Download or read book Good Jobs Bad Jobs written by Arne L. Kalleberg and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The economic boom of the 1990s veiled a grim reality: in addition to the growing gap between rich and poor, the gap between good and bad quality jobs was also expanding. The postwar prosperity of the mid-twentieth century had enabled millions of American workers to join the middle class, but as author Arne L. Kalleberg shows, by the 1970s this upward movement had slowed, in part due to the steady disappearance of secure, well-paying industrial jobs. Ever since, precarious employment has been on the rise—paying low wages, offering few benefits, and with virtually no long-term security. Today, the polarization between workers with higher skill levels and those with low skills and low wages is more entrenched than ever. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs traces this trend to large-scale transformations in the American labor market and the changing demographics of low-wage workers. Kalleberg draws on nearly four decades of survey data, as well as his own research, to evaluate trends in U.S. job quality and suggest ways to improve American labor market practices and social policies. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs provides an insightful analysis of how and why precarious employment is gaining ground in the labor market and the role these developments have played in the decline of the middle class. Kalleberg shows that by the 1970s, government deregulation, global competition, and the rise of the service sector gained traction, while institutional protections for workers—such as unions and minimum-wage legislation—weakened. Together, these forces marked the end of postwar security for American workers. The composition of the labor force also changed significantly; the number of dual-earner families increased, as did the share of the workforce comprised of women, non-white, and immigrant workers. Of these groups, blacks, Latinos, and immigrants remain concentrated in the most precarious and low-quality jobs, with educational attainment being the leading indicator of who will earn the highest wages and experience the most job security and highest levels of autonomy and control over their jobs and schedules. Kalleberg demonstrates, however, that building a better safety net—increasing government responsibility for worker health care and retirement, as well as strengthening unions—can go a long way toward redressing the effects of today’s volatile labor market. There is every reason to expect that the growth of precarious jobs—which already make up a significant share of the American job market—will continue. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs deftly shows that the decline in U.S. job quality is not the result of fluctuations in the business cycle, but rather the result of economic restructuring and the disappearance of institutional protections for workers. Only government, employers and labor working together on long-term strategies—including an expanded safety net, strengthened legal protections, and better training opportunities—can help reverse this trend. A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology.
Download or read book No More Work written by James Livingston and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-10-28 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance--in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem--why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that "full employment" is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world--and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.
Download or read book The Fissured Workplace written by David Weil and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety protections, and ever-widening income inequality. From the perspectives of CEOs and investors, fissuring--splitting off functions that were once managed internally--has been phenomenally successful. Despite giving up direct control to subcontractors and franchises, these large companies have figured out how to maintain the quality of brand-name products and services, without the cost of maintaining an expensive workforce. But from the perspective of workers, this strategy has meant stagnation in wages and benefits and a lower standard of living. Weil proposes ways to modernize regulatory policies so that employers can meet their obligations to workers while allowing companies to keep the beneficial aspects of this business strategy.
Download or read book Bad Boss written by Michelle Gibbings and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-10-05 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a tough or toxic work environment, are you brave enough to challenge your own thinking and shift your own perspective to make relationships work? Bad Boss is for anyone who is in — or who is keen to avoid — a negative workplace environment characterised by ineffective leadership. Believe it or not, bad bosses are not bad people, and there are concrete steps you can take to improve your situation. Inside, author Michelle Gibbings shares wisdom drawn from decades in corporate leadership. It takes teamwork at every level to create an environment where everyone can flourish. If you dare to examine your own role in your current situation and take action today, you stand to gain better relationships and greater career satisfaction. Challenge the standard leadership practices and transform a tough situation to the benefit of all. Learn how to: determine where the problem really lies identify your role in the bad boss situation strategise your best option forward take action using concrete tools reflect and monitor progress for long-term gain. Bad Boss will take the edge off your stressful work environment and provide you with key actionable steps to turn things around.
Download or read book Ask a Manager written by Alison Green and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together
Download or read book Bad Bosses Crazy Coworkers Other Office Idiots written by Vicky Oliver and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you confronted any of these coworkers or bosses recently? The Grumpy Martyr The Boss's Pet The Credit Snatcher Bad Bosses, Crazy Coworkers & Other Office Idiots is designed to help people with all their office issues, from an exasperating coworker to a boss from hell. This book helps readers quickly pinpoint their problems and implement immediate tactics to resolve them. Vicky Oliver has helped more than 5,000 working people at different levels in different fields resolve their work problems. Bad Bosses, Crazy Coworkers & Other Office Idiots is a direct result of what she has learned as a career expert who has made herself available to help people in their times of need. With this book in hand, readers will have the answers to all their difficult work issues and will see their job satisfaction skyrocket.
Download or read book The Case for Working with Your Hands written by Matthew Crawford and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-05-06 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some jobs offer fulfilment while others leave us frustrated? Why do we so often think of our working selves as separate from our 'true' selves? Over the course of the twentieth century, we have separated mental work from manual labour, replacing the workshop with either the office cubicle or the factory line. In this inspiring and persuasive book, Matthew Crawford explores the dangers of this false distinction and presents instead the case for working with your hands. He brings to life the immense psychological and intellectual satisfactions of making and fixing things, explores the moral benefits of a technical education and, at a time when jobs are increasingly being outsourced over the internet, argues that the skilled manual trades may be one of the few sure paths to a good living. Drawing on the work of our greatest thinkers, from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Karl Marx to Iris Murdoch, as well as on his own experiences as an electrician and motorcycle mechanic, Crawford delivers a radical, timely and extremely enjoyable re-evaluation of our attitudes to work.
Download or read book Overload written by Erin L. Kelly and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why too much work and too little time is hurting workers and companies—and how a proven workplace redesign can benefit employees and the bottom line Today's ways of working are not working—even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. "Flexible" work policies and corporate lip service about "work-life balance" don't come close to fixing the problem. But this unhealthy and unsustainable situation can be changed—and Overload shows how. Drawing on five years of research, including hundreds of interviews with employees and managers, Kelly and Moen tell the story of a major experiment that they helped design and implement at a Fortune 500 firm. The company adopted creative and practical work redesigns that gave workers more control over how and where they worked and encouraged managers to evaluate performance in new ways. The result? Employees' health, well-being, and ability to manage their personal and work lives improved, while the company benefited from higher job satisfaction and lower turnover. And, as Kelly and Moen show, such changes can—and should—be made on a wide scale. Complete with advice about ways that employees, managers, and corporate leaders can begin to question and fix one of today's most serious workplace problems, Overload is an inspiring account about how rethinking and redesigning work could transform our lives and companies.
Download or read book The Peter Principle written by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic #1 New York Times bestseller that answers the age-old question Why is incompetence so maddeningly rampant and so vexingly triumphant? The Peter Principle, the eponymous law Dr. Laurence J. Peter coined, explains that everyone in a hierarchy—from the office intern to the CEO, from the low-level civil servant to a nation’s president—will inevitably rise to his or her level of incompetence. Dr. Peter explains why incompetence is at the root of everything we endeavor to do—why schools bestow ignorance, why governments condone anarchy, why courts dispense injustice, why prosperity causes unhappiness, and why utopian plans never generate utopias. With the wit of Mark Twain, the psychological acuity of Sigmund Freud, and the theoretical impact of Isaac Newton, Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull’s The Peter Principle brilliantly explains how incompetence and its accompanying symptoms, syndromes, and remedies define the world and the work we do in it.
Download or read book People Styles at Work and Beyond written by Robert Bolton and published by AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn. This book was released on 2009 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As cofounders of the leadership coaching and training firm Ridge Associates, authors Robert Bolton and Dorothy Grover teach that good interpersonal communication is essential to getting things done. In this comprehensive and practical guide, they offer a proven method for understanding the key behavioral styles of those around you (including your own) and explain how you can leverage the strengths and weaknesses of each to relate to others--even the most difficult of coworkers--more winsomely. People Styles at Work . . . and Beyond does this by offering a self-assessment to determine which style you are and then uses that information to teach readers how to: recognize how they come across to other coworkers; read others' body language and behavior to identify the best ways to work with them; make small adjustments that will dramatically increase the quality and productivity of their interactions; find common ground with different people while retaining their individuality; relate less defensively and more effectively no matter how others act At work, at home, and even while you're out running errands, your ability to relate to others affects how well you get things done. Now including all new material on personal relationships, parenting, and more, this is the ultimate how-to can help any reader avoid conflicts and enhance important relationships.
Download or read book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline written by George Saunders and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice. Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline “It’s no exaggeration to say that short story master George Saunders helped change the trajectory of American fiction.”—The Wall Street Journal “Saunders’s satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it’s also ferocious and very funny.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources of voice. [CivilWarLand in Bad Decline] is scary, hilarious, and unforgettable.”—Tobias Wolff “Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless.”—Jonathan Franzen “Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”—Zadie Smith “An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.”—Thomas Pynchon
Download or read book Surrounded by Bad Bosses and Lazy Employees written by Thomas Erikson and published by Vermilion. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fed up with a bad boss or lazy colleagues? Erikson shows how understanding your boss's behavioural tendencies as well as your own will lead to a more harmonious and productive workplace. He also sets out what characterises an exemplary leader type and how you can adapt your behaviour to model it
Download or read book How to Deal with Work Stress and Negative Coworkers written by Joshua Strachan and published by ZeroNever. This book was released on 2019-05 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a lot of people, some measure of stress is needed to sharpen their focus and help them deliver their best at work just like some heat helps in purifying gold ore to get the real thing. Remember how you would stay in your pajamas, without bothering with a bath or grooming, on a day you have absolutely nothing planned and no particular goal to achieve? Having no demands made on you at work will make you nothing short of a mediocre worker since there is nothing to prove. But while a little stress may spur you into giving your best, excessive stress will affect your productivity and job performance. It may also take a toll on your personal life, physical health, and emotional wellbeing. Once you start dreading the bleeping of your alarm in the morning or wishing your train ride to work would extend some more, the stress is probably becoming too much for you. According to the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, job stress is the ''harmful physical and emotional responses that occur when the requirements of a job do not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker''. While you may not have the luxury of leaving a job that stresses you for another, you can take steps to reduce your stress levels. More from this book: -Ways to deal with negative people -Pressure management techniques in the workplace -How to work less and boost productivity -Managing workplace induced stress -Productive stress management techniques
Download or read book People Styles at Work written by Robert Bolton and published by AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn. This book was released on 1996 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text asserts that it is possible to overcome personality conflicts by understanding other people's differences instead of merely reacting to them emotionally
Download or read book Creative Labour written by David Hesmondhalgh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it like to work in the media? Are media jobs more âe~creativeâe(tm) than those in other sectors? To answer these questions, this book explores the creative industries, using a combination of original research and a synthesis of existing studies. Through its close analysis of key issues âe" such as tensions between commerce and creativity, the conditions and experiences of workers, alienation, autonomy, self-realization, emotional and affective labour, self-exploitation, and how possible it might be to produce âe~good workâe(tm) Creative Labour makes a major contribution to our understanding of the media, of work, and of social and cultural change. In addition, the book undertakes an extensive exploration of the creative industries, spanning numerous sectors including television, music and journalism. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible account of life in the creative industries in the twenty-first century. It is a major piece of research and a valuable study aid for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects including business and management studies, sociology of work, sociology of culture, and media and communications.
Download or read book Good People Bad Managers written by Samuel A. Culbert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Good People, Bad Managers: How Work Culture Corrupts Good Intentions, author Samuel A. Culbert makes readers aware of what bad habits are routinely followed by well-intended managers. Managers need to understand the causes for their constant distraction, become more aware of the negatives they inadvertently inflict, and the hollowness of the rationales they use to justify what they do. Company leaders, CEOs, and top tier managers need to become more aware of the ever-present concerns of their own workforce, implementing the management mentality they want in their company and then teaching their managerial employees how to absorb it.
Download or read book Curating Your Life written by Gail Golden and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choosing the things you keep in your life and where you focus your energy is doable, and Gail Golden shows you how. Curating your life means selecting those activities that are most important, meaningful, and joyful for you and fiercely focusing your energy on those endeavors. It also means putting a whole bunch of stuff in the back room, to be reconsidered at another time. Curating your life means sorting your activities into three categories: The things you are not going to do, at least not right now The things you will be mediocre at The things you will be great at This is not simple. But the payoff is amazing. Living a well-curated life is doable. You get to succeed at the things that really matter to you, and you still get to enjoy life. Join Gail Golden on a tour of how to curate your life for success, happiness, and fulfillment.
