The Next Shift

The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America

The Next Shift
Gabriel Winant
RRP:
NZ$ 68.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 58.64
Hardback
h235 x 156mm - 368pg
30 Apr 2021 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780674238091
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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.
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' s real lives, Winant explores the move from manufacturing to care, tracing the rise of a new working class-one that looks very different from the stereotypical blue-collar worker of the Rust Belt' s mythic past. . . A road map for how to think about the changing working class. -- Sarah Jaffe * Bookforum * Beautifully written, extensively researched, and sharply argued, The Next Shift offers a new way to think about the transformations often grouped together under the rubric of ' neoliberalism. ' Winant sees deindustrialization not simply as a story of decline, but a story of the rise of a new kind of working class. -- Kimberly Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City: New York' s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics A sophisticated, politically pointed, and beautiful crafted book, The Next Shift chronicles both the erosion of the white male industrial working class and the ascendance of a service sector run by the labor of white women and men and women of color. But unlike most stories of industrial decline, Winant' s history bristles with hope for activism for the new world of work that has emerged. -- Eileen Boris, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 In this nuanced and powerful book, Gabriel Winant connects the slow-motion devastation of deindustrialization to the perverse political economy of care as the twin fruit of America' s compromised social bargain. Through the rusting of ' Steel City, USA,' Winant makes tragically concrete the ways that industrial job loss was transformed into a profit-driven market for health care-ensuring that caregivers can never afford the services they provide, and that the social exclusion on which the welfare state was built will swallow up ever greater majorities. -- Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise One of the most timely books of our era. The global pandemic has turned care workers into heroes while concealing the history that rendered them undervalued, underpaid, and precarious long before COVID struck. Winant recovers this history, revealing how the growth of the care industry was a consequence of, and response to, the decline of the industrial sector, and suggesting that the very laborers tasked with keeping the rest of the working class from an early grave may prove to be capitalism' s proverbial gravediggers. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination How and why has the healthcare sector taken over formerly industrial cities? Why are care work jobs so important yet so undervalued? In one of the most important works of labor, economic, and policy history to appear in years, Gabriel Winant compellingly answers these questions. This is an essential book for understanding the healthcare system, its weaknesses, and the policies necessary to create a system that is equitable for both workers and patients. -- Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit Winant explores in his informative debut the rise and fall of Pittsburgh' s steel industry as a microcosm of America' s shift from an industrial to a service economy. * Publishers Weekly *
Gabriel Winant is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His writing about work, inequality, and capitalism in modern America has appeared in The Nation, the New Republic, Dissent, and n+1.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780674238091
Published: 30 Apr 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 235mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 368

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