PositiveBookforumUsing the tech giant as a focal point allows MacGillis to show that this state of affairs was a choice, not an inevitability. It’s not that \'good jobs left\'; the transformation of work was engineered. Fulfillment meticulously documents how that process plays out, with the fate of millions haggled over by a handful of people in tucked-away conference rooms.
Jane McAlevey
PositiveBookForumAt times, the labor leader Jane McAlevey’s latest book, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy, reads like an army field manual, with the author as drill instructor ... In McAlevey’s view, labor organizing is all-consuming, demanding, and dangerous ... A Collective Bargain offers an introduction to the world of unions and their enemies, disseminating the how-tos of organizing to those people who lack experience in, for example, running supermajority strikes—which is to say, most people. McAlevey’s writing is an attempt to circulate organizers’ skills, breathing life into the long-quiescent labor movement.
Bernice Yeung
RaveBookforumEven while describing experiences many publications might package as trauma porn, Yeung never lets larger structures out of sight: The story here is not about individual pathologies but the power differentials that enable abusers to act on their impulses and get away with it ... As pundits opine about #MeToo in the pages of every major newspaper, Yeung does something better: Rather than give her own view on how to solve the scourge of sexual violence, she shows us what these workers themselves have been doing to address it ... The risks are too high for most undocumented, low-wage workers. And even if they do speak, who will listen? This is why Yeung’s framing is so critical: What helps the women in this book is not speech alone, cathartic as it may be. It is the organizers around them, often low-wage immigrant workers themselves, who ensure that survivors can speak without fear—and that others will hear them ... In a Day’s Work shows us how to stamp out sexual violence.
Heike Geissler, Trans. by Katy Derbyshire
PositiveThe Nation...a portrait of self-estrangement, instability, and loneliness on the modern-day assembly line ... The focus on this tension—the clash between a worker’s individuality and the brute facts of life in the warehouse—is what drives the book. While several journalists have gone undercover at the e-commerce giant’s warehouses to expose its labor practices, Geissler’s account is about a person just trying to make ends meet. Seasonal Associate is also far more literary in style, as she turns to the likes of Gertrude Stein, Emil Cioran, and Mónica de la Torre to make sense of the tedium ... As with the other accounts, Geissler exposes many of the horrors of the job, but what her book reveals, above all else, is how working in a place like Amazon erodes one’s sense of self ... Given Amazon’s half-million employees worldwide, and with no signs of its growth slowing down ... We need all the material we can get to fight back. Geissler offers ammunition—and literature, too.
