By The Beachwood Workplace Disobedience Affairs Desk

How Ordinary Americans Subvert An Unfair Economy.
“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,” says publisher The New Press. “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.”
Here are some examples pulled from the text.

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Posted on March 15, 2010

By Nancy Simon

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . “ – Emma Lazarus
For as far back as our forefathers’ time, we have called people who belonged to a lower economic class poor.
Poverty – or the state of being poor – has been used in reference to everything from a person’s financial status (or lack thereof) to their unfortunate lot in life, e.g., “That poor SOB has a nasty wife at home who is what makes him so miserable.”
Yet, while poverty comes across as respectful, the term poor conveys a most negative connotation.
And though times have changed and politically correct terms pertaining to everything from race to religion have been placed under a microscope, one may muse that terms used in reference to society’s bottom rung have neither been questioned nor adjusted for contemporary times in any conceivable way.

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Posted on March 12, 2010