The Great Recession brought rising inequality and changing family economies. New technologies continued to move jobs overseas, including those held by middle-class information workers. The first new edition to capture these historic changes, this book is the leading text in the sociology of work and related research fields. Wharton s readings retain the classics but offer a new spectrum of articles accessible to undergraduate students that focus on the changes that will most affect their lives.New to the fourth edition"

Presents an overview of the history of American labor using excerpts from primary source documents, short biographies of influential people, and more.

The purpose of this book is to help the reader to better understand American values, expectations, and behaviours in business activities and to help them to develop practical strategies for being successful in working with Americans.

Engaging and Working with African American Fathers: Strategies and Lessons Learned challenges traditional and historic practices and policies that have systematically excluded fathers and contributed to social and health disparities among this population. With chapters written primarily by African American women – drawing on years of research, interviews, and practical experience with this demographic – each section explores current evidence on engagement approaches, descriptions of agencies/programs addressing specific issues fathers face, and case studies documenting typical clients and approaches to addressing their diverse needs. Offering an expansive overview of issues affecting African American fathers, the book explores such important topics as public, child and mental health, education, parenting, employment, and public initiatives among others. Engaging and Working with African American Fathers is a key resource for social work, public health, education students, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and members of communities who are challenged by meeting the diverse needs of African American fathers.

“An unusually deep and wide-ranging study” by a sociologist who spent years listening to and living among workers at a New Jersey chemical plant (Journal of American Studies). Over a period of six years during the late 1970s, at factory and warehouse, at the tavern across the road, in their homes and union meetings, on fishing trips and social outings, David Halle talked and listened to workers of an automated chemical plant in New Jersey’s industrial heartland—white, male, and mostly Catholic. He has emerged with an unusually comprehensive and convincingly realistic picture of blue-collar life in America during this era. Throughout the book, Halle illustrates his analysis with excerpts of workers’ views on everything from strikes, class consciousness, politics, job security, and toxic chemicals to marriage, betting on horses, God, home-ownership, drinking, adultery, the Super Bowl, and life after death. Halle challenges the stereotypes of the blue-collar mentality and provides a detailed, in-depth portrait of one community of workers at a time when it was relatively affluent and secure. “Absorbing reading.”—Business Week

This volume examines special issues associated with providing services and guidance to African American men. Although this group of men is like any other in its struggle with its social and economic problems, African American men experience a higher rate of murder, imprisonment, unemployment and racism. The contributors to this book provide a broad, interdisciplinary view of the possible solutions to the different problems facing African American men.

The book is dedicated to the real life issues in the process of human migration. It discusses people movement that is tied to immigration and trade policy, where workers are treated as a commodity and is not just about selling a product or a service. It is about finding the future. It explores the future of the workers, the corporations and the society at large.The primary objective however is in finding the future. Not just a future in general, but specific futures for the individuals under the care of policies that govern people movement. The focus is the future in the sense that it makes a prediction about where the future lies and then takes specific steps to make that future happen. That is where the subject of human migration comes in. The globalized political and economic system creates illegality by displacing people and then denying the workers rights and equality as they have to do what they have to do in order to survive. Globalization forces people into migration into countries where the ideas of divide and rule have been codified as a legal justification for the injustices. Inequality therefore is re-created and re introduced by a global economic system. In the realm of social reality - this social inequality creates a caste system, where one class of workers is pitted against the other for personal gain. Where when one side of the coin gets tainted, the other side shines brightly, putting the society at large in a conundrum. This book examines the function of social inequality in a modern world of high-tech guest workers and India’s increasing dependence on exporting people to the labor pool in the global North. This book is titled Green Carrot - America’s Work Visa Crisis in recognition of this reality. While Indian workers serving with employers in the United States has been used as a case study, it aims to drive home a point - Should the human migration exports rest only on the economic needs or should they be more focused on the human rights of its workers?Through the book an attempt is made to explore the politics of the debate over immigration and trade policies between India and the United States. The book examines closely the cultural factors associated with the brokerage of intellectual capital and rights to intellectual property - two distinct yet, vulnerable areas in the political debate on immigration reform. The book examines body shopping as a business model that promotes the brokerage of intellectual capital and ends with the need for innovation, bringing focus on generating intellectual property. The book begins with examining what it means to be an indentured guest worker in labor bondage with a foreign employer - how immigration status is used to keep people vulnerable, to criminalize them and punish them when they try to improve their conditions. The narrative travels to examine how the visa status is used to control the movement of its foreign employee and how the brokerage of intellectual capital allows subjugation for personal gain and its consequences on family life. The book traces back in history to explore America’s dependence on foreign labor and examines how the present day system of body shopping in fact creates an economic system that benefit from the changes causing displacement, and also benefits from the labor displacement produces, especially those on the foreign work visas. It traces the development of the employer lobby set up to win expansion of the work visa programs. How the immigration policies have all but been about low salaries for foreign workers, excluding the local workers from competing for jobs thus dividing the work forces Finally the book suggests some alternatives, always the hardest part in the immigration debate. It concentrates on some of the most progressive ideas, which have been put forward by immigration and human rights activists.