Review of “What Workers Say: Decades of Struggle and How to Make Real Opportunity Now”

Abstract

There is a long tradition of writing that seeks to foreground the voices of subaltern agents, enriching the public’s understanding of how workers and other marginalized groups experience and respond to the world. Oral histories are premised on this effort; John Gwaltney’s Drylongso showcased the meanings that many African Americans share among themselves; Studs Terkel’s famous Working was so successful at capturing the everyday concerns of workers than it was made into a Broadway musical. Enter Roberta Iversen’s What Workers Say. The book’s premise is that policymakers would do well to understand the life horizons of workers in a broad array of occupations and industries, especially those in the burgeoning service sector, where those without a college education have enduring stagnating wages, eroding provisions for upward mobility, and an uphill battle to stay above the poverty line. The book’s empirical base comes from four different qualitative projects that Iversen conducted on the effects of workforce development, job training programs, and other policies designed to equip workers to cope with an ever more challenging labor market. These projects were conducted over the span of four decades in a number of US cities; here, they are knitted together in an effort to grasp the structural transformations that workers have had to endure over time. The outcome is a book whose presentation mimics the broader shift in the nation’s labor force, moving from manufacturing and clerical work to retail, health care, architecture, real estate, and other service occupations. The author presents excerpts from select individual workers, positioning their observations as reflections of broader historical trends. In a sense, the author has repurposed a series of snapshots and used them to generate a newsreel with which to convey a number of structural developments —the rise of precarious work, low and stagnating wages, cutbacks in public assistance, credential barriers impeding worker mobility, and long-term unemployment—that have become all too common features of our neoliberal economy.