Catherwood LibraryILR School

A new book by Steven Greenhouse charges that American businesses have for years broken the law to keep labor costs down, contributing to the quickening erosion of the nation's middle class. Greenhouse cites a wide range of examples of companies harassing workers to keep them from organizing, compromising safety standards, and falsifying time sheets, all with uncommon tenacity and guile. Greenhouse writes that while many of these violations of workers rights occur in blue-collar and retail industries, an alarming number are going on in white-collar companies as well, with businesses hiring so-called "perma-temp" workers who are hired as temps and kept on the job permanently without the health care or retirement benefits they're required to give full-time workers. The result, says Greenhouse, is a blurring of the traditional line between the middle and working classes, and a shrinking of the number of Americans receiving proper pay and benefits. In his review, Madrick places Greenouse's book within the context of the upcoming presidential election, stating that the only chance for worker rights to begin to be restored would come with a Democratic victory in November.