We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About The Next Shift: The Fall Of Industry And The Rise
Product Description Men in hardhats were once the heart of America’s working class; now it is women in scrubs. What does this shift portend for our future?Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy―particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America’s cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization.As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. Hospitals and nursing homes went on hiring sprees. But many care jobs bear little resemblance to the manufacturing work the city lost. Unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. And the new working class disproportionately comprises women and people of color.Today health care workers are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-first-century workforce. The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next. If health care employees, along with other essential workers, can translate the increasing recognition of their economic value into political power, they may become a major force in the twenty-first century. Review The replacement of blue-collar work by pink-collar work has been much discussed, but what makes this book stand out is Winant’s argument that two seemingly distinct phenomena are in fact inextricably connected…An original work of serious scholarship, but it’s also vivid and readable…[An] eye-opening book. -- Jennifer Szalai ― New York Times A deeply upsetting book. It meticulously charts the transformation of the working class to show how the destruction of workers’ unions and bodies occurred in a feedback loop, with capitalist exploitation demanding care, demanding more exploitation, demanding still more care. The demolition of state support and state protections served to speed up this feedback loop. It has long since spun out of control…Winant ably blends social and political history with conventional labor history to construct a remarkably comprehensive narrative with clear contemporary implications. -- Scott W. Stern ― New Republic Winant charts the rise of this new political economy and working class in his terrific new book…Offering fine-grained details of shop-floor industrial relations, the book is at once an ethnographic probe into the lives of working-class families and a comprehensive analysis of the larger dynamics of the US political economy…A useful guide to the sweeping social changes that have shaped a huge segment of the economy and created the dystopian world of contemporary service-sector work. -- Nelson Lichtenstein ― The Nation How the health-care industry replaced manufacturing while downgrading the quality of American middle-class life, furthering inequality, and fueling political bitter divisions is the welcome subject of Gabriel Winant’s The Next Shift…Winant weaves together a convincing argument that this downward mobility has been driven by a gendered and racist political economy that values many things―from retiree health care to CEO pay―more than care work by women and people of color…Many health-care workers on the bottom rungs now find themselves, in some ways, back where industrial workers started in the nineteenth century…[An] important book. -- John W. Miller ― Democracy Digs deep into the stories of working people, tracing the rise and fall of two industries that, despite vast differences on the surface, have been intertwined for decades. Through stories of real people
