New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse has written a really interesting, well researched book: The Big Squeeze. He's on book tour and will read and speak at Demos 220 Fifth Ave (26/27th St) 5th Floor at Noon on June 5, 2007. If fair wages and good working conditions are issues on your agenda, go.

Below, the blurb:

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker takes a fresh, probing, and often shocking look at the stresses and strains faced by tens of millions of American workers as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security has shriveled.

Steven Greenhouse explains how economic, business, political, and social trends have fueled "the squeeze." Greenhouse argues that the social contract between employers and employees, guaranteeing steady work and good pensions, has eroded over the last three decades, damaged by massive layoffs of factory and office workers and Wall Street's demands for ever-higher profits. Through in-depth examinations of workers across the spectrumfrom janitors to software engineersGreenhouse illuminates how the post-World War II social contract that helped build the world's largest and most prosperous middle class has been replaced by a startling contradiction: corporate profits, economic growth, and worker productivity have grown strongly while worker pay has languished and Americans have worked longer and harder.

In what Barbara Ehrenreich hails as a brilliant and vividly reported exposé, Greenhouse provides a blueprint for getting America back on track by giving workers the benefits, respect and wages they deserve.