Never Good Enough

Ariel Ducey is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary.

"To overcome the hazards of constant health care restructuring efforts, one union strategy has been the development of programs to make allied health workers multiskilled and cross-trained. However, these expensive training programs have provided neither more meaningful work not better paying jobs... This book features interviews with allied health workers about their educational, occupational, and personal histories. The interviews certainly speak to the humor and creativity health care workers employ in light of these constant training programs."-B. A. D'Anna, Choice, September 2009 "In her book, Never Good Enough, Ariel Ducey explores the ideology of the market and healthcare restructuring in considerable historical detail. She takes aim at the major values of individualism, competitiveness, and the pursuit of self-interest underlying U.S. health policy during the mid-1990s and the mantra of the inevitability of market-based reform. As a healthcare ethnographer and sociologist Ducey's perspective comes from the study of the healthcare workforce training industry in New York City. In particular, she closely examines SEIU's New York City-based Local 1199, and its strategy of labor-management partnerships and embrace of work-force retaining programs in response to healthcare restructuring and the threat of hospital layoffs in the early to mid-1990s. There may be considerable disagreement with Ducey's point of view, but her opinions are well supported and reflect a healthy respect for academic integrity and fairness."-Registered Nurse "Ariel Ducey's Never Good Enough takes a hard look at how unions can best aid the job enrichment and career development of their members. Job training is a field with as many pitfalls as promises-and Ducey examines them all. Her book is an invaluable guide to what works and what doesn't, in health care and other industries where labor-management training initiatives are supposed to cushion the impact of corporate restructuring and provide more meaningful employment for American workers."-Larry Cohen, President, Communications Workers of America "Whether you find yourself agreeing or arguing with Ariel Ducey, Never Good Enough will spark fresh thought about the way we define knowledge and skill, the purpose of worker education, and the distortions wrought by ever-present rhetoric of the 'new economy.' This is a stimulating book."-Mike Rose, author of The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker "Ariel Ducey illuminates the structure of the health care industry by not only following legislative and funding trails but also observing the lives of working people themselves. Ducey takes seriously the aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of these health care workers-primarily immigrants of color and African American women. These workers provide an organic critique of hospital reengineering, including the transformation of nursing from hands-on patient care to the filling out of forms."-Eileen Boris, Hull Chair of Women's Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara