Anecdotal manifesto for a living wage for tipped workers.
By Jayaraman’s account, more than 6 million workers in the U.S. live on tips, which are unpredictable and often not forthcoming. “For tipped workers…the customer is always right,” she writes. “The customer pays your bills, not the employer, and as a result, the customer’s biases dictate a worker’s livelihood.” This plays out in numerous ways. For one, workers of color often are relegated to menial roles. One example is an undocumented young man from Mexico who was stuck as a busser for years before finally rising to the vaunted role of bartender. Women workers are subject to incessant sexual harassment, which they dare resist at the expense of pay and even their own health, since a common demand is that they remove personal protective gear and show themselves. The subminimum wage that tipped workers receive, Jayaraman writes provocatively, is a holdover from slavery, punishing the ranks of immigrants, people of color, and women. And that’s not to mention the truly enslaving practice of requiring prisoners to work for “as little as 11 cents an hour or $1 a day, depending on the state.” Only seven states have mandated that tipped workers be paid a minimum wage. Meanwhile, Jayaraman writes, whole sectors of workers in the gig economy are being forced into subminimum wage positions that benefit the bosses but not them. Drawing on profiles and more than 500 interviews with prisoners, nail-salon workers, restaurant staff, drivers, delivery workers, and many others, Jayaraman delivers an argument that is often repetitive, since the conclusion of each profile is always the same: The subminimum wage must be abolished in favor of “one fair wage,” the title of both this book and Jayaraman’s legislative initiative.
A clearly argued, sometimes-circular case for bringing economic justice to a growing segment of the workforce.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62097-533-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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BOOK REVIEW
Sedaris remains stubbornly irreverent even in the face of pandemic lockdowns and social upheaval.
In his previous collection of original essays, Calypso (2018), the author was unusually downbeat, fixated on aging and the deaths of his mother and sister. There’s bad news in this book, too—most notably, the death of his problematic and seemingly indestructible father at 96—but Sedaris generally carries himself more lightly. On a trip to a gun range, he’s puzzled by boxer shorts with a holster feature, which he wishes were called “gunderpants.” He plays along with nursing-home staffers who, hearing a funnyman named David is on the premises, think he’s Dave Chappelle. He’s bemused by his sister Amy’s landing a new apartment to escape her territorial pet rabbit. On tour, he collects sheaves of off-color jokes and tales of sexual self-gratification gone wrong. His relationship with his partner, Hugh, remains contentious, but it’s mellowing. (“After thirty years, sleeping is the new having sex.”) Even more serious stuff rolls off him. Of Covid-19, he writes that “more than eight hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn’t get to choose a one of them.” The author’s support of Black Lives Matter is tempered by his interest in the earnest conscientiousness of organizers ensuring everyone is fed and hydrated. (He refers to one such person as a “snacktivist.”) Such impolitic material, though, puts serious essays in sharper, more powerful relief. He recalls fending off the flirtations of a 12-year-old boy in France, frustrated by the language barrier and other factors that kept him from supporting a young gay man. His father’s death unlocks a crushing piece about dad’s inappropriate, sexualizing treatment of his children. For years—chronicled in many books—Sedaris labored to elude his father’s criticism. Even in death, though, it proves hard to escape or laugh off.
A sweet-and-sour set of pieces on loss, absurdity, and places they intersect.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-39245-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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