Having a good, stable job used to be the bedrock of the American Dream. Not anymore. In this richly detailed and eye-opening book, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers. Through the stories of four major employers -- General Motors, General Electric, Kodak, and Coca-Cola -- he shows how big businesses once took responsibility for providing their workers and retirees with an array of social benefits. At the height of the post-World War II economy, these companies also believed that worker pay needed to be kept high in order to preserve morale and keep the economy humming. Productivity boomed. But the corporate social contract didn't last. By tracing the ups and downs of these four corporate icons over seventy years, Wartzman illustrates just how much has been lost: job security and steadily rising pay, guaranteed pensions, robust health benefits, and much more. Charting the Golden Age of the '50s and '60s; the turbulent years of the '70s and '80s; and the growth of downsizing, outsourcing, and instability in the modern era, Wartzman's narrative is a biography of the American Dream gone sideways. Deeply researched and compelling, The End of Loyalty will make you rethink how Americans can begin to resurrect the middle class. Finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize in current interestA best business book of the year in economics, Strategy+Business
Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked "peaceful coexistence" with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.
An in-depth look at today’s most pressing business issues through the eyes of Peter Drucker—the father of modern management “Channeling Peter Drucker to tackle some of this century’s most difficult topics, What Would Drucker Do Now? is a veritable treasure trove of fascinating reading. Drucker’s insights were nothing short of remarkable, and Rick Wartzman pays high tribute to that fact while adding a few of his own.” —Marshall Goldsmith, author of the New York Times bestsellers MOJO And What Got You Here Won’t Get You There “Rick Wartzman has accomplished what I didn’t think was possible: a tapestry of ideas drawn from Wartzman’s observations and personal experiences, woven together with the wisdom of the most important management thinker of this or any other age.” —Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Management, the University of Southern California, and author of the recently published Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership “Peter Drucker’s thinking has had an enduring impact on consumer-driven companies like Macy’s. . . . [What Would Drucker Do Now?] serves as a compendium of the very best ideas that can help all of our companies win in a highly competitive marketplace for products, services, and customer experiences.” —Terry Lundgren, Chairman, President, and CEO, Macy’s Inc. “This collection of essays . . . will broaden you as a manager, a leader, and as a human being. . . . Rick Wartzman has done the world a great service by collecting the most incisive observations of a beautiful mind and linking them to problems that face leaders and organizations everywhere.” —Brian Walker, President and CEO, Herman Miller, Inc. “If Peter Drucker is the master, Rick Wartzman is the prized pupil. Drucker would be delighted to see his theories applied in such a cogent, thoughtful fashion.” —Jim Weddle, Managing Partner, Edward Jones, and consulting client of Peter Drucker About the Book: As technology, globalization, and business innovation advance at breakneck speed, the question “What would Drucker do now?” becomes more relevant by the day. More than anyone of his time, Peter Drucker understood how the individual, the organization, and society are interrelated. And no one better recognized and articulated the challenges facing all three—or came up with more practical solutions to those challenges. Since 2007, the Drucker Institute’s executive director, Rick Wartzman, has been asking what Drucker would do on a regular basis— in his popular online column for Bloomberg Businessweek. In each piece, Wartzman introduces a current issue and provides a view of it through the eyes of Peter Drucker, based on his deep knowledge of Drucker’s ideas and ideals. What Would Drucker Do Now? culls Wartzman’s best, most timely columns into a single volume, offering a perspective on business and society you won’t find anywhere else. Featuring more than 80 articles, the book is organized into seven thematic sections: Management as a Discipline The Practice of Management Management Challenges for the Twenty-First Century On Wall Street and Finance On Values and Responsibility The Public and Social Sectors Art, Music, and Sports Covering everything from the federal bailout of GM and the scandal at Goldman Sachs to the roles religion and race relations play in a well-functioning society, What Would Drucker Do Now? explores a range of subjects as broad as Drucker’s remarkable mind. Wartzman provides a smart, original, and provocative look at a world being buffeted by change and in which all organizations—private, public, and nonprofit—are searching for answers. What would Drucker do now, indeed?
Inside one of the nation's most important works on race Two Societies: The Rioting of 1967 and the Writing of the Kerner Report studies the 150 riots that occurred throughout the country in 1967 and how this infamous report was written in only seven months and unanimously adopted by both Republicans and Democrats. Designed so that each chapter can serve as stand-alone account of some aspect about the report, its development, or the rioting, Two Societies also looks into why the rioting seemed to suddenly stop after Martin Luther King’s assassination. It assesses to what extent progress has been made at eliminating the “two societies” that the report warned about, and it compares 1967’s rioting to the disorders that occurred after George Floyd’s death in 2020. Given that so many of the subjects that the Kerner Report addressed (unequal economic opportunities, controversial police incidents, a lack of understanding about the existence and impact of racism, etc.) are identical to those that we struggle with today, Two Societies will not only be of interest to those who study or participate in creating policy but also those who want to know what happened then and what is happening now.
This detailed study of the relationship between race relations and unionization in Chicago's meatpacking industry draws on traditional primary and secondary materials and on an extensive set of interviews conducted in the mid-1980s that explore subjective dimensions of the workers' experience. "An ideal case study to analyze one of the central problems in American labor history--the relation ship between racial identity and working class formation and organization." -- James R. Barrett, author of Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 "Meticulously researched, grounded firmly in extensive oral history and archival sources, and carefully argued, Down on the Killing Floor will be indispensable reading for everyone interested in race and labor." -- Eric Arnesen, author of Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class and Politics, 1863-1923 A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilentz
This concise overview of the labor movement in the United States focuses on why American workers have failed to develop the powerful unions that exist in other industrialized countries. Packed with valuable analysis and information, Hard Work explores historical perspectives, examines social and political policies, and brings us inside today's unions, providing an excellent introduction to labor in America. Hard Work begins with a comparison of the very different conditions that prevail for labor in the United States and in Europe. What emerges is a picture of an American labor movement forced to operate on terrain shaped by powerful corporations, a weak state, and an inhospitable judicial system. What also emerges is a picture of an American worker that has virtually disappeared from the American social imagination. Recently, however, the authors find that a new kind of unionism—one that more closely resembles a social movement—has begun to develop from the shell of the old labor movement. Looking at the cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas they point to new practices that are being developed by innovative unions to fight corporate domination, practices that may well signal a revival of unionism and the emergence of a new social imagination in the United States.
How America’s biggest company began taking better care of its workers--and why such efforts will never be enough. Fifteen years ago, Walmart was the most controversial company in America. By offering incredibly low prices, it had come to dominate the retail landscape. But with this dominance came a suite of ethical concerns. Walmart was accused of wiping out mom-and-pop businesses across the country; ruthlessly pressuring suppliers to cut costs, even if it meant closing up U.S. factories and moving production overseas; and, above all, not taking adequate care of its own employees, who were paid so little that many wound up on public assistance. Today, while Walmart remains America's largest employer, the picture is very different. It has become an environmental leader among businesses, and has taken many other steps to use its immense scale to have a positive social impact. Most notably, its starting wage has risen from $7.25 to $12, and employee benefits have improved. With internal and external threats to its business looming, the company began to change directions in 2005—a transformation that accelerated in 2014, with the arrival of CEO Doug McMillon. By undertaking such large-scale change without a legal mandate to do so, Walmart has joined a number of major corporations that say they are dedicated to practicing a new, socially conscious form of capitalism. In Still Broke, award-winning author Rick Wartzman goes inside the company's transformation, showing in novelistic detail how the company has gotten to where it is. Yet he also asks a critical question: is it enough? With a still-simmering public debate around the minimum wage and widespread movements by workers demanding better treatment, how far will $12 an hour go in today's economy? Or even $15? Or Walmart’s average wage, which now hovers above $17—but, even so, doesn’t pencil out to so much as $32,000 a year for a fulltime worker? In the richest nation on earth, how did the bar get set so low? How did America find itself relying on an army of low-wage workers without ever acknowledging their most basic needs? And if Walmart's brand of change is the best we have, how can we ever expect to build a healthy society? With unparalleled access to the key executives and change-makers at Walmart, Still Broke does more than document a remarkable business makeover. It interrogates the role of business in American life, and asks what the future of our economy and country can be—and whose job it is to make it.
Here is a piece of history not found in conventional textbooks. If ever there were a book our young needed, it is Meatpackers-it reveals an epoch in which trade unions fought and won whatever rights working people possess today. With these rights constantly imperiled, this book is mandatory reading." --Studs Terkel "The stories are dramatically and richly told, and they offer insights no scholarly study can quite adequately provide." --Peter Rachleff, Journal of American History Available for the first time in paperback, Meatpackers provides an important window into race and racism in the American workplace. In their own words, male and female packinghouse workers in the Midwest-mostly African-American-talk of their experiences on the shop floor and picket lines. They tell of their fight between the 1930s and 1960s for economic advancement and racial equality. In cities like Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Fort Worth, and Waterloo, Iowa, meatpackers built a union that would defend their interests as workers-and fight for their civil rights.
“Perlstein...aims here at nothing less than weaving a tapestry of social upheaval. His success is dazzling.” —Los Angeles Times “Both brilliant and fun, a consuming journey back into the making of modern politics.” —Jon Meacham “Nixonland is a grand historical epic. Rick Perlstein has turned a story we think we know—American politics between the opposing presidential landslides of 1964 and 1972—into an often-surprising and always-fascinating new narrative.” —Jeffrey Toobin Rick Perlstein’s bestselling account of how the Nixon era laid the groundwork for the political divide that marks our country today. Told with vivid urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland recaptures America’s turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency of the United States. Perlstein’s epic account begins in the blood and fire of the 1965 Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson’s historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater appeared to herald a permanent liberal consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than ever, and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Between 1965 and 1972 America experienced no less than a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born. Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein’s magisterial account of how it all happened confirms his place as one of our country’s most celebrated historians.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020 From the bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge comes the dramatic conclusion of how conservatism took control of American political power. Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga’s final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement. In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford’s defeat, too old to make another run. His comeback was fueled by an extraordinary confluence: fundamentalist preachers and former segregationists reinventing themselves as militant crusaders against gay rights and feminism; business executives uniting against regulation in an era of economic decline; a cadre of secretive “New Right” organizers deploying state-of-the-art technology, bending political norms to the breaking point—and Reagan’s own unbending optimism, his ability to convey unshakable confidence in America as the world’s “shining city on a hill.” Meanwhile, a civil war broke out in the Democratic party. When President Jimmy Carter called Americans to a new ethic of austerity, Senator Ted Kennedy reacted with horror, challenging him for reelection. Carter’s Oval Office tenure was further imperiled by the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, near-catastrophe at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant, aviation accidents, serial killers on the loose, and endless gas lines. Backed by a reenergized conservative Republican base, Reagan ran on the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”—and prevailed. Reaganland is the story of how that happened, tracing conservatives’ cutthroat strategies to gain power and explaining why they endure four decades later.
A travel series unlike any other, Insight Guides go beyond the sights and into reality. Their incomparable photojournalistic approach captures the uniqueness of each culture they cover: their traditions, their arts, their history, their lives. The stunning photography is married to compelling text, written by local writers; the people most qualified to convey their culture's "secrets".Yes, Insight Guides will tell you which attractions to visit, but they'll also tell you a whole lot more. From the most popular resort cities to the world's most remote and exotic villages, Insight Guides will give you the insider's perspective you need to truly experience any destination you visit.Insight Guides serve many purposes. They are ideal for planning a trip. And, they're wonderful souvenirs to treasure for years after. Even the armchair traveler can be swept away by their magnificent content and experience the world from the comfort of home.Many international and domestic and domestic destinations also offer companion FlexiMaps, an innovative laminated folding map specially designed for the discriminating traveler.
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