Rick Wartzman – The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America

Having a good, stable job used to be the bedrock of the American Dream. Not anymore.

In this richly detailed and eye-opening book, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers. Through the stories of four major employers–General Motors, General Electric, Kodak, and Coca-Cola–he shows how big businesses once took responsibility for providing their workers and retirees with an array of social benefits. At the height of the post-World War II economy, these companies also believed that worker pay needed to be kept high in order to preserve morale and keep the economy humming. Productivity boomed.

But the corporate social contract didn’t last. By tracing the ups and downs of these four corporate icons over seventy years, Wartzman illustrates just how much has been lost: job security and steadily rising pay, guaranteed pensions, robust health benefits, and much more. Charting the Golden Age of the ’50s and ’60s; the turbulent years of the ’70s and ’80s; and the growth of downsizing, outsourcing, and instability in the modern era, Wartzman’s narrative is a biography of the American Dream gone sideways.

Deeply researched and compelling, The End of Loyalty will make you rethink how Americans can begin to resurrect the middle class.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize in current interest

A best business book of the year in economics, Strategy Business

Rick Wartzman is one of America’s finest journalists and this book reminds us why. The end of loyalty. There is an idea that companies and workers are bound by a deeper social contract. With a historian’s sweep and a novelist’s eye for detail, Wartzman shows how that contract fell apart and what it means for all of us. People will read this book for a long time to understand the American experience. Pink is the author of Drive, A Whole New Mind, and To Sell Is Human.

That’s right. The end of loyalty. The corporate bonds that were essential to American life have splintered. It is a book that helps explain the rise of Donald Trump and why so many people feel angry. A former executive editor of the New York Times.

That’s right. The end of loyalty. The story needs to be told. Rick Wartzman vividly describes a world in which corporate leaders believed that good business meant generating value for their employees as well as their shareholders, an old-fashioned attitude whose time may come again. It is a great book. Anne-Marie Slaughter is the president and CEO of New America.

Rick Wartzman has written about the economic history of the last seventy-five years. The end of loyalty. The collapse of a corporate social contract that guided American economic life for much of the twentieth century is linked to the economic angst and political turbulence of our moment. While Wartzman places much of the blame for this problem on business and a growing obsession with profit, he challenges all of us-liberals and conservatives, CEOs and union members to imagine what a new social contract might look like. The author of Our Divided Political Heart and Why the Right Went Wrong is E. J. Dionne Jr.

A book that needs to be read quickly. Rick Wartzman’s was well written and researched. The end of loyalty. The unraveling of the social contract is a penetrating account of the end of the golden years of American capitalism. Anyone hoping to understand our current age of anxiety will need to read this book. Greg Grandin is the author of Kissinger’s Shadow and Fordlandia.

It is imperative for Americans to share our prosperity more broadly once again, according to a book written by a senior advisor at the Drucker Institute. Publishers Weekly.

What could be the defining questions of the twenty-first century-where we were, where we are, and where we are headed in terms of jobs and the nature of corporate America in all its bitter reality is explored by the senior advisor at the Drucker Institute. For those who have ever worried about their jobs, his research is essential. There is a booklist.

An examination of why large American employers shifted from loyalty to their workers to loyalty to stockholders. Through reporting and anecdotal stories. The Wall Street Journal. And. The Los Angeles Times. A lively history with relevance to every worker is how writer and editor Wartzman describes the evolution of policies by concentrating on four of the biggest corporations in the world. Kirkus.

The relationship between large American corporations and their workers is changing. th Highly recommended for general readers and those interested in labor-management issues… century provides the basis for this thoughtful and enlightening volume by Wartzman… Highly recommended for general readers and those interested in labor-management issues… The journal of the library.

Over the past 75 years, there has been a brilliant, rogue history of American business. Forbes.

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