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

At the Altar of the Bottom Line: The Degradation of Work in the 21st Century, by Tom Juravich, professor of labor studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, follows a long line of sociological research and involvement in the labor movement. His approach combines historical and sociological analysis as contexts exemplified by intimate interviews dissecting contemporary working conditions encountered by workers in North America. An unusual aspect of his interest in the plight of modern-day workers is that of a songwriter and singer. Juravich was a founding member of Local 1000 of the American Federation of Musicians. Included with this book is a CD that contains excerpts of interviews Juravich recorded, as well as four original songs he wrote and performed.

Based on extensive interviews with eighty-five workers carried out over six years in four different industries, Juravich, a sociologist, combines oral history with his social and historic interpretation of today's American workplace. Its four chapters focus on four different types of workplaces to uncover specific conditions that underlie a common corporate cultural disposition toward its workers that increasingly permeates companies in the U.S. The book includes two auxiliary sections, "Conclusion" and "Appendix: On Workplace Ethnography," and concludes with one-and-a-half pages of notes, an extensive list of references that runs for sixteen pages, and twelve pages of interviewee photographs by Paul Shoul.

In the first chapter, on customer service, Juravich deconstructs the Verizon model in Andover, Massachusetts, to show how the call center industry as a whole follows the same model, where reps are overwhelmed by the required pace of work and job stress. The second chapter's focus on exploitation, Juravich's descriptions of work in New Bedford fish houses are reminiscent of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. In New Bedford, undocumented Mayan Guatemalans face political and economic pressures as they try to maintain their jobs in the fish-processing industry. In the hypocrisy of our time, they face inhumane anti-immigrant abuses exemplified by brutal immigration raids by U.S. agents. Chapter 3 examines work exhaustion. Boston Medical Center is a hospital where consolidation has brought the altar of the bottom line to fundamentally alter patient care delivery while more profitable elective surgery takes place nonstop. The final chapter details how the Jones Beloit plant in Dalton, Massachusetts, closed without warning on August 20, 1998. Three hundred workers were abruptly told to leave, completely abandoned after years of employment. As in the other chapters, Juravich does a masterful job setting the historical stage and takes us step-by-step through the industrial philosophies of the day that eventually led to the closing.

This book is not about ethnography, but it is about history and sociology. Juravich deftly combines historical events for each chapter with sociological perspectives and concepts as contexts for the conditions and situations the workers express in their oral histories. Oral history is the core of his book and guides the narrative. He succeeds in keeping the script a people's history. The text will inform not only academics but also any intelligent reader who wants to understand one man's interpretation of our work society as consequential, as flowing from past to present. He abhors statistics as a kind of sociologist's plague and rather surrounds the approximately two hundred quotes from the oral histories with history and inference, keeping the interviewee as the expert.

Missing is any mention of the specific questions he asked. It would have been fascinating to see how he led the conversation and how one question led to the next. He presents no new theories, but the book shines as it focuses on subjects important to the informant and on Juravich's explanation of the history and the sociology behind the informant's problems and concerns.

Juravich avoids depicting the oral histories as mere data cache...