standards in the rich world. Thirty years of rocketing debt and financial wizardry had masked the deep underlying fragility of finance-led growth, and in 2008 we were forced to pay up.

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members.

Soon after the birth of Mickey Mouse, one animator raised the Disney Studio far beyond Walt's expectations. That animator also led a union war that almost destroyed it. Art Babbitt animated for the Disney studio throughout the 1930s and through 1941, years in which he and Walt were jointly driven to elevate animation as an art form, up through Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia.

In this book, Arun Sundararajan, an expert on the sharing economy, explains the transition to what he describes as "crowd-based capitalism" - a new way of organizing economic activity that may supplant the traditional corporate-centered model. As peer-to-peer commercial exchange blurs the lines between the personal and the professional, how will the economy, government regulation, what it means to have a job, and our social fabric be affected?

Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.

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.

As a care-leaver who has experienced homelessness, award-winning investigative journalist Daniel Lavelle has spent his life navigating social services that are not fit for purpose and leave many vulnerable people slipping through the cracks. For though the right to adequate housing is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the reality is another, much grimmer, story.

A generation of Americans came of age boycotting grapes, swept up in a movement that vanquished California's most powerful industry and accomplished the unthinkable: dignity and contracts for farm workers. Four decades later, Cesar Chavez's likeness graces postage stamps, and dozens of schools and streets have been renamed in his honor. But the real story of Chavez's farm workers' movement - both its historic triumphs and its tragic disintegration - has remained buried beneath the hagiography.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

Working at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, was considered a good job. It was the kind of industrial manufacturing job that allowed blue-collar workers to thrive in the latter half of the 20th century—that allowed them to buy their own home, and maybe a small boat for the lake. But it was also the kind of job that exposed you to toxic chemicals and offered little to no protection from them, either in the way of protective gear or adequate ventilation. Eventually, it was a job that gave you bladder cancer.

With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, our society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work. Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations.

On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. A wave of mass hysteria swept the country, leading to a sensational trial that culminated in four controversial executions and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover. Historian James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life an epic 20-year struggle for the eight-hour workday.

From the marketing consultant down the street to the home based "mompreneur," they are America's new economic icons: the job-hopping, tech-savvy, fulfillment-seeking, independent workers. This entertaining and provocative account of the new frontier - by Fast Company contributor Pink - will change your thinking...and maybe even change your life.