The Big Squeeze:
Tough Times for the American Worker
by Steven Greenhouse
Knopf, 2008 345 pp $25.95
Love the Work, Hate the Job:
Why America’s Best Workers
Are Unhappier Than Ever
by David Kusnet
Wiley & Sons, 2008 270 pp $25.95
MANY LABOR scholars find the concept of a “postwar social contract” a little light in the socks, too intangible to be useful and too optimistic about the potential of capitalism to be desirable. Not Steve Greenhouse. In The Big Squeeze, the postwar social contract between workers and capitalists was simply about sharing the gains of productivity growth. Workers’ standard of living should go up, in “real” terms adjusted for inflation, exactly to the extent that productivity increases.
That’s the social contract. For Greenhouse it’s simply the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA...
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