Margins
Out of Sight book cover
Out of Sight
The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe
2015
First Published
3.90
Average Rating
256
Number of Pages

A provocative analysis of labor, globalization, and environmental harm by the award-winning historian and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes . In the current state of our globalized economy, corporations have no incentive to protect their workers or the environment. Jobs moves seamlessly across national borders while the laws that protect us from rapacious behavior remain bound by them. As a result, labor exploitation and toxic pollution remain standard practice. In Out of Sight, Erik Loomis―a historian of both the labor and environmental movements―follows a narrative that runs from the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013. He demonstrates that our modern systems of industrial production are just as dirty and abusive as they were during the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age. The only difference is that the ugly side of manufacturing is now hidden in faraway places where workers are most vulnerable. In this Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Loomis shows that the great environmental victories of twentieth-century America―the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the EPA―were actually union victories. Using this history as a call to action, Out of Sight proposes a path toward regulations that follow corporations wherever they do business, putting the power back in workers’ hands. “The story told here is tragic and important.” ―Bill McKibben “Erik Loomis prescribes how activists can take back our country―for workers and those who care about the health of our planet.” ―Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH)

Avg Rating
3.90
Number of Ratings
82
5 STARS
32%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
18%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
4%
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Author

Erik Loomis
Author · 3 books
Erik Loomis is an associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns, and Money on labor and environmental issues past and present. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Dissent, and the New Republic. The author of Out of Sight and A History of America in Ten Strikes (both from The New Press) as well as Empire of Timber, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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