At the Altar of the Bottom Line: The Degradation of Work in the 21st Century (review)

With the jobless recovery dragging on it is sometimes hard to remember that millions of people do work for a living, many of them in increasingly stressful circumstances. Tom Juravich, professor of labor studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, lays bare the degradation of work, utilizing indepth interviews with workers at a Verizon call center, undocumented Guatemalan workers at fish-processing plants in New Bedford, Massachusetts, operating-room nurses at Boston Medical Center, and workers who once made machinery for the paper industry at the Jones Beloit plant in Dalton, Massachusetts. About these workplaces, Juravich writes:

In each of the four sites, employers and the industries they were part of adapted to growing competition, the globalization of production, and a crisis in profitmaking by expanding through mergers and acquisitions. Such consolidation, driven by the search for increased profits, fundamentally altered the way work was done in the four sites. Each employer in a different way turned up the heat on its workers, leaving some workers feeling stressed and others exhausted, exploiting some and abandoning others.

(pp. 9-10)

Coming up on the centennial of one of the United States' most famous strikes, the walkout of some 23,000 mostly women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Juravich notes that in 1912 workers wanted bread—sustenance to feed their families—and they "wanted roses: dignity and self-respect on the job . . . they wanted to have a life (p. 39). The Verizon call center workers he interviewed labor in the shadows of Lawrence. While the company pays decent wages, workers have "little control of work, little flexibility in work schedules, and little basic dignity on the job." As one worker told him: "They pay me well to treat me bad" (pp. 39-40).

Guatemalan fish-processing workers, on the other hand, face low wages and extremely difficult working conditions and harsh treatment. The plants, Juravich suggests, are "not all that different from the packinghouses Upton Sinclair wrote of almost one hundred years ago." (p. 57). I swore off hamburgers for awhile after reading The Jungle, and I did not eat fish for several days after reading this section of At the Altar of the Bottom Line. That Juravich developed the trust required for these workers—many undocumented who speak little English—to give him a glimpse into their lives is testimony to his research skills. These are not drive-by, superficial looks at the workplace.

The chapter that frightened me most examined nursing work at a large hospital in Boston. Management had in place a system of work organization that seems better-suited for stamping out Henry Ford's Model Ts than caring for living bodies. A nurse told Juravich what it was like to work in a corporatized hospital:

The more operations you can do in one day, the more money you can make. It's a rush. They want you to be thorough, and they want you to be committed to the patient, and be culturally sensitive, and be aware of all the ramifications of what it means to give anesthesia, what it means to do tonsils on a four-year old baby, but hurry as fast as you possibly can to do it.

(p. 120)

This book should be required reading at every statehouse in the nation. If these stories do not move legislatures to overhaul how we work, then I'm not sure what will. As an added bonus, while they do their assigned reading, our students—or leaders—can listen to a CD with four songs written and performed by Juravich, as well as audio excerpts from his interviews.