Using charts, graphs, and cartoons, Michael Yates describes how unemployment, or the fear of it, is part of the life of every American worker. He outlines the changes in the structure of the labor market that have undermined the living standards of the employed. Tying these together, he provides an easily understood analysis of the economy and the social destruction brought on by its everyday functions.

Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs: Employment and Unemployment in the United States (Special Publication)

Business & Money

Yates, Michael D.

Economics

Monthly Review+press

Why Unions Matter

"A comprehensive, readable introduction to the history, structure, functioning, and yes, the problems of U.S. unions. For labor and political activists just coming on the scene or veterans looking for that missing overview, this is the best place to start." --Kim Moody, author of Workers in a Lean World With historical sidebars ranging from the Industrial Workers of the World to Cesar Chavez and a generous sprinkling of photos and cartoons, Why Unions Matter is a clear and simple introduction to the labor movement's purpose and promise.

"A comprehensive, readable introduction to the history, structure, functioning, and yes, the problems of U.S. unions. For labor and political activists just coming on the scene or veterans looking for that missing overview, this is the best place to start." --Kim Moody, author of Workers in a Lean World With historical sidebars ranging from the Industrial Workers of the World to Cesar Chavez and a generous sprinkling of photos and cartoons, Why Unions Matter is a clear and simple introduction to the labor movement's purpose and promise.

The Great Inequality (Critical Interventions)

A growing inequality in income and wealth marks modern capitalism, and it negatively affects nearly every aspect of our lives, especially those of the working class. It is and will continue to be the central issue of politics in almost every nation on earth. In this book, the author explains inequality in clear, passionate, and intelligent prose: what it is, why it matters, how it affects us, what its underlying causes are, and what we might do about it. This book was written to encourage informed radical action by working people, the unemployed, and the poor, uniquely blending the author’s own experiences with his ability to make complex issues comprehensible to a mass audience. This book will be excellent for courses in a variety of disciplines, and it will be useful to activists and the general reading public.

Routledge

Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy

The economic boom of the 1990s created huge wealth for the bosses, but benefited workers hardly at all. At the same time, the bosses were able to take the political initiative and even the moral high ground, while workers were often divided against each other. This new book by leading labor analyst Michael D. Yates seeks to explain how this happened, and what can be done about it. Essential to both tasks is “naming the system”—the system that ensures that those who do the work do not benefit from the wealth they produce. Yates draws on recent data to show that the growing inequality—globally, and within the United States—is a necessary consequence of capitalism, and not an unfortunate side-effect that can be remedied by technical measures. To defend working people against ongoing attacks—on their working conditions, their living standards, and their future and that of their children—and to challenge inequality, it is necessary to understand capitalism as a system and for labor to challenge the political dominance of capitalist interests. Naming the System examines contemporary trends in employment and unemployment, in hours of work, and in the nature of jobs. It shows how working life is being reconfigured today, and how the effects of this are masked by mainstream economic theories. It uses numerous concrete examples to relate larger theoretical issues to everyday experience of the present-day economy. And it sets out the strategic options for organized labor in the current political context, in which the U.S.-led war on terrorism threatens to eclipse the anti-globalization movement.

The road trip is a staple of modern American literature. But nowhere in American literature, until now, has a left-wing economist hit the road, observing and interpreting the extraordinary range and spectacle of U.S. life, bringing out its conflicts and contradictions with humor and insight.
Disillusioned with academic life after thirty-two years teaching economics, Michael D. Yates took early retirement in 2001, with a pension account that had doubled during the dot.com frenzy of the late 1990s. He and his wife Karen sold their house, got rid of their belongings, and have moved around the country since then, often spending months at a time on the road. Michael and Karen spent the summer of 2001 in Yellowstone National Park, where Michael worked as a hotel front-desk clerk. They moved to Manhattan for a year, where he worked for Monthly Review. From there they went to Portland, Oregon, to explore the Pacific Northwest. After five months of travel in Summer and Fall 2004, they settled in Miami Beach. Ahead of the 2005 hurricane season, they went back on the road, settling this time in Colorado.
Cheap Motels and a Hotplate is both an account of their adventures and a penetrating examination of work and inequality, race and class, alienation and environmental degradation in the small towns and big cities of the contemporary United States.

Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist's Travelogue

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue

In this new edition of Why Unions Matter, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The new edition not onlyupdates the first, but also examines the record of the New Voice slate that took control of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the continuing decline in union membership and density, the Change to Win split in 2005, the growing importance of immigrant workers, the rise of worker centers, the impacts of and labor responses to globalization, and the need for labor to have an independent political voice. This is simply the best introduction to unions on the market.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Yates, Michael D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Yates, Michael D.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Yates, Michael D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs: Employment and Unemployment in the United States (Special Publication)

Why Unions Matter

Why Unions Matter

The Great Inequality (Critical Interventions)

Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy

Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy

Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist's Travelogue

Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue

Why Unions Matter

Why Unions Matter