Big Squeeze: Tough Times For American Work - 08 edition

Steven Greenhouse has been the labor and workplace correspondent for the New York Times since 1995.

Chapter One Worked Over and Overworked In his job at a Wal-Mart in Texas, Mike Michell was responsible for catching shoplifters, and he was good at it, too, catching 180 in one two-year period. But one afternoon things went wildly awry when he chased a thiefa woman using stolen checksinto the parking lot. She jumped into her car, and her accomplice gunned the accelerator, slamming the car into Michell and sending him to the hospital with a broken kneecap, a badly torn shoulder, and two herniated disks. Michell was so devoted to Wal-Mart that he somehow returned to work the next day, but a few weeks later he told his boss that he needed surgery on his knee. He was fired soon afterward, apparently as part of a strategy to dismiss workers whose injuries run up Wal-Mart's workers' comp bills. Immediately after serving in the army, Dawn Eubanks took a seven-dollar-an-hour job at a call center in Florida. Some days she was told to clock in just two or three hours, and some days she was not allowed to clock in during her whole eight-hour shift. The call center's managers warned the workers that if they went home, even though they weren't allowed to clock in, they would be viewed as having quit. Twenty-eight-year-old John Arnold works in the same Caterpillar factory in Illinois as his father, but under the plant's two-tier contract, the maximum he can ever earn is14.90 an hour, far less than the25 earned by his father. Caterpillar, long a symbol of America's industrial might, insists that it needs a lower wage tier to remain competitive. ''A few people I work with are living at home with their parents,'' Arnold said. ''Some are even on food stamps.'' At a Koch Foods poultry plant in Tennessee, the managers were so intent on keeping the line running all out that Antonia Lopez Paz and the other workers who carved off chicken tenders were ordered not to go to the bathroom except during their lunch and coffee breaks. When one desperate woman asked permission to go, her supervisor took off his hard hat and said, ''You can go to the bathroom in this.'' Some women ended up soiling themselves. Don Jensen anticipated a relaxing life of golf after retiring from his human resources post with Lucent Technologies in New Jersey, where he was in charge of recruiting graduates from Stanford, Cornell, MIT, and other top universities. But when Lucent increased its retirees' health insurance premiums to8,280 a year, up from180, Jensen was forced to abandon his retirement. He took a job as a ten-dollar-an-hour bank teller. As part of her software company's last-lap sprint to get new products out the door, Myra Bronstein sometimes had to work twenty-four hours straight testing for bugs. She felt great loyalty to the Seattle-area company because its executives had repeatedly promised, ''As long as we're in business, you have a job.'' But one Friday morning the company suddenly fired Bronstein and seventeen other quality assurance engineers. The engineers were told that if they wanted to receive severance pay, they had to agree to spend the next month training the workers from India who would be replacing them. One of the least examined but most important trends taking place in the United States today is the broad decline in the status and treatment of American workerswhite-collar and blue-collar workers, middle-class and low-end workersthat began nearly three decades ago, gradually gathered momentum, and hit with full force soon after the turn of this century. A profound shift has left a broad swath of the American workforce on a lower plane than in decades past, with health cov

''The Big Squeezeis a wonderful, important, and timely book.'' Eric Schlosser, author ofFast Food Nation