The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy [NOOK Book]

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Overview

Here is a book that tells the real story of the countless unsung heroes who bend or break the rules to help those millions of Americans with impossible schedules, paychecks, and lives. Whether it is a nurse choosing to treat an uninsured child, a supervisor deciding to overlook infractions, or a restaurant manager sneaking food to a worker’s children, middle-class Americans are secretly refusing to be complicit in a fundamentally unfair system that puts a decent life beyond the reach of the working poor.

In a national tale of a kind of economic disobedience—told in whispers to Lisa Dodson over the course of eight years of research across the ...
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More About This Book

Overview

Here is a book that tells the real story of the countless unsung heroes who bend or break the rules to help those millions of Americans with impossible schedules, paychecks, and lives. Whether it is a nurse choosing to treat an uninsured child, a supervisor deciding to overlook infractions, or a restaurant manager sneaking food to a worker’s children, middle-class Americans are secretly refusing to be complicit in a fundamentally unfair system that puts a decent life beyond the reach of the working poor.

In a national tale of a kind of economic disobedience—told in whispers to Lisa Dodson over the course of eight years of research across the country—hundreds of supervisors, teachers, and health care professionals describe intentional acts of defiance that together tell the story of a quiet revolt, of a moral underground that has grown in response to an immoral economy.

A hugely important book, as hopeful as it is searing and with profound implications, The Moral Underground combines narratives and social research to document a whole new phenomenon—people reaching across America’s economic fault line—and provides a missing national account of the human consequences and lives behind the business-page headlines.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In this fascinating exploration of economic civil disobedience, Dodson (Don't Call Us Out by Name) introduces readers to teachers, supervisors, health-care professionals and managers who bend the rules—and even break the law—to support those in need. Dodson shares stories of individuals like Linda, a health-care supervisor who has, against hospital policy, “driven an employee to court on work time” and allows her low-wage employees to manipulate the schedule so they can attend to child-care needs. The author interviews Cora, a restaurant manager, who came up with a “double talk system,” in which she keeps two sets of time sheets so that workers can attend to family issues and who says, “helping women meet their kids or do what they have to do is more important” than her chain restaurant's rules. Dodson's study is gripping and her argument is persuasive: we should not have to put compassionate Americans in a position where they have to choose between following rules and helping those who are trying to help themselves. (Jan.)
Kirkus Reviews
Eloquent, rational analysis of the social intersections between middle-class working Americans and working-poor Americans, and the surprising daily efforts by bosses, teachers and healers to level this uneven economic playing field. Sociologist Dodson (Don't Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America, 1998) began researching what would become this book by studying the day-to-day balancing acts performed by working-poor parents in their efforts to raise families. In 2001, her focus shifted when one interview subject, a middle-class grocery-store manager, asked Dodson if she was curious how he ethically dealt with employing a low-wage workforce who couldn't support themselves on what he paid them. The author consequently discovered that in response to a market that seemingly institutionalizes poverty among its workers-one in four working Americans earn less than $19,000 annually-many supervisors, teachers and health-care workers simply break rules to secure the well-being of their workers, patients and students. Dodson's conclusions are quantifiable and surprising. Managers break the guidelines they were trained to follow because, as many tell her, "being asked to collude with rules that are immoral and treat people unfairly eventually will lead to acts of disobedience." Teachers openly reject curriculum and regulations that regard students as socioeconomically equal when, as most teachers note, they are anything but. Health-care workers cheat on insurance forms to care for uninsured patients. Dodson writes clearly and unsentimentally about this unorganized grassroots movement, grounded in notions of economic morality and spearheaded by everyday workersoperating in the front lines of America's current recession. The author rejects as conditional and subjective the American middle-class ideal of economic self-reliance and offers an alternate five-part solution to the worst social stratification since 1928. At the heart of this movement toward equality are common people who, Dodson writes, "reach the point where they break the rules-seek a moral underground-in order to treat others as they would be treated because, finally, that is the heart of decent society."Important, encouraging reporting.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781595585295
  • Publisher: New Press, The
  • Publication date: 1/12/2010
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 240
  • Sales rank: 473,723
  • File size: 382 KB

Meet the Author

Lisa Dodson worked as a union activist, an obstetrical nurse, and the director of the Division of Women’s Health for the state of Massachusetts before becoming a professor of sociology at Boston College. The author of Don’t Call Us Out of Name, she lives in Auburndale, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part 1 Ethics at Work 11

1 Employing Parents Who Can't Make a Living 13

2 The Meaning of Work Ethic 27

3 American Bosses: Sympathetic, Amoral Marketeers, and a Few Rule Breakers 57

Part 2 Troubling Children 73

4 Working for the Good of the Child 77

5 "Irresponsible" Parenting or Social Neglect? 93

6 Beyond Blame: Recognizing Unequal Choices 119

Part 3 The Sickening Effects Of Poverty 133

7 A Healer's Dilemma 135

8 Trying to Heal Economic Harms 157

Part 4 Raising A Moral Underground 169

9 Roots of Disobedience 171

10 Raising a Moral Underground 189

Addendum: Research as Democracy 201

Notes 213

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