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.
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 ... [McCallum] meticulously explains how we got here ... An interesting idea.
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... A thoughtful consideration of work and the workaday world that brings the class struggle to the fore.
