San Antonio College Library

"Americans are overworked. After declining for a century through hard-fought labor movement victories, average annual work hours increased approximately 8 percent for all working adults from 1979 to 2016. In Worked Over, sociologist Jamie McCallum reveals how the battle over time on the job has been central to conflicts over capitalism from the beginning, how overwork is at the heart of the inequities and injustices in America's economy today, and...

"The full-time job is disappearing--is landing the right gig the new American Dream? One in three American workers is now a freelancer. This "gig economy"--One that provides neither the guarantee of steady hours nor benefits--emerged out of the digital era and has revolutionized the way we do business. High-profile tech start-ups such as Uber and Airbnb are constantly making headlines for the disruption they cause to the industries they overturn....

"In 2007, Saket Soni received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast "man camps," surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to 20,000...

In the 1950s, manufacturing generated nearly 30 percent of U.S. income. Over the past fifty-five years, that share has gradually declined to less than 12 percent. At the same time, real estate, finance, and Wall Street trading have grown. While manufacturing's share of the U.S. economy shrinks, it expands in countries such as China and Germany that have a strong industrial policy. Meanwhile Americans are only vaguely aware of the many consequences...

"Most Americans think that our country has done quite a lot to protect women and ensure gender equity in the workplace. After all, we have banned discrimination against women, required equal pay for equal work, and adopted family-leave legislation. But the fact is that we have a two-tiered system, where some working women have a full panoply of rights while others have few or none at all. We allow blatant discrimination by small employers. Domestic...

The United States labor movement can credit - or blamepolicies and regulations created during World War II for its current status. Focusing on the War Labor Board's treatment of arbitration, strikes, the scope of bargaining, and the contentious issue of union security, James Atleson shows how wartime necessities and language have carried over into a very different postwar world, affecting not only relations between unions and management but those...

"Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives--including from before birth to after death--in the American domestic slave trades. Covering the full "life cycle" (including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior...

Challenges and alters the way we view the economic background of today's world, and examines how changes will affect the future.

"In the great boom of the 1990s, top management's compensation soared, but the wages of most Americans barely grew at all. This wage stagnation has baffled experts, but in The new ruthless economy, Simon Head points to information technology as the prime cause of this growing wage disparity"--Jacket.