Of the two million waiters and waitresses working in America,” Batya Ungar-Sargon writes, “just over half own their homes.” My wife, who worked as a waitress for fifteen years, was in the lucky half. But we have watched many of her friends and colleagues struggle. Whether they work in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Ten years ago in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Nashville, Tennessee, HarperCollins shut down its last two remaining U.S. warehouses, after a series of such closings had left an untold number of workers unemployed. CEO Brian Murray offered these words of corporate right-think: “We have taken a . . . . Continue Reading »
Will we encourage an economy that works for its people? Or one in which people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere can work and do well, while cash payments from Washington pacify those left behind? Continue Reading »
In this issue, Oren Cass explodes the false dichotomy between cultural questions and economic ones(“The Problem with the Culture Problem”). Nowhere is the falsity more evident than in the question that will define the coming decade: Should we emphasize consumption or work? Our answer will have . . . . Continue Reading »
Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by james bloodworth atlantic, 288 pages, $19.95 What single image best sums up Amazon, which this year became, after Apple, the world’s second-ever trillion-dollar company? Is it the grinning face of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and very . . . . Continue Reading »
I met men for the first time when I was eleven years old. My father left me with them. He was an academic. I don’t know much about what he did for the University at Buffalo, and later Washington University in St. Louis. When he was at work, he wasn’t with us. But he wasn’t around much when he . . . . Continue Reading »
This historical study by an assistant professor at the Lutheran-affiliated Valparaiso University in Indiana focuses on one of the most fascinating chapters in American history: Chicago labor relations between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the 20th century. In those decades the city churned with industrial development, drawing ever greater numbers of native-born, Irish, northern European, African American, and southern and eastern European laborers.