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Across the United States, increasing numbers of employers are breaking, bending, or evading long-established laws and standards designed to protect workers, from the minimum wage to job safety standards to the right to organize. This “gloves-off economy,” no longer confined to a marginal set of sweatshops and fly-by-night small businesses, is sending shock waves into every corner of the low-wage labor market. In the process, employers who play by the rules are under growing pressure to follow suit, intensifying the search for low-cost business strategies across a wide range of industries and ratcheting up into ever higher reaches of the labor market. Although other books have touched on pieces of this problem, The Gloves-off Economy is the first to provide a comprehensive, integrated analysis—and quite a disturbing one.
This book examines a range of gloves-off practices, the workers who are affected by them, and strategies for enforcing workplace standards. The editors, four respected labor scholars, have brought together economists, sociologists, labor attorneys, union strategists, and other experts to offer varying perspectives on both the problem and the creative solutions currently being explored in a wide range of communities and industries. Annette Bernhardt, Heather Boushey, Laura Dresser, and Chris Tilly and the volume's other authors combine rigorous analysis with a stirring call to renew worker protections in the twenty-first century.
Contributors
Glenn Adler, AFL-CIO
Annette Bernhardt, National Employment Law Project
Heather Boushey, Congressional staffer
Laura Dresser, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Maurice Emsellem, National Employment Law Project
Sarah Gammage, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
Ana Luz Gonzalez, University of California at Los Angeles
Mark H. Greenberg, Center for American Progress
Jill Hurst, SEIU
Stephen Lerner, SEIU
Elizabeth Lower-Basch, Center for Law and Social Policy
Stephanie Luce, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Edwin Meléndez, Milano, The New School for Management and Urban Policy in New York City
Ruth Milkman, University of California at Los Angeles
Debbie A. Mukamal, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Paul K. Sonn, National Employment Law Project
Amy Sugimori, La Fuente
Nik Theodore, University of Illinois at Chicago
Chris Tilly, University of California at Los Angeles
Abel Valenzuela Jr, University of California at Los Angeles
David Weil, Boston University
Noah D. Zatz, University of California at Los Angeles
About the Author
Annette Bernhardt is Policy Co-Director of the National Employment Law Project. Heather Boushey is a Congressional staffer. Laura Dresser is Associate Director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) at the University of Wisconsin Madison. In Fall 2008, Chris Tilly will be Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA.
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