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Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
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About This Book
How essential workers' fight for better jobs during the pandemic revolutionized US labor politics Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, essential workers lashed out against low wages, long hours, and safety risks, attracting a level of support unseen in decades. This explosion of labor unrest seemed sudden to many. But Essential reveals that American workers had simmered in discontent long before their anger boiled over. Decades of austerity, sociologist Jamie K. McCallum shows, have left frontline workers vulnerable to employer abuse, lacking government protections, and increasingly furious. Through firsthand research conducted as the pandemic unfolded, McCallum traces the evolution of workers' militancy, showing how their struggles for safer workplaces, better pay and health care, and the right to unionize have benefitted all Americans and spurred a radical new phase of the labor movement. This is essential reading for understanding the past, present, and future of the working class.
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Reviews
"Interweaving deeply affecting personal stories with whip-smart structural analysis, this is a revealing diagnosis of America's ills and an invigorating call for change."
"McCallum's interviews with essential workers and their families — among them, a striking health care worker who won safety and wage concessions from her employer, and the daughter of a Walmart employee who died from COVID — form the book's empathetic core ..."
"Insightful, thought-provoking and peppered with helpful statistics and charts, Essential is both a clarion call to improve the lives of the working class and a primer on how their prosperity--or lack of it--is tied to the fate of all Americans."
"Timely follow-up to Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream..."
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