A clearly argued, sometimes-circular case for bringing economic justice to a growing segment of the workforce.
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. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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