This book examines the concepts on which these perspectives are based—empathic knowledge, transpersonal caring, the meaning of illness, the silence of suffering. The world of illness may be different from that seen by either nursing or medicine. It may not be visible, but it is not hidden; it may not be articulated, but it is not unknown to the ill. It's not a mystery; it doesn't require interpretation. But it does not readily offer itself to our understanding. I use the works of James Agee and Michel de Certeau as metaphor and example.

To help promote that transformation, we decided to write this book: a description and analysis of a major cultural shift that has made one complex and safety-critical industry—never previously known for concern for interpersonal or inter-professional relations—into an exemplary teamwork culture that is arguably now one of the safest in the world.

If aviation could do it, health care can too.

The lessons of aviation and other safety-critical, high-reliability industries are receiving more attention in health care than ever before. In spite of great resistance, some of these initiatives are producing positive models that offer great promise, as described in subsequent chapters. Nevertheless, we write this book out of concern that that there is much more lip service than real systemic change when it comes to making health care a truly high-reliability industry—one in which genuine interprofessional and occupational practice is the norm. This is why it is so important for health care to recognize how much it can learn and adapt from the aviation model of safety and teamwork. Moving beyond the checklist will help advance the efforts of all of those who are working so hard to make health care safer for both patients and those who work in health care settings.

According to the data, the short answer is, "not well at all." The past 10 years have been a "lost decade" of wage and income growth for most American families. A quarter century of wage stagnation and slow income growth preceded this lost decade, largely because rising wage, income, and wealth inequality funneled the rewards of economic growth to the top. The sweep of the research in this book shows that these trends are the result of inadequate, wrong, or absent policy responses. Ample economic growth in the past three-and-a-half decades provided the potential to substantially raise living standards across the board, but economic policies frequently served the interests of those with the most wealth, income, and political power and prevented broad-based prosperity.

The Great Recession occurred in an era of political polarization, which the sharp downturn exacerbated. As a result, resolving the issues related to public sector employment was complicated by an infusion of ideology. Working out the problems that remain unresolved is likely to be marked by continued partisan struggles in state and local affairs, and in similar conflicts around the world.

The goal of this book is to help answer these questions and expand our understanding of how immigrant worker rights are enforced and advanced. I situate the rights of immigrant workers in the space between both labor standards enforcement and immigration control, two conflicting jurisdictions whose implementation can vary widely, depending on their local political context. I then look beyond government bureaucrats to understand how enforcement strategies are influenced by local intermediaries who may have diverse interests in the advancement of immigrant worker rights. These include local elected officials, who can either intensify or mitigate the surveillance of undocumented immigrants and promote or stymie the interests of workers; civil society actors, who have direct knowledge of and access to immigrant workers, and who work in diverse ways to advance their rights; and consular institutions, whose unique combination of political legitimacy, institutionalized resources, and unfettered support for their emigrant population creates a unique pathway for rights enforcement.

The guy behind me went on, "What trailer park in Spring hake Park are you from? What part of Columbia Heights"

"Yeah," another guy joined him as our waitress came, "What rock in New Brightondid you crawl out from under?" New Brighton was my childhood mailing address. I skated at the roller rink in Spring Lake Park; I got my first job there in a bakery at fourteen. I sputtered through my order while these two guys behind me riffed on, besting each other's epithets, to a table of people laughing. Every one of their epithets were the places where my father and much of his family (and, later, my cousins and their families) had proudly bought homes and farms and settled down with skilled working class jobs. The shock and irony of hearing their blatant classism when I had just been out there left me speechless. Suddenly my head was spinning with rage. It made me crazy to juxtapose the tenderness and triumph of the day—and my own complicated cultural history—with this casual and complete contempt for the places my family called home.

Another goal of this volume is to demonstrate to broader groups of policy makers, shareholder activists, journalists, business intellectuals, economic and social justice activists, and citizens the ongoing relevance of shared capitalism and its potential for improving broader social and economic outcomes beyond employee well-being and firm productivity, such as promoting economic growth, innovation, and employment stability, as well as addressing the alarming growth in wealth inequality that has occurred in the last two decades. Although this book and its introduction focus primarily on employee ownership in the United States and, to a lesser extent, western Europe, it is important to note that shared capitalism can be found in all parts of the globe, from broad-based employee stock options in Korea, to the privatization of formerly state-owned industries in eastern Europe, to worker cooperatives in Argentina that were created in response to the financial crisis of the early 2000s. This diversity provides a rich set of experiences on which we can draw to assess the potential offered by shared capitalism and to inform policies to encourage it. This volume represents a modest step in that direction.

As a cultural anthropologist, I immersed myself in life at Vita Needle for nearly five years (more intensively in some years than in others) in order to learn what, on top of a paycheck, Vita Needle provides its employees. The story I tell is based on interviews but also on my own work on the shop floor. The distinctive research method of cultural anthropology is "participant observation": we immerse ourselves in the societies we study in order to understand experiences and meaning-making from an insider's perspective. Sometimes we study our own societies, sometimes societies quite foreign to us, but even when we study our own, we remain outsiders and can never fully access an insider viewpoint. Though as anthropologists we can get quite close, and we use research methods and narrative techniques to bring out the insider perspectives, our stories always reflect our own priorities and perspectives that come from our personal biographies and professional positions. I was drawn into Vita Needle and became part of the story itself, and so these pages include my personal reflections on the complexity of a research design that required my own immersion in order to explore lives and dreams and situate them within the context of a broader analysis. It is my hope that readers will discover as much about their own views on aging and retirement as they do about people at Vita Needle.

...

Throughout this book, I argue that for unions to remain relevant in the hospital industry and beyond—winning support among workers, winning campaigns against employers, and winning broad-based political power— they must recognize the cultural dimension of labor struggle, and must be concerned as much with putting forward a vision of the public good as with winning material advantage. The campaign at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital—and its relationship to broader successes and failures in the labor movement—illustrates the possibilities and perils of this approach to labor struggle.

This is not a story about an egalitarian little Eden being corrupted by the forces of capitalist modernization. La Quebrada's residents have lived with social inequality, violence, political conflict, and economic instability for generations. As coffee farmers, their fortunes have long been tied to the vicissitudes of global markets. However, the social changes wrought by migration presented qualitatively new challenges, as a functioning local economy became dependent on migrants working in distant places such as Long Island and South Dakota who lived in ways that most people in La Quebrada struggled to comprehend or explain. The new reality of migration created a sense of confusion that was especially strong in the early stages of La Quebrada's migration boom, when communication between villagers and migrants was rare. The decline of coffee markets and the rise of the migration economy happened so quickly and chaotically that people struggled to understand, evaluate, and give meaning to the changes they wereexperiencing. Therefore, migration was experienced as sociocultural disintegration in 2003-2005, when the bulk of the research for this study was conducted.