The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It
With insight and precision,David Weilhas brought to light the shell game played by so many modern business organizations. Today, the company whose logo is on your work shirt, smock, or ID badge may not be the one that recruits, hires, manages, pays, disciplines, and sometimes even houses you. This fracturing of the basic employer-employee relationship is reshaping lives and industries. If there's one book you should read about work today, this is it. (Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President)The Fissured Workplacepaints a striking picture of the underside of the U.S. labor market: the workers who service expensive hotels but need food stamps and income support for their families to survive; the 'independent contractors' who clean office buildings under contracts that pay below minimum wages; and hundreds of thousands of others struggling in an economy where you work not for branded name companies in the open light but for subcontractors behind the scenes.Weildocuments the growth of the fissured labor market, tells us how it contributes to the impoverishment of America, and offers ways to make matters better. You will think differently about the world of work after reading this marvelous book.(Richard B. Freeman, Harvard University)The book persuasively argues that widening income inequality has less to do with technological innovations and more to do with organizational innovations.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  The deep dive thatWeildoes on subcontracting, franchising, and supply chains is a must-read for anyone interested in how these practices have affected pay and working conditions. He goes beyond just documenting what is happening and presents a detailed proposal on how and why we need to mend, through legislation and enforcement, the increasingly fissured relationship between workers and their employers. (Lisa M. Lynch, Dean, The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University)The kinds of workplace fissuring discussed here--subcontracting, franchising and global supply chains--have been the subjects of a number of studies detailing the employment effects thatWeildescribes.The Fissured Workplaceis unusual in bringing this research together into an integrated, detailed and decidedly policy-oriented analysis. Through linking organizational strategies that share an underlying logic, it makes a compelling case that workplace fissuring should be given a more prominent place in analyses of the causes of growing inequality. Along the way, Weil shows that fissuring constitutes a fundamental and formidable challenge to existing employment regulations…It makes a convincing case that the better regulation of fissured workplaces is a first step towards reversing the erosion of pay and conditions at the bottom of the labor market. (Virginia DoellgastTimes Higher Education2014-03-06)