In this groundbreaking pamphlet Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American, examines how Americans can begin making the shift away from a resource-destructive society to one that values the environment, community, and quality of life above business and profit. She traces back how after World War II, Americans had hoped that technology and social investment would yield shorter work weeks, more pay, and complete healthcare. Instead, we work more, get paid less, and maintain an indecent adult minimum wage. Where did we go wrong?
Schor's pamphlet charts an economic vision that aims to reduce work hours, increase leisure, create new work schedules that are not operating on a "male" model of employment, create green quotas and industry-wide environmental standards, alternative housing and transportation, raise minimum wage, restructure labor relations, change corporate culture, and promote social accountability. The pamphlet "sets the guideposts," writes Noam Chomsky, "for constructive thinking and action to save our country from becoming a plaything for investors and transnational corporations, and to place its fate in the hands of its citizens."
Collected in
Pamphlets and Short Political Non-fiction
A professor at Harvard University for seventeen years in the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies, Juliet Schor is currently Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Schor has been a Guggenheim Fellow in 1995–1996, and in 2006 she received the Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Economics Institute at Tufts University. Her 1992 book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure became a surprise bestseller, and was followed up by 1998’s The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. Schor’s most recent book is Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. She lives in the Boston area.