Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy

The 1990s were years of turmoil and transformation in American work experiences and employment relationships. Trends including the growth of contingent labor, the erosion of the stable employment contract, the restructuring of jobs and companies, and the emergence of opportunity-enhancing employee participation programs reconfigured occupations, career paths, and labor market opportunities. Vicki Smith analyzes this shift, asking how workers navigated their way across the divide between bad jobs and good jobs, between jobs organized hierarchically and jobs requiring greater worker involvement, and between temporary and stable work.

Crossing the Great Divide uses original case study data from four diverse organizational settings around the country. Smith compares the situations of nonunionized, white-collar workers at a photocopy service firm; unionized blue-collar workers in a wood-products processing factory; temporary assemblers and clerical workers in a high-tech firm; and unemployed managers, technical workers, and professionals participating in a job sea

This timely book by Smith (sociology, Univ. of California, Davis; Managing in the Corporate Interest) looks at the vicissitudes of work today caused by "downsizing, restructuring, the increased use of contingent labor, together with economic prosperity, progressive work reform, and job creation." She focuses on four different organizational settings a photocopy service firm, a processing factory, a high-tech firm, and a job-search club and highlights the experiences of a number of workers whose lives have been transformed by workplace changes. While acknowledging the need for organizational and governmental support to provide, for example, retraining and extended unemployment benefits for displaced workers, Smith puts the onus for improving workers' outlooks on corporations, asserting that they must assume responsibility for fostering "meaningful connections" with their employees. This well-researched volume, a nice complement to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Boom-Time America (LJ 5/1/01), is recommended for special and academic libraries. Ellen D. Gilbert, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.