Journalist Adam Chandler, who delivered a pop culture history of the fast food industry in 2019’s Drive-Thru Dreams, believes that “work is the crisis of our time.” In his new book, 99% Perspiration (Pantheon, Jan. 2025), he interrogates the concepts of bootstrapping and meritocracy. The crisis of work, he says, isn’t just about jobs but about all the baggage that comes with them—ambition, pay inequity, stress, burnout.
As the effects of the 2024 election start to land and Google searches for “what is a tariff?” skyrocket, this season delivers books that challenge received economic wisdom, including the notion that hard work leads inexorably to success.
Climbing the corporate stepladder
In 99% Perspiration, the title of which recalls Thomas Edison’s quote about the makeup of genius (the remaining 1% is inspiration), Chandler builds a case against the prevailing wisdom that hard work is a cure-all. Rather, he says, our obsession with work “depletes us,” especially as it relates to belief in the American dream, which he points out was never universally accessible and, since its post-WWII heyday, is increasingly difficult to achieve.
The dream isn’t a midcentury artifact, according to Chandler; it’s still common among recent immigrants and their families, the new arrivals to the U.S. who, he says, are “here to hustle.” But for many people, rising costs have quashed hopes that a middle-class income can support a household and set up children for a better life than their parents had. Wages in the lower and middle income brackets have dipped past stagnation to outright decline, and the effect on the national mood has been palpable.
“People feel politically alienated, so they’re open to scams and opportunistic schemes like crypto that prey on people’s vulnerabilities,” Chandler says. “I call this the American abracadabra—the idea that if you didn’t succeed, you didn’t work hard enough.” In previous decades, he says, there was more social cohesion across income brackets, but inequality has pushed people into more homogenized neighborhoods. Without that cohesion, and with a lack of a social safety net, he says, we’ve become ever more polarized.
At the other end of the spectrum from division is collective bargaining. Jaz Brisack, who helped organize the first unionized Starbucks in the U.S., in Buffalo, N.Y., shares stories of the nationwide labor movement in Get on the Job and Organize (One Signal, Apr. 2025). Anti-union corporations aren’t concerned about losing money to higher wages and benefits, Brisack suggests; if anything, they argue, legal fees and union-busting campaigns are more expensive than recognizing a union would be. But management frequently sees a union as posing an unacceptable existential threat to its position of control, according to Brisack, so “we can’t look to the law to save us. Companies use everything—the courts, shutting down stores. But across all of these campaigns, we see a springboard effect where people see workers organize and think, if they can do it, we can do it.”
Public health professor and primary care physician Michael D. Stein serves a primarily working-class population in and around Providence, R.I., and through that care came to understand how critical work is to the identity of his patients. A Living (Melville House, Apr. 2025) offers portraits of many of the people he serves—factory workers, HVAC installers, masons, farmers, massage therapists, commercial sex workers—in what’s structured as an homage to Studs Terkel’s influential Working, published 50 years ago.
Stein’s interviews explore identity, structure, connections, loss, and survival. “Work is what we do all day, and it shapes us,” he says. “Listening to people talk about work is a way of learning their emotional narrative.”
Social justice organizer Vanessa Priya Daniel shines a light on women of color in the labor movement over the past 20 years in Unrig the Game (Random House, Mar. 2025). She interviewed 50 women leaders to explore “what makes women of color MVPs, what’s benching them, and what we can do about it,” she says, because for these women, the workplace can be a minefield: they may face an assumption of incompetence, she explains, or the expectation that they will be “a mother or mammy.” In addition, they’re given no latitude to make mistakes and may find themselves alone when attacked by management or colleagues.
“The goal shouldn’t be that women of color become such jedis that we outmaneuver this level of nonsense,” according to Daniel. “People need to recognize the lens through which they see women of color leaders. It’s a toxic blend of white supremacy and patriarchy—we need to become aware enough not to reify those things.”
Adventures in capitalism
When University of Wisconsin–Madison history professor Emily Callaci had her first baby, she was, as many new parents are, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work and time required to care for a child. “It got me wondering why I felt so ill-equipped to deal with this struggle,” she says, “and why the feminists I grew up with didn’t speak to it.” That gap led to Wages for Housework (Seal, Mar. 2025), which positions the feminist fight to receive pay for domestic labor as a starting point for a more equitable society. “It’s about the underpaid, unrecognized work,” like childcare and eldercare, she says, “the invisible work that’s not part of the formal economy. The childhood tax credit is on the agenda now, and both right and left are talking about it.”
Others advocating for an equitable economy include the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of high-net-worth individuals advocating for the wealthy to be appropriately taxed and workers to be appropriately paid. John Driscoll, former CEO of a midsize healthcare company and a current Walgreens executive, is a member of the group and the coauthor of Pay the People! (New Press, Dec.). He and his coauthor, Patriotic Millionaires board chair and former BlackRock executive Morris Pearl, argue that raising the minimum wage is not only crucial to breaking the cycle of poverty but also for maintaining a healthy economy.
Millions of people are now underpaid, Driscoll says, and “working harder and harder to get paid less and less every year.” Though critics claim higher wages stymie business, the data says otherwise; in April 2024 California raised fast food minimum wages to $20 per hour, and the result was an additional 10,000 fast food jobs. When wages stagnate, taxpayers make up the difference; an estimated four million full-time workers in America are on food stamps, which are funded by the public.
“It’s a proven fallacy that capitalism is a zero-sum game,” Driscoll says. “It’s the greatest engine for social and economic progress that we’ve invented.” While other authors PW spoke with were less enthused in their discussions of capitalism, all called for thoughtful, deliberate change in how it’s implemented rather than arguing for a full-scale overhaul.
In World Eaters (Dutton, Mar. 2025) TechEquity Collaborative CEO and founder Catherine Bracy posits that venture capital is capitalism on steroids. “Venture capital is a distillation of the most toxic elements of the capitalistic structure,” she says. “The original venture capitalists got really rich and the average of the value of their entire funds was driven by a small number of very large outcomes. They decided to reverse engineer this strategy, and force every company they bought to be the type to deliver those types of returns. Other forms of capitalism are not always well aligned with what’s best for society, but they don’t require this speed and thoughtlessness. Since venture capital is the only option for accessing this much money, companies have to contort themselves into something that can achieve at this scale.”
But entrepreneurs can take the upper hand, she says, as long as they’re willing to break free of the need to become a unicorn. She cites Bryce Roberts, founder of Indie Enterprises, who identified a gap in the market: the thousands of companies that offer value and deliver a return at a smaller scale than those sought by giant venture capital funds. “Those founders don’t have to make these crazy choices, they don’t have to scale at that level, but they still create value and jobs,” Bracy says. “We need to encourage venture capital to go back to its original purpose: funding the risky but high-value tech breakthroughs we need, and creating new capital options for these companies serving the Main Street economy.”
In Capitalism and Its Critics (FSG, Apr. 2025), New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy tracks the evolution of capitalism through the eyes of its opponents—foundational figures such as Karl Marx and contemporary thinkers including Thomas Pikkety. Some of the historical criticisms differ little from today’s, he says: for instance, in the early 19th century, the English Luddites opposed mechanization and the displacement of pre-industrial textile workers.
“The debates were similar: why should workers suffer for the economy at large, enriching a small number of already rich people?” Though his subjects’ ideas were new and situated in their times, “the themes keep recurring, including the conflict between workers and employers, which will never go away,” Cassidy says. “It’s the nature of the system.”
Liz Scheier is a writer, editor, and product strategist living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of the memoir Never Simple.
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