The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America

Gabriel Winant

Jun 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by BJ Harrison

About this audiobook

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy-particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America's cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization. As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. Unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. And the new working class disproportionately comprises women and people of color. Today health care workers are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-first-century workforce. The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next. If health care employees, along with other essential workers, can translate the increasing recognition of their economic value into political power, they may become a major force in the twenty-first century.

About the author

Gabriel Winant is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. His writing about work, inequality, and capitalism in modern America has appeared in The Nation, the New Republic, Dissent, and n+1.

Since iTunes named his as one of the top podcasts of 2007, BJ Harrison has continued to wow audiences. With more than 750 audiobooks to his credit, BJ has an astounding array of character voices, dialects, and accents at his fingertips, coupled with an impressive depth of interpretation.