Michael D. Yates – författare

The road trip is a staple of modern American literature. But nowhere in American literature, until now, has a left-wing economist hit the road, observing and interpreting the extraordinary range and spectacle of U.S. life, bringing out its conflicts and contradictions with humor and insight. Disillusioned with academic life after thirty-two years teaching economics, Michael D. Yates took early retirement in 2001, with a pension account that had doubled during the dot.com frenzy of the late 1990s. He and his wife Karen sold their house, got rid of their belongings, and have moved around the country since then, often spending months at a time on the road. Michael and Karen spent the summer of 2001 in Yellowstone National Park, where Michael worked as a hotel front-desk clerk. They moved to Manhattan for a year, where he worked for Monthly Review. From there they went to Portland, Oregon, to explore the Pacific Northwest. After five months of travel in Summer and Fall 2004, they settled in Miami Beach. Ahead of the 2005 hurricane season, they went back on the road, settling this time in Colorado."Cheap Motels and a Hotplate" is both an account of their adventures and a penetrating examination of work and inequality, race and class, alienation and environmental degradation in the small towns and big cities of the contemporary United States.

Workers in the United States are systematically being allocated a shrinking share of the prodigious wealth we produce, and that's old news. This widening exploitation of workers and communities further exposes the myth of a 'just' capitalist economy. Despite the radical increase in economic and social inequality, we still lack a cohesive popular understanding and consciousness of why and how our market-based economic system facilitates this 'one-sided class war' against us. More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States is a strategically assembled collection which binds diverse, informed, often compellingly personal explorations of social and economic inequity together into a revealing journey through the scarred terrain of today's working-class reality.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed to the world what many U.S. politicians and pundits have long been able to ignore. The media images that commanded our attention spoke loudly of the class and racial divisions that still exist in the United States today. Despite the stock market gains of the 1990s, which increased the ranks of millionaires and created greater wealth for those already wealthy, U.S. society has witnessed a dramatic increase in class inequality over the last two decades. A host of newly available research indicates that the United States is a far more class-bound society than was previously supposed. The rich are becoming both relatively and absolutely richer while the poor are becoming relatively, if not absolutely, poorer. "More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States" is a sobering examination of the dynamics of class relations today. John Bellamy Foster, William K. Tabb, David Roediger, Stephanie Luce, and Mark Brenner - among others - contribute essays that challenge many of our assumptions about class and provide a multilayered analysis.Topics include the impact of social and economic policy on class; wealth and prospects for the working poor; undocumented workers and their exploitation in the U.S. informal economy; race and class struggles post-Hurricane Katrina; women and class over the last forty years; and education reform and the devastating effects for public schooling. Editor, Michael D. Yates shares a personal story of his working-class life and values, the shaping of his political consciousness, and the people and ideas that inspired his teaching. For the vast majority of us, a strong work ethic and desire to see the next generation in better circumstances are no longer enough. The barriers separating classes are hardening. Class inequality manifests itself in wealth, income, and occupation, but also in education, consumption, and health. "More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States" demonstrates that an analysis of society as a whole - its relationships of power, conflict, and potential for social change - is not possible without a thorough investigation of the role and meaning of class.

“Michael Yates’s passion and respect for the class he came out of delivers a book that is especially accessible without retreating from the complexities and internal contradictions of working class life and organization—a book committed not only to defending workers, but also to building on their potentials to transform society.”—Sam Gindin, former chief economist, Canadian Auto Workers Union; Packer Visitor in Social Justice, Political Science Dept., York University, TorontoOne of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But, as Karl Marx points out, it is the fact of being paid for one's work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce” – where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals” – lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They've organized unions, struck, picketed, boycotted, formed political organizations and parties – sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But, Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of creating that change.In his timely and innovative book, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can, indeed, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work, itself, Yates asks if there can, in fact, be a thing called the working class? If so, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, location – to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions, Yates supports his arguments with relevant, clearly explained data, historical examples, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class, and what all of us might do to change the world.

Explains the reality of labor markets and the nature and necessity of class struggleFor most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market.This book reveals the raw truth: The labor market is in fact a mere veil over the exploitation of workers. Peek behind it, and we clearly see the extraction, by a small but powerful class of productive property-owning capitalists, of a surplus from a much larger and propertyless class of wage laborers. Work Work Work offers us a glimpse into the mechanisms critical to this subterfuge: In every workplace, capital implements a comprehensive set of control mechanisms to constrain those who toil from defending themselves against exploitation. These include everything from the herding of workers into factories to the extreme forms of surveillance utilized by today’s “captains of industry” like the Waltons family (of the Walmart empire) and Jeff Bezos.In these strikingly lucid and passionately written chapters, Yates explains the reality of labor markets, the nature of work in capitalist societies, and the nature and necessity of class struggle, which alone can bring exploitation – and the system of control that makes it possible – to a final end.