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The Big Squeeze
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The Big Squeeze
by Steven Greenhouse

It can hardly be called a secret: these days, in this country, if you're not rich, you're boned.

New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse decided to set that fact down for the record, and the result was The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. Published in 2008, just as everything was going to shit in America's economy, The Big Squeeze documents the full gamut of the ways in which American workers are being screwed: diminishing wages, nonexistent job security, and a host of illegal activities, such as denying benefits, altering time sheets to cheat workers of earned wages, aggressive union-busting, and a general hostility towards the rights of workers--up to and including locking workers in on the night shift and not letting them out, regardless of what emergency may come.

As Greenhouse make clear, all of these actions are the products of a philosophical shift that seized corporate America's collective hive-brain sometime in the 1980s (the Reagan era, of course); that shift brutally devalued the contributions of those who work in favor of the demands (and even whims) of those who hold stock. In a land where the shareholder is king, those who earn paychecks are disposable peasants locked in a form of neo-serfdom--a portrait that author Greenhouse skillfully paints with the litany of grim stories presented in his telling prose.

Greenhouse wisely covers all the angles in telling his tale of dispossessed labor in America. To thwart those who might claim that the tribulations he documents are simply the sorrows of low-wage peons working dead-end jobs for the usual corporate suspects, the author provides powerful counterarguments by describing the problems of high tech workers--problems that, despite their high level of education and skill, mirror those of their uneducated working brethren. It's not just the lowly Mexicans who are getting screwed here, and the author spells that fact out through powerful, sympathetic stories that cover a whole socioeconomic range of victims.

Greenhouse also makes the cagey decision to offer the reader not just the villains in this piece, but a corporate hero as well, in the form of Costco. The membership driven wholesaler stands in sharp contrast to its chief competitor on the low-price front, Wal-mart (an organization Greenhouse routinely excoriates throughout his narrative). Somehow, unlike its competitor from Arkansas, Costco finds a way to pay decent wages and create a fair and equitable corporate culture while still providing its customers the inexpensive products they desire. Through that contrast, Greenhouse makes a strong case that, despite the bullshit that spews from the mouths of CEOs, our labor market doesn't have to be this way. The American economy could still work to the benefit of all of us; that it does not is a conscious choice on the part of those in power.

The Big Squeeze has a few minor faults. Much of the text reads like lengthy newspaper stories that have been somewhat inelegantly stitched together--no surprise, since much of the source material came from Greenhouse's work for the Times. The book as a whole is long, and textually denser than what the casual reader may be prepared to handle. Finally, the work is undeniably a downer. That fact inevitably results from the subject being covered, but it still affects the mood of the reader long before the final summary of suggested remedies. The few hopeful stories offered to the reader are buried too deeply within the grim litany to brighten the overall mood.

Nevertheless, The Big Squeeze documents the details of an important reality that we who are the 99% must face. Only by confronting that reality head on can there be any hope that it will change, through the actions of our own selves if not our so-called leadership. Greenhouse, with The Big Squeeze, has painted the bullseye on the most critical targets. It's now up to us to act.