Labour Work

This provocative book makes a compelling case for reducing the number of workdays in a week to four. International business expert Robert Grosse draws on scholarly research to construct an appealing argument for why the four-day workweek benefits both the organization and the employee. Research has demonstrated that longer work hours harm the individual and don't amount to a more effective organization. The book goes beyond merely arguing that a reduced workweek is a good idea. It delves into why, explores the means for achieving it, and scrutinizes the barriers to getting there.

In this book Apurva Purohit, CEO of Radio City 91.1 FM, shows how women can accept, adapt and achieve their way to the highest rung in every arena. Through real-life stories and funny anecdotes, she provides pithy tips on a multitude of topics, from training husbands to training interns, from the right attitude to getting it right with kids, from dealing with household crises to office emergencies, from building a reputation to paving one's way to the top.

We work because we have to, but also because we like it: from hunting-gathering over 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs. Jan Lucassen provides an inclusive history of humanity's busy labor throughout the ages. Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organizes work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state. 

With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, our society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work. Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations.

In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation.

The Short Studies in Biblical Theology series is designed to help listeners see the whole Bible as a unified story - culminating in Jesus. Insightful, accessible, and practical, these books are perfect for listeners looking for bite-sized introductions to major subjects in biblical theology. The third volume in the series, Work and Our Labor in the Lord, explores how work fits into the framework of the whole Bible.

Today's ways of working are not working - even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. "Flexible" work policies and corporate lip service about "work-life balance" don't come close to fixing the problem.

Employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy - sometimes in coercive ways. Using a diverse array of evidence, including national surveys of workers and employers, as well as in-depth interviews with top corporate managers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's Politics at Work explains why mobilization of workers has become an appealing corporate political strategy in recent decades.

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and anti-work theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.

Najeeb's dearest wish is to work in the Gulf and earn enough money to send back home. He achieves his dream only to be propelled by a series of incidents, grim and absurd, into a slave-like existence herding goats in the middle of the Saudi desert. Memories of the lush, verdant landscape of his village and of his loving family haunt Najeeb, whose only solace is the companionship of goats. In the end, the lonely young man contrives a hazardous scheme to escape his desert prison.  

Jamie Merisotis, author of the award-winning 2016 book America Needs Talent, argues that people will coexist with smart machines by learning, earning, and serving others over their lifetimes. But Merisotis asserts large-scale change is necessary to develop and hone the knowledge, skills, and abilities that render us uniquely human. These qualities include compassion, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and interpersonal communication.

A revolutionary new history of humankind through the prism of work, from the origins of life on Earth to our ever-more automated present. The work we do brings us meaning, moulds our values, determines our social status and dictates how we spend most of our time. But this wasn't always the case: for 95 percent of our species' history, work held a radically different importance. How, then, did work become the central organisational principle of our societies? How did it transform our bodies, our environments, our views on equality and our sense of time? 

In the past few years, online crowdworking platforms - like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Clickworker - have become an increasingly important source of work, particularly for those in the Global South. Here, small tasks are assigned to people online, and are often used to train algorithms to spot patterns, patterns through machine learning those same algorithms will then be able to spot more effectively than humans. Used for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the digital economy.

Eve Rodsky is changing society one relationship at a time, by coming up with a 21st-century solution to an age-old problem: women shouldering the brunt of domestic responsibilities, the mental load, the emotional labour. Everything that is required to keep the fridge full, the children's homework in their schoolbags, and the the household running. The unequal division of all this invisible work in relationships is a recipe for disaster, but no one has offered a real solution to this dilemma, until now. 

Emotional labor is essential to our society and economy, but it’s so often invisible. In this groundbreaking, journalistic deep dive, Rose Hackman shares the stories of hundreds of women, tracing the history of this kind of work and exposing common manifestations of the phenomenon. But Hackman doesn’t simply diagnose a problem—she empowers us to combat this insidious force and forge pathways for radical evolution, justice, and change.

While most people work ever-longer hours, international statistics suggest that the average time spent on non-work activities per employee is around two hours a day. How is this possible, and what are the reasons behind employees withdrawing from work? In this thought-provoking book, Roland Paulsen examines organizational misbehavior, specifically the phenomenon of "empty labor", defined as the time during which employees engage in private activities during the working day. This study explores a variety of explanations, from under-employment to workplace resistance.

Women have made up roughly half of the college-educated workforce for years, and before the onset of the economic crisis of 2020, the gap between the percentage of women and the percentage of men in the labor force was the lowest on record. But women remain underrepresented in positions of power and status. The endurance of these inequalities begs the question: Why haven't we made more progress? Ammerman and Groysberg focus on the pervasive organizational obstacles and managerial actions that create gender imbalance. 

Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants - and Americans feared for their meat supply. But the Midwest is not simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered. Native Midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren spent years interviewing Iowans who work in the meatpacking industry, both native-born residents and recent migrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.

In this account, Gottlieb Mittelberger reveals the plight of poor German families who migrated to America in the 18th century. It was normal at the time for poor Europeans to fund their journey to the New World by agreeing to a period of indentured servitude. Yet what Mittleberger observed was more akin to slavery: workers were auctioned off upon arrival with no formal contract. This enlightening record reveals a darker side to early American history.