Michael D. Yates

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Minnesota

Business & Economics

An Economist's Travelogue

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.

Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

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Ohio

Inequality and Work in the Global Economy

The economic boom of the 1990s created huge wealth for the bosses, but benefited workers hardly at all. At the same time, the bosses were able to take the political initiative and even the moral high ground, while workers were often divided against each other. This new book by leading labor analyst Michael D. Yates seeks to explain how this happened, and what can be done about it.
Essential to both tasks is "naming the system"--the system that ensures that those who do the work do not benefit from the wealth they produce. Yates draws on recent data to show that the growing inequality--globally, and within the United States--is a necessary consequence of capitalism, and not an unfortunate side-effect that can be remedied by technical measures. To defend working people against ongoing attacks--on their working conditions, their living standards, and their future and that of their children--and to challenge inequality, it is necessary to understand capitalism as a system and for labor to challenge the political dominance of capitalist interests.
Naming the System examines contemporary trends in employment and unemployment, in hours of work, and in the nature of jobs. It shows how working life is being reconfigured today, and how the effects of this are masked by mainstream economic theories. It uses numerous concrete examples to relate larger theoretical issues to everyday experience of the present-day economy. And it sets out the strategic options for organized labor in the current political context, in which the U.S.-led war on terrorism threatens to eclipse the anti-globalization movement.

Naming the System

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Michael D. Yates

Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

Michael D. Yates

Naming the System