Sleeping Giant

Narrator Tanya Eby's tone perfectly fits this cogent reporting on how employers large and small fail working-class people in the U.S. The startling inequities she shares--brutal working conditions and systematic corporate and government suppression of wages--are egregious enough to justify a hectoring tone. But the equanimity in her voice better allows this information to help create public awareness about the feudal conditions in much of the retail, service, construction, and healthcare sectors; the hidden costs of low wages to families; and the government agencies called upon to help them survive. Many in the working class are people of color, and their awakening to their demographic power will surely move our culture toward more equitable pay and working conditions. T.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

February 8, 2016
Joining the election-year onslaught of political publishing, Draut (Strapped) taps the working class as 2016’s biggest potential transformers. Draut’s definition of the working class is useful—“individuals in the labor force who do not have bachelor’s degrees”—and she uses two other variables, occupation and income, to paint a dire portrait of decline. Today, members of the working class are most likely to work as “retail salespeople, cashiers, food service and prep workers, and janitors,” earning the hourly wage that goes along with such positions. A growing number of working-class people care for the very young and very old, important work often left unprotected by labor laws. Members of the new working class are less likely than in past decades to work in manufacturing—where the work was physically challenging but generally well compensated—and also much less likely to be white and male. Diversity both complicates political organizing and opens a door of opportunity for successful union solidarity and consciousness-raising. The book is unabashedly progressive, growing increasingly political, accusatory, and angry in its later chapters, where it lays claim to the “left flank of the Democratic Party” with a goal of moving “the center of the party back to being the champions of the working class.” Agent: Andrew Stuart, Stuart Agency.