A practical, cleareyed, albeit repetitive, resource.
A worker’s guide to getting fair treatment and holding employers accountable.
In this book, Schachtner, a technical and community college instructor, aims to “help workers better understand their rights, responsibilities, and the larger systems at play” that affect the relationship between employee and employer. He emphasizes that the nature of that relationship is purely transactional, “a business arrangement where both parties have something valuable to offer,” rejecting the notion that employment is a form of benevolence where companies “give” jobs to workers. He defines employment ethics as “fundamental principles that establish basic workplace ethics, safety, and sustainability worldwide,” and as “tangible factors that affect your daily life, financial stability, and well-being.” Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of the employment relationship. First comes work ethic, which has four basic components: productivity, reliability, autonomy, and collaboration; each are discussed in detail. Chapter 2, “Employers Are Not Leaders,” explains the difference between management, which focuses on day-to-day processes and efficiency, and leadership, which is people-focused and needed in challenging times. The third chapter applies the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs framework to employment. Next, the author stresses the importance of a balanced relationship, noting differences between long-term and short-term/gig work and the problem of misclassification. The middle of the book tackles workplace safety and security, corporate accountability, and environmental responsibility. Chapter 8 makes the case for “community-supporting” wages. Chapter 9 reviews Maslow’s principles, and what happens when employer ethics fail. Chapter 10 and the conclusion serve as a call to action and outline how to advocate for change. All chapters end with reflection questions to help readers evaluate their own workplaces, such as, “Are your ideas and input respected in team settings, even if you are not in a leadership role?” There is also a reference list of the author’s research sources.
Throughout the book, Schachtner portrays the employer-employee relationship as heavily one-sided, where a worker’s loyalty is often demanded but rarely reciprocated: “For too long, the burden of the employment relationship has been placed exclusively on employees.” He details the myriad problems that occur when employers are unethical, including infamous historical catastrophes like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Chernobyl reactor meltdown, Monongah coal mine and Bhopal chemical plant explosions, and violent union busting. The author asserts that the regulations created in response to these and other workplace tragedies are essential for holding employers accountable and without enforcement by government watchdog agencies, companies would be free to exploit and endanger employees, communities, and the environment in the pursuit of ever-higher corporate profits. Other than mentioning freelance work for corporations and the issue of misclassification of gig workers, the only form of employment described is traditional jobs in for-profit industries. The author doesn’t mention government or nonprofit employers, although some of the issues might also apply to them. Schachtner’s writing is clear and straightforward, but he often repeats key points, for example, variations on the sentence “Recognizing ethical gaps is the first step toward advocating for change” appear in nearly every chapter. The book’s conclusion provides a partial list of resources such as OSHA, ISO, and Safe Work Australia. It makes a persuasive case that government regulations, oversight, and enforcement are necessary and worker advocacy, both individual and collective, is essential for a well-functioning society.
A practical, cleareyed, albeit repetitive, resource.Pub Date: July 7, 2025
ISBN: 9798992830910
Page Count: 184
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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