5 comments about Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.

1. A well-researched and original book describing the shifting allegiances of Chicago workers from ethnic help societies to their welfare capitalist employers to finally the US government. In addition to the subject of the growing labor movement, the book is also a great survey of the various ethnic/racial groups of 1920s Chicago and their differing experiences with Americanization.

   There is a book I would like to recommend as a virtual "sequel" to this one. The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue. While Cohen's book is about the creation of the New Deal coalition in the factory neighborhoods and towns of Chicago, Sugrue's book is about the disappearance of the factories and the departure from the Democratic coalition in the 1960s of the same groups who joined it in the 30s. Sugrue's book also won a Bancroft prize and if you like one you will surely like the other.




2. Making a New Deal is an absolutely incredible look at workers during the Interwar period in Chicago. Cohen has crafted a monumental work that not only covers workers political and union organization but also covers the changes in their lives resulting from societal changes such as the advent of radio and the chain store.
   What's particularly appealing and interesting about this book is also what it says about modern times. Cohen discusses that due to the advent of radio and national networks, fewer workers got their local and world news from ethnic newspapers or other papers in Chicago. As can be seen from this, the current lement concerning the consolidation of newspapers, TV and radio stations isn't new, it began even in the 1930s. Also interesting is how many immigrant parents worried about their children becoming influenced by American culture that they did not understand, particularly clubs, dance halls and radio music.
   Cohen's work is profoundly important and most of the book is a great read.



3. Cohen's work based on her Ph.D. Dissertation at UC-Berkeley proves to be a comprehensive, engaging, and insightful look into popular culture in 1920s and 1930s Chicago. She moves seamlessly from labor history to cultural history to ethnic history without losing the reader by including helpful charts, figures, and photographs. Her section on the nature of mass media and mass consumption undoubtedly provides evidence of her writing style in The American Pageant.

   Cohen does not create a delineation between immigrants that came to the area and natives of the Chicago area, which goes a long way in terms of bias. She covers African-Americans, Polish, Italians, and Jews without being critical one way or the other. Each chapter seems to be able to live by itself, which gives the book a flavor of being a compendium of papers instead of a conjoined work. All in all, Cohen does a wonderful job examining Chicago and Chicagoans whatever their ethnicity may be.




4. Cohen presents a seemingly broad and well-supported thesis to explain the success of unionism in the 1930s. However, while all persuasive, some of her major arguments seem only tangentially relevant to either each other or her main thesis. While she provides a strong, coherent explanation as to why Chicago workers' political loyalties and attitudes shifted so dramatically during the depression, it is frankly nothing new. Yes, workers felt entitled to aid and came to favor a strong, interventionist federal government, but the connections she draws between this and the unionization of Chicago factories remain tenuous. Correlation, as they say, is not causation; but Cohen argues, both implicitly and explicitly, that workers' preference for government intervention was a major factor in the labor struggles of the 1930s. If Cohen had acknowledged that labor solidarity and preference for big-government welfare programs were but two symptoms of worker's frustration, and accordingly broadened and adjusted her thesis, her chapter about Chicagoans attitudes vis-à-vis big government could have provided excellent support for her final argument. In the context of her overarching thesis, however, the chapter seems almost like a square peg in a round hole. Instead of letting her explanations-albeit insightful-of the working class's political consciousness reflect back on the people who hold them, she advances the somewhat further-fetched notion that worker's political experiences led directly to the later growth of unionization. None of this, however, detracts from her excellent account of the organizations and institutions that were shared between the too. Cohen primarily fails by not supporting her argument that these interrelations were anything more than marriages of political expediency forged in desperate times. That the Communists dabbled in both the labor movement and various forms of political activism does not mean that both were one and the same. Cohen rejects the simple explanation that they were both separate outlets for the collective rage of the underemployed.
   
   Ask many American historians for a short answer why the CIO was so successful in the 30s, and they may answer: because of the NLRA, hesitance of local, state, and federal governments to take the politically inexpedient step of supporting industry, and, most importantly, a mass of desperate workers imbued with a newfound distrust for the system that had betrayed them. This is essentially the answer Lizabeth Cohen arrives at; she simply takes a circuitous-if enjoyable-path to reach it. She provides a complex, nuanced answer in a place where a simple answer might do. Perhaps she's asking a different question than it appears she is. The title of her book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, implies that she's looking at a topic broader than the unionization of Chicago factories, but by bookending her many salient and though-provoking claims with the tales of 1919's failed strike and the CIO's ascendancy in the 1930s, she is limiting the scope of her book far too narrowly. Nonetheless, nothing is intrinsically wrong with any of Cohen's arguments and she provides a fascinating window into the mind of America's urban, industrial workforce during the depression.



5. In Making a New Deal Lizabeth Cohen has produced the sort of cultural history many historians only dream of writing. It is both meticulously researched, witness the 140 pages of end notes, and beautifully written. She employs quantitative analysis, material culture interpretations, and oral histories to recover the world of Chicago industrial workers, particularly steelworkers, tractor assemblers, and meatpackers, between 1919 and 1939. As would be expected from the Thompsonish title, Cohen argues that these workers were active participants in the creation of the New Deal. She demonstrates that workers' response to the Depression was shaped by the reconfiguration in the 1920s of both ethnicity and work place relationships, and the growth of mass culture. Workers made the New Deal as part of a process whereby diverse cultural experiences were replaced by homogeneous ones. How did this happen?
   
   Cohen begins her book with the defeat of labour's efforts to maintain the wages and conditions they won during the First World War. She argues that after 1919 'localisms' of 'race, ethnicity, job, and neighborhood' undercut the ability of workers to resist 'employers insisting on the open shop, government engaged in Red Scare tactics, and craft unions resistant to organizing industrial workers' (p. 38). Suffice to say that although her argument here is not groundbreaking Cohen takes the time to delineate how these 'localisms' separated workers even as they fought for similar
   goals. Her focus on the local nature of workers' experiences shows that although the 1920s was a stagnant period for union activism, workers' cultures were politically charged. For instance, ethnic identities were reshaped in those years as mutual benefit societies and community based 'banks' expanded their base from regional to national origin communities and adopted more commercial methods of business. Likewise the struggle of immigrant Italian catholics against the American church hierarchy transformed patron saint festivals from village or Chicago neighbourhood traditions into an Italian-American tradition. As Cohen writes, 'ethnic organizations introduced workers to the world outside their neighborhoods while ensuring that it was still an ethnic one' (p. 95).
   
   Workers' encounters with mass culture in the 1920s were also mediated by ethnic and neighbourhood identities. The purchase of a standardised mass produced item, such as a phonograph, did not automatically draw workers into a homogeneous American middle class culture. Rather it helped keep ethnic cultures alive as major American record companies re-pressed European recordings and recruited immigrant entertainers for original releases. Chicago was also an important centre of 'race records' and independent producers who catered to ethnic audiences. Cohen argues that a commodity could help a person retain or lose a cultural identity. 'What mattered were the experiences and expectations that the consumer brought to the object' (p.106). Workers were less inclined to buy standardised brand name products from cash and carry chain
   stores that blossomed in the 1920s, such as A & P, because neighbourhood grocers provided credit and were more convenient. Nonetheless the pressure of competition forced independent grocers to organise co-operative wholesale purchases and stock brand name goods. Movies and radio were also first consumed in local and ethnic variants before being subjected to chain ownership. Mass culture was not simply imposed from the top but rather shaped through the interaction of consumers predilections and the methods of distribution. Cohen points to jazz as an example of how one folk culture made it in the mainstream.
   
   Workers' identities were also shaped in the workplace where employers sought to create loyalty, increase productivity, and head off militancy, through various welfare schemes. In an effort to ensure individual loyalty employers broke up ethnic and race work groups. They thought this would erase group solidarity and produce a more docile workforce. Instead it promoted worker solidarity. Cohen shows that workers acted together to resist speed ups and other attempts to increase their productivity. The experiments conducted at the Chicago area's largest employer, the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric, by Australian born Elton Mayo receive a mention, as does the fact that these workers dubbed rate breakers 'Phar Lap', but Cohen does not make the obvious connection. Although workers did not give employers their unmitigated loyalty, they came to expect employers to meet some of their welfare needs. Workers noticed when the boss did not deliver on these expectations and this widened the gap between them and employers.
   
   In the 1920s workers forged peer communities that existed side by side with traditional institutions that shaped worker and ethnic identities. When the Depression swept these institutions away workers turned to each other for support and mobilized to demand intervention by the federal government. Cohen's final chapters chronicle the pressure workers applied to the Democratic administration, which it had elected, for laws that protected their right to organise unions and for the equitable distribution of welfare. She also devotes a chapter to the rise of the CIO in Chicago. Cohen shows that Chicago's industrial workers invested their future in a centralised national welfare state and a centralised national union of factory workers. She notes that although these institutions were no safeguard of workers liberty, and in some ways came to imprison them, it is important to understand what rank and file workers accomplished.
   
   This book established Cohen as one of the great historians of her generation.

1 comments about Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work.

1. Parreñas, a scholar admired by many whose academic training, coupled with her linguistic skills, draws inquiring minds into the largely untapped world of Filipino international migration. The book critically situates the migration from a historical-structural perspective and yet focuses on the family as the unit of analysis which must negotiate between the state regulations of both sending and receiving countries, the financial realities of citizens from poor countries of the world, and the emotional hardships faced by family members. The study, in general, is an extremely important one because it taps into what is a "female" international labor migration, bound by related expectations of gender roles, thereby encouraging readers to rethink our gendered perspective of all labor migrations. In addition, the book offers an effective assessment of the critical role of the family to young children (the focus of her subsequent book), the challenges faced by poor populations of the world, and how the global economy is structured to benefit wealthy nations of the world. I highly recommend the book and have only a small criticism: though she has carefully helped us to see the gendered inequalities faced by female international migrants, at times in the book Parreñas herself seems quite unnecessarily judgemental of the very women whose predicaments she details.

5 comments about Fired, Downsized, or Laid Off: What Your Employer Doesn't Want You to Know About How to Fight Back.

1. Written in plain English. Deals with the legal basics, emotional scars, and what's reasonable to ask for. Even has a list of 101 things to possibly ask for. I needed these things very much, and found them in this book. Provides a good insight, too, into what negotiating with your ex-boss, and Human Resources, is all about. I never realized that they wanted something from me even more than I needed the extra severance from them! This book is highly motivating, too. I recommend it for anyone.



2. Before I came across Mr. Sklover's book, I didn't know where to begin, or what had to be done. It was recommended to me by a friend who used it to help her, and it did. This book starts off slowly, and proceeds step by step in leading you through the process of Going Back, Asking for More, and Getting It..In Writing. It is the book on this subject that I believe will be the book everyone will read, use and keep...for the next time.



3. I would have rated this book, but unfortunately, I was not shipped the order as promised. Maybe in a couple of months I will be able to offer better feedback.



4. The problem is that when we have a job we tend to invest in the illusion of security. We also feel disloyal to our employer if we prepare for the time of separation.

   The funny thing is that when the whack comes (and to often it is as unforseen as club to the back of the head) you can bet that the company has prepared very carefully every aspect of our severance package before they apply that hit to the sweet spot on your noggin.

   Very few people have the clout to get an employment contract let alone negotiate up front for a separation arrangement. For most of us we live in an "at will" world. The author points out that this "at will" isn't necessarily as once sided as our employers would have us believe.

   They rely on the shock of the moment, our lack of preparation, and our shame for losing our job to streamline us into signing away rights and getting the heck out of dodge. It isn't in their interests to give you time to think and prepare, and, frankly, when you are laying off 1,000 or 10,000 people you simply can't enter into separate negotiations with every one of them. However, I can tell you that in the UK employees are routinely given employment contracts as they are hired.

   This is why every employee should read this book today. Prepare and think about the ever more inevitable separation. Empoyees need to be on as equal a footing with their employer as they can; given current laws and the limitations of economics. We need to have more open eyes and be less sentimental about our jobs.

   This book is a great first step or two on that path. Just as profits are made when you purchase an asset (buying at the right price) - not when you sell them, the basis for your separation (which you should accept as inevitable in some non-specified future) is laid when you are hired. We need to be smarter when we go into these situations and realize the planning and, well, practiced sincerity (masked insincerity) that employers now use during hiring, throughout the term of employment and during termination.

   They aren't bad people, necessarily, it is just that they are prepared for what is happeneing and most employees are not. The message of this very helpful book is "Get Prepared!".

   It isn't that they are all bad people; it is the nature of the current business and legal climate that leads to much of this nonsense.

   This book will provide a great morale booster and provide some thoughts that can help even a newly terminated employee create a decent plan of counter-attack. Better to use this information and take positive action than be pushed downstream like so many cut trees.




5. If You are Laid Off or Redundant you need ideas to Make Money. First negotiate the best package or payoff from work. Second, how to make money from home for your future. This book does not go into a lot of details on how to start a business, probably the most likely options if you are laid off over 40.

5 comments about The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide.

1. Eye-opening doesn't even begin to describe this enlightening volume about the socioeconomic divide among whites and non-whites in this country and the role the government plays in reinforcing the separation. Organized by five key members of the nonpartisan United for a Fair Economy organization based in Atlanta, the book handily dismantles the Horatio Alger myth, especially for minority members, by detailing how economic predation has persisted even as significant strides have been made in the far more discernible civil rights arena. The co-authors - Executive Director Meizhu Lui, Communications Director Betsy Leondar-Wright, current board member Bárbara Robles, past board member (until 2005) Rose Brewer, and Rebecca Adamson of the First Peoples Worldwide - have assembled not only a comprehensive history but also a fulsome, current picture of the economic discrimination that has festered pointedly against four different groups - African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Native Americans.
   
   Not coincidentally, the five women come from five different ethnic groups (including white), which allow them to compare their individual experiences and provide personal validation (and sometimes challenges) of their findings. Perhaps the most compelling fact unearthed is the substantial divide in net worth between blacks and whites. Previously, focus has been mostly on income disparity, which while significant, has been almost passively accepted. Specifically, median household income for whites in 2003 was about $48K, while for black households it was about $30K. However, looking on the balance sheet, the co-authors uncovered the revelatory fact that whites had a median net worth of $121K in 2001 versus just $19K for blacks.
   
   This and the book's other equally invaluable findings clearly illustrate how public policy has hindered asset accumulation among non-whites, and there is also an itemized list of special advantages afforded exclusively to whites. On a more personal level, the co-authors show how such exclusionary tactics have affected the self-esteem of their families, especially among their fathers who feel they have failed them somehow. In a hopeful effort to clarify the decisive influence of government on Americans' net worth, the book is not a socialist tract but rather a realistic how-to guide on how to affect policy changes that will help future generations in their wealth-building strategies. I think this is must-read information well worth studying by those looking for a constructive means of addressing the economic inequity in wealth, not just income. This is essential reading.



2. Heavily researched, but written in a very accessible way. You will learn volumes about wealth disparities and how they got that way, and you will learn something about yourself too. Highly recommended for anyone with interests in social and economic justice, racism, and just getting ahead in America.



3. This book is a solid piece of scholarship for the most part. The last quarter, however, dissipates into more reformism. It is interesting to see statistics on the wealth differential between Whites and other Ethnic Groups and the causal factors concomitantly, e.g. racism, Ethnocentricism, greed etc. The historical analysis as to what created the divide is thorough. That said, the prescription in the end makes one wonder if the scholars' really grasped the Historical antecedents that they presented to begin with. What occured in the past to create the disparity was not accidental. On the contrary. Whites today have the same mindset as their ancestors did in regards to wealth and securing it. How can they not? It's the same continuum. The society reinforces it. Just ask Tim Wise. Whites need only be on auto pilot to maintain this unjust system. The only solution is a complete social revolution, this - in the long run - will move people of color into equality while simultaneously changing the psyches' of Whites. Anything short of that can be consigned to phantasmic thinking.



4. This book is very biased against the US economy and is basically advocating a socialist or semi-socalist state. The book becomes very repetitive at times and the long chapters are filled with facts that do not seem related to thier arguments. Furthermore they state that the goal of the Color of Wealth is meant to provide solutions for the current state of the economy. They spend an enormous amount of time pointing out "issues" with the US economy but only spend a short paragraph at the end of each chapter explaining thier "solutions" and "conclusions" which seem very basic and at times do not flow with thier evidence. The book is filled with logic gaps in thier arguments. The main problem I have with this book is that it seems to me that they are implying that the United States is an economic aparthide system similar to that of old South Africa on page 29. Although I do give the authors some credit because the book is well researched. The authors of this book clearly seem more interested in bashing the United States from a ultra-left liberal point of view rather than providing solutions to the so called "racial problems" in the US economy. I would not recomend this book to anyone looking to understand any sort of racial economic problems in the US.



5. I read this with an open mind, but then I had to question some of their facts because they would contradict each other. The book opens by comparing Whites to other races in America. The main argument is that America tilts the playing field in favor of White Americans, and people of color are oppressed to the point that we cannot accumulate wealth. However there are a few bar graphs that point to the contrary. For example, Indians and Filipinos earn more than Whites. The authors contend that most White Americans have their college paid for by their parents. But I don't see how that means that the U.S. government is giving them an unfair head start. My parents paid for my college education, and unlike the book states, they did not use the equity of their house to pay for my or my 3 siblings' college education. They are also homeowners even though they are people of color. I don't think that our situation is exactly shocking or out of the ordinary. My family is just responsible for ourselves and our own destiny in America.
   The book gives a long and detailed and dreary history of America's racist past. However, we must remember that it is in the past. As bad as racism is, I don't think the answer is affirmative action, as the book suggests. Didn't Martin Luther King, Jr. dream of a nation where his children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character? In addition, the racist policy that America used to have is no longer the policy today. But affirmative action would replace the old racist policies with a new racist policy.
   Another point that I found strange was the idea that Reagan's policies were racist. The book goes on to say that his racist policies accidentally hurt poor Whites as well. Couldn't that just mean that the policies were not racist in the first place?
   Overall I found this book very offensive as a racial minority because it claims that we cannot get to where we want to be without help from the government. Affirmative action is not legal in California, so I am glad to know that I got into UCLA on my own merit and not because of my race. If it were still legal, I would question whether I was truly good enough to get into the school. If we use affirmative action, I suspect that our abilities will be questioned.
   The book's solution for the race problem is an unrealistic plan which includes a socialist state. I hope someone tells the authors that socialism failed in the USSR. Yes, the "S" stands for "Socialist." If the authors tried living in the European countries they deem so superior to the USA, they might see that some other countries are racist even today. But they will probably excuse them since those European countries have the universal healthcare and high taxes they praise in the book.

5 comments about Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness.

1. Williamsburg County had an unbelievable amount of violence, in both variety and magnitude, in such a short period of time. In less than fifty years this one county had labor wars, Ku Klux Klan wars, gang wars, and one of the worst feuds in American history. Paul Angle is a good writer, but that is only an added benefit. Reading the media accounts of these events would be fascinating enough. Anyone interested in a case study of a dysfunctional community should read this book.



2. While working near Marion, Illinois (Williamson County) in the winter of 2002 and spring of 2003 I was (at first) completely unaware of the history of the area. Finding that I was a history lover, a co-worker, native to the area, told me about "the troubles" and recommended this book. I quickly decided that Bloody Williamson was one of the better books I had ever read concerning this violent era in American history. While reading the book, I rode over many of the roads and visited as many of the old sites as I could find.



3. This is a true gem, which depicts the violent history of a rural southern county in Illinois. The author tells of organized labor, bootleggers, gangs and the KKK of the 1920s in Williamson County, Illinois. Angle writes in any easy format for most readers and his book is well indexed. I would highly recommend this book to all readers!
   
   Mike Koch, author of "The Kimes Gang."



4. If you are a history buff, you will almost certainly enjoy this book immensely as I did. It tells the incredible but little known story of one of the most violent chapters in U.S. history. In fact, some historians believe that the gangs of Williamson County were the most dangerous and violent gangs in U.S. History. Paul Angle does a wonderful job of telling this fascinating story which covers a period of about 50 years. I was particularly interested in it because my father lived through it. He lived in Marion, Illinois at the time and the Sheriff who plays a large part in the book was the father of his best friend. He also personally witnessed some of the things mentioned in the book. My father is 99 years old now and he still remembers it all clearly. But even without that personal connection to the story of Williamson County, I would have been just as fascinated.
   
   I was amazed when reading the review by Alan Mills. How could someone get the most basic facts presented in the book so wrong? He claims that the mine owner hired thugs who killed the miners when, in fact, the mine owner hired guards and non-union miners to work the mines and the union miners killed them! And the "thugs" did not hang around because they were dead! Also, Williamson is a county not a town. Another reviewer guessed that Alan had just read the back cover but he couldn't have even done that based on his "review."



5. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Williamson County, Illinois became a byword for lawlessness. The county first came to nationwide attention in the 1870s, when a bloody feud, comparable to the worst that the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee had to offer, wracked the area. Then in the 1920s, the town was beset by union and Ku Klux Klan violence to a shocking degree. Indeed, the rest of the country, and even the rest of the world was appalled at the violence, and the townspeople who condoned it.
   
   This is a wonderfully interesting book. The author does an excellent job of bringing bloody Williamson to life, and showing it in all its lack of glory. This tale of union murderers and KKK hoodlums (often the same people) is sure to shock you, and make you very glad that you didn't live then and there!
   
   I highly recommend this book!

2 comments about Harvard Business Review on Work and Life Balance (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series).

1. Here we have a collection of several articles about balancing work and life. I liked the book because of that. You don't have to begin reading on page 1. Just see the index for an article of choice an begin reading there. The ideas the authors propose are written in an easy reading manner an are always backed on serious researches. I licked it a lot.



2. The package came overseas to Japan in less time than expected. Great service! I was so excited to get the package of books before I had to leave for a business trip for a week. (If the books had come "on time," then I would have already left.)

2 comments about Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery.

1. Slavery is often seen as a historical issue - but in fact human bondage is very prevalent today, as ENSLAVED shows with its collection of slave narratives written by both past and current slaves and slaveholders from Asia, Africa, the Mid-East and the U.S. 21st century human bondage isn't a common topic but it will prove a unique and involving one for any high school to college-level course in social issues.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



2. This book is edited by Jesse Sage and one other author. The forward was written by Gloria Steinem, not the whole book.
   
   The book contains different chapters written by people who were either held in slavery or were slave owners. There is a chapter about an American girl who was abducted and abused as a young teenager. I have researched this topic for three years and I have not come across an account as disturbing as hers. The fact that her abuse occurred within the U.S. and wasn't noticed/stopped by anyone else (especially hospital staff) is alarming. Her story bridges the gap between what is called "prostitution" when it happens in the U.S. and "trafficking" when it occurs elsewhere. The descriptions of her abuse are alarming. Read her account only if you are prepared to keep each detail with you forever.
   
   I recommend "Enslaved" because it describes and categorizes the different types of slavery that are occurring. A plus is that the accounts are written by the people affected by slavery in some form and not sensationalist journalists. Evocative and informative.

3 comments about Labor Relations: Development, Structure, Processes.

1. I can only assume that the vast majority of you ordering this book are for college. I can't imagine anyone ordering it for fun. Basically, its a great college book. Not confusing, in good order and logical.



2. It's a college book, but its good..the only thing is that the laws get updated all the time..so, you should be careful with them.



3. The book arrived in a timely manner. It was clean and well kept. I appreciate the fast response.

3 comments about Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge.

1. Retirement income prospects for the average American are bleak. One third of households are totally dependent on Social Security as their only source of income. Meanwhile half of Americans are taking early retirement at age 62 which permanently reduces these benefits. Once common, defined benefit plans that assure retirees an inflation adjusted income bundled with healthcare provisions are rapidly disappearing outside the public sector. Less than 20% of the work force has these guarantees. Less than half of the private sector work force contributes to any personal retirement plan. And a Federal Reserve study (2004) finds that those that do contribute have only saved about $60,000.
   
   More could be said about this gloomy financial picture, but in this study retirement is viewed from an employment perspective. The authors argue for reshaping government, employer, and employee attitudes on the need to extend working careers another 3-4 years to improve the odds of living comfortably in retirement. Among their key ideas: Raise the early retirement eligiblity age for collecting Social Security from 62 to encourage more Americans to continue working and contributing to their retirement plans. Allow older workers to opt out of the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax to increase their income and encourage them to stay in the work force at a stage when accruing additional Social Security benefits are negligible.
   
   This short study is rigorously organized and amply supported by available research. The key ideas are clearly presented - but there is an academic dryness about it all. The main points are repeated frequently but the treatment is not patronizing. We are convinced. America needs to work to "full retirement" currently age 66. So, rather than raising the early retirement eligibility age for Social Security, why not just simply eliminate it? Certainly there is no arguing with the authors' conclusion that retirement has become a far "messier" experience than in the past. But given the realities they describe, their central thesis - that Americans can have a comfortable retirement by working just another few years - seems overly optimistic.



2. Munnell and Sass propose a straightforward way to reduce longevity risk: working at career jobs for an average of three additional years. This would raise the age at which half the age cohort is out of the workforce from today's 63 to about 66 -- which was the corresponding average age of retirement for men in 1960.
   
   A major driver of early retirements is the earliest eligibility age (EEA) for Social Security benefits: 62. Most workers claim at this age, accepting reduced benefits, instead of working till their full retirement age and receiving full benefits. The authors recommend raising the EEA to 65 as an incentive for workers to stay in the workforce. They also suggest exempting workers and employers from the payroll tax after the worker reaches age 62 and extending Social Security's salary-averaging period from 35 to 40 years (130-131). Meanwhile, "The most important thing workers can do to extend their careers is to keep their skills up to date and remain responsive to employer needs" (119). "Workers will also need to stay healthy" (121).
   
   Another hurdle is employers' lukewarm attitude toward older workers. This results mainly from the increasing cost of healthcare insurance as workers age and the tendency of compensation to rise with age even if productivity declines. These factors can largely be addressed by the actions cited above.
   
   An important factor not mentioned in Working Longer is the investment savvy -- or lack of it -- of the worker in managing 401(k) investments. In a world where millions of people invest their retirement money in stable funds while paying high interest on credit-card debt, this is a major issue. A one-semester course in personal finance for high-school seniors could help future generations of Americans manage their financial lives more effectively.
   
   For additional perspectives on this important book, see the reviews in The Economist and The New York Times.



3. It is essential to work longer for all Americans. Why? The money is not enough from social security, pension and 401K. With the recent stock market meltdown, everyone loses money.
   
   It does not matter how smart you are. You made millions last year. But then you bought a condo in Manhattan. It went down this year.
   
   I agree with the authors. Working is the only way to make money with a guarantee, you earn it.

5 comments about The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.

1. Mike Rose is a kind of mix between Studs Terkel and Antonio Damasio, the guy who wrote Descartes' Error. In this book he documents the intelligence it takes to do blue-collar and service industry jobs like being a waitress or a hairstylist or a plumber or a welder. While he does this he also pays tribute to his own family, all of whom worked in manufacturing or the service industry. I found the chapter on his mother, a career waitress, especially moving and beautifully written. Rose dispels the notion that blue collar or service industry labor is "mindless" as he provides an inspiring and personal account of the lives of workers -- from the shop floor to the diner to the beauty salon. His discussion of education is wonderful. Rose provides a vision for moving beyond the "skill and drill" approach to education usually doled out to the sons and daughters of the working classes. A terrific read from a writer with deep, first hand knowledge of the lives of America's workers.



2. The book is OK. The central theme is that we judge people and their abilities (intelligence) based on the job they hold, and that in dismissing the job as unimportant we also dismiss the individual and unimportant. The thesis is important, but the book belabors the point and spends too much time covering points that otherwise could have been stipulated. The greatest problem with the book is the notes style that is used. It is worthless. The latest trend in publishing is to pull a phrase from the text, highlight it under a notes section at the end of the book, and then present a collection of endnote and bibliographic information. Not only is this format cluttered and unhelpful, but the pull quote is not numerically referenced within the text. This lack of direct reference makes the notes utterly useless. This format is lazy and intellectually dishonest, and the practice needs to be discontinued.



3. Mike Rose is a just a plain wonderful writer. He knows how to really evoke a scene, and bring his ideas to life thorugh the stories he tells. In this book Rose explore the idea that much of what we call blue collar and other manual labor can entail high levels of intelligence. In this he is attempting to blur what has traditionally been seen as the hand/brain divide in occupations and study. He engages in this exploration by interviewing and observing people engaged in a variety of trades, from hairdresser and waitress to plumber and welder. He also explore what this might say about our traditional school curriculum and specifically vocational curriculum. A very thoughtful and delightful book.



4. Attempts to evaluate and measure the quality of human effort, or what economists now call human capital, have a long history. Leviticus (XXVI: 3-6) says,
   
   "When a man shall clearly utter a vow of persons unto the Lord according to thy valuation, then thy valuation shall be for the male from twenty years old even onto sixty years even, even thy valuation shall be fifty shekels of silver .... In addition, if it be a female, then thy valuation shall be thirty shekels. And if it be from five years old even unto twenty years old, then thy valuation shall be for male twenty shekels and for the female ten shekels."
   
   I am quoting this biblical passage from Elchanan Cohn's classic text The Economics of Education (1979), to point out that the idea of human capital is historical. More recently, emphasis has shifted towards contrasting "hand work" to "brain work" in a way that attributes higher value to the latter than the former. This book is the first ever study of its kind to raise serious questions about that attribution. It documents "the thought it takes to do physical work." It debugs the notion that physical work does not have intelligent effort behind it by telling stories of hard working communities. The general notion that hand work is dumb work comes from a disturbing fact that "in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but not thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain" (p. xv).
   
   Chapter 7 on "Rethinking Hand and Brain" is the gem - to me. However, all eight chapters are just as good. For the specialist the afterword "On Method", and 21 pages of notes (pp.229-249) are good sources of inspiration. "On Method" describes extant methodological approaches to "the nature of cognition and legitimacy of various methods of studying it" (p.217). As for me the author has made a compelling case that it is silly to continue to argue that physical work is not intelligent work. Obviously, when the smartest construction engineer picks up a wrench to check if that last bolt on the bridge is tight enough, he or she does not turn off his/her brain. An EXCELLENT TRIBUTE to both labor and human intelligence!
   
   Amavilah, Author
   Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies
   ISBN: 1600210465



5. We read The Mind at Work in Comp 201 at SUNY Potsdam. Here are some informal comments from students in the class:
   
   --He does belabor his main point
   --It is an eye opener
   --It changes the way you think about the working class
   --Rose backs up his work by using documented research and real experiences from real people.
   --Dr. Springsteen did not appreciate the citation style
   --We gave it 3.5 stars as a class average
   --It could be useful for high school students who have to choose between academic and vocational tracks
   --Rose's writing style was kind of boring, but easy to understand. He wrote in a person-to-person style, like you were talking to him.
   --Some of the writing was too technical (but maybe that's because I am a creative writer)
   --wouldn't recommend to an average person...it's like an acquired taste, you really have to be interested in learning about society and the ideas instilled in us by society
   --it reads like a textbook until the 7th chapter when you get to hear his argument
   --with the section on vocational education, he tied in younger generations; interesting generational approach