Wall Street's War on Workers
Redundancies upend people’s lives, cause enormous stress, and lead to debilitating personal debt. The societal harm caused by mass layoffs has been known about for decades. Yet, we continue to do little to stop them. Why?
In Wall Street’s War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of The Labor Institute, explains why mass layoffs occur and how our current laws and regulations allow companies to turn these layoffs into short-term financial gains. He provides a clear lens with which we should see how healthy corporations in the United States have used mass layoffs and stock buybacks to enrich shareholders at the expense of their employees.
Wall Street’s War on Workers places U.S. labor practices in the broader context of social and political life, examining the impact financial strip-mining and legalized looting are having on party politics as well as society, destroying the integrity of democratic institutions.
Both groundbreaking and urgent, Leopold’s expertise and research provides a compelling narrative that will captivate readers and shed light on a topic that deserves our attention, not only offering solutions that could halt mass layoffs, but also offering a new hope for workers everywhere.
After graduating from Oberlin College and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, Les Leopold co-founded the Labor Institute in 1976, a nonprofit organization that designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment, and economics for unions, worker centers, and community organizations. He continues to serve as executive director of the Labor Institute and is currently working to build a national economic educational train-the-trainer program with unions and community groups. Les has written several books, including Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice (Labor Institute Press, 2015), How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away with Siphoning Off America’s Wealth (John Wiley and Sons, 2013), The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and—What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009), and The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2006). The Mazzocchi story won the Gold Medal from Independent Publisher Book Awards for best biography in 2008.