THE END OF LOYALTY: THE RISE AND FALL OF GOOD JOBS IN AMERICA

Much has been lost over the last 70 years. Big businesses once took responsibility for providing their workers and retirees with an array of social benefits. Post World War II, these companies believed that worker pay needed to be kept high in order to preserve morale. Productivity boomed.

Rick Wartzman illustrates how much things have changed since then. Job security, steadily rising pay, guaranteed pensions, and robust health benefits were once thought to contribute to worker morale and to keep the company humming, but these benefits are now gone. Wartzman will trace the ups and downs of four corporate icons–General Motors, General Electric, Kodak and Coca-Cola—and the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers. Wartzman also addresses what can be done to rebuild the work force and help resurrect the middle class.

Before joining the Drucker Institute in 2007 as its founding executive director, Wartzman worked for two decades as a reporter, editor and columnist at The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. While business editor of the LA Times, he helped shape a three-part series on Walmart’s impact on the economy and society, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for national reportin