A study of everyday employee resistance at work, with first person accounts of sabotage illustrated and intermingled with related news clippings, facts and quotes.
Everyday capable, hardworking, committed employees suffer emotional abuse at their workplace. Some flee from jobs they love, forced out by mean-spirited co-workers, subordinates or superiors -- often with the tacit approval of higher management. The authors, Dr. Noa Davenport, Ruth Distler Schwartz, and Gail Pursell Elliott have written a book for every employee and manager in America. The book deals with what has become a household word in Europe: Mobbing. Mobbing is a "ganging up" by several individuals, to force someone out of the workplace through rumor, innuendo, intimidation, discrediting, and particularly, humiliation. Mobbing is a serious form of nonsexual, nonracial harassment. It has been legally described as status-blind harassment.
Thirty years ago, the bestselling "letter to the government" Work in America published to national acclaim, including front-page coverage in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. It sounded an alarm about worker dissatisfaction and the effects on the nation as a whole. Now, based on thirty years of research, this new book sheds light on what has changed - and what hasn't. This groundbreaking work will illuminate the new critical issues - from worker demands to the new ethical rules to the revolution in culture at work.
In Dying to Work, Jonathan Karmel raises our awareness of unsafe working conditions with accounts of workers who were needlessly injured or killed on the job. Based on heart-wrenching interviews Karmel conducted with injured workers and surviving family members across the country, the stories in this book are introduced in a way that helps place them in a historical and political context and represent a wide survey of the American workplace, including, among others, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, hotel housekeepers, and river dredgers. Karmel’s examples are portraits of the lives and dreams cut short and reports of the workplace incidents that tragically changed the lives of everyone around them. Dying to Work includes incidents from industries and jobs that we do not commonly associate with injuries and fatalities and highlights the risks faced by workers who are hidden in plain view all around us. While exposing the failure of safety laws that leave millions of workers without compensation and employers without any meaningful incentive to protect their workers, Karmel offers the reader some hope in the form of policy suggestions that may make American workers safer and employers more accountable. This is a book for anyone interested in issues of worker health and safety, and it will also serve as the cornerstone for courses in public policy, community health, labor studies, business ethics, regulation and safety, and occupational and environmental health policy.
In the 1950s, the exclusion of women and of black and Latino men from higher-paying jobs was so universal as to seem normal to most Americans. Today, diversity in the workforce is a point of pride. How did such a transformation come about? In this bold and groundbreaking work, Nancy MacLean shows how African-American and later Mexican-American civil rights activists and feminists concluded that freedom alone would not suffice: access to jobs at all levels is a requisite of full citizenship. Tracing the struggle to open the American workplace to all, MacLean chronicles the cultural and political advances that have irrevocably changed our nation over the past fifty years. Freedom Is Not Enough reveals the fundamental role jobs play in the struggle for equality. We meet the grassroots activists—rank-and-file workers, community leaders, trade unionists, advocates, lawyers—and their allies in government who fight for fair treatment, as we also witness the conservative forces that assembled to resist their demands. Weaving a powerful and memorable narrative, MacLean demonstrates the life-altering impact of the Civil Rights Act and the movement for economic advancement that it fostered. The struggle for jobs reached far beyond the workplace to transform American culture. MacLean enables us to understand why so many came to see good jobs for all as the measure of full citizenship in a vital democracy. Opening up the workplace, she shows, opened minds and hearts to the genuine inclusion of all Americans for the first time in our nation’s history.
Many managers are frustrated by a bewildering array of advice about what works in the workplace. This volume contributes to a growing consensus about effective workplace practices. The collection combines detailed studies of single industries (automobile assembly, apparel, and machine tools) with cross-industry studies of financial performance. The contributors find that systems of innovative human resource management practices can have large effects on business performance. Success does not come from any single innovation, but from a coherent system encompassing pay, training, and employee involvement. Although a majority of contemporary US businesses now have adopted some innovative work practices, only a small percentage of businesses have adopted a coherent new system. A concluding chapter outlines barriers to diffusion and discusses public policies to remove barriers and enhance dissemination of effective management.
For US baby boomers morphing into older employees, an attorney draws on many years of experience in employment discrimination for a timely review of age-related stereotypes, discriminatory workplace practices, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, recommendations for ADEA changes, and recourse options. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Turbulence--rapid and sometimes tumultuous changes--has characterized the labor markets of the 1970's and 1980's. Turbulent competitive conditions have cut sharply into profits and have forced downsizings and radical readjustments in America's workplaces. Workplace turbulence has resulted in lost jobs, declining incomes, and falling productivity for American labor. From the perspectives of business and labor, turbulence and its consequences is the key human resources issue for the last part of the twentieth century. In Turbulence in the American Workplace, a distinguished group of experts forcefully and convincingly argue that the human resources capacity of the private sector is the first line of defense against turbulence and is of equal importance to public sector education and training programs. The authors--including Kathleen Christensen, Patricia M. Flynn, Douglas T. Hall, Harry C. Katz, Jeffrey H. Keefe, Christopher J. Ruhm, Andrew M. Sum, and Michael Useem--effectively demonstrate how global competition, deregulation, and technological change are creating hard choices for employers that will alter both the living standards of workers and the performance of American industry in the coming decades. This illuminating work will be of significant value to business school faculty, corporate strategic planners, and general managers, as well as students and professionals interested in the areas of public policy, industrial relations, education, and labor studies.
Today's managers must deal with a wide variety of employee differences in ethnic backgrounds, values, lifestyles, and needs. This book presents a model of employee acculturation, investigating how Muslim employees adapt to U.S. national and organizational cultures The study investigates the relationships between respondents' acculturation patterns, their degree of religiosity, degree of collective or individual orientation, the extent of perceived discrepancies between their original cultures and U.S. organizational culture, and their national origin, examining demographic variables such as age, gender, education, occupation, and number of years lived and worked in the U.S Responses from 339 Muslims revealed that most were inclined to retain their original culture rather than adopting U.S. national culture. In contrast, most accepted U.S. organizational cultures. The analysis of the practical implications of these findings for business management highlights a number of practical strategies for coping with an increasingly multicultural workforce (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1993; revised with new preface, and index)