100 books like Doing Comparable Worth

Did you know that until 1974, the job category ‘domestic worker’ was excluded from labor rights that were established in FDR’s New Deal legislation such as the minimum wage and workers’ compensation? Did you know that 1960s union leaders ignored the exploitative labor conditions of domestic work because they considered these workers “unorganizable”?

Historian Premilla Nadasan’s wonderful book tells the story of Black domestic workers’ exclusion from legal rights to which other workers were entitled and their fight to gain those rights beginning in the 1950s and extending through the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.

Telling this history through the life stories of domestic workers who were leaders in this movement makes this book a particularly compelling and worthwhile read.  

When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) first opened its doors in 1965, sex discrimination had many different meanings to women who wrote in to complain.

Some pointed to the abysmally low pay in “women’s occupations” such as secretarial work, while others described the barriers women faced getting into professions such as management or law. Katherine Turk’s fascinating book shows us how and why this government agency invented an official definition for sex discrimination. 

Importantly too, Turk highlights the consequences this definition came to have for women in a varied occupations and professions. The EEOC’s understanding of sex equality helped improve workplaces for some categories of women workers, but not for most. 

Roxane Gay’s memoir writing is brilliant! So is her collection of personal essays written by women who have experienced sexual harassment and rape.

Gay’s painful introductory piece on learning to understand her own experience of being gang raped at age twelve as “not that bad” illuminates the problem with rape culture. Women learn to blame themselves. 

As the essays by other authors make clear, rape culture is bad and women are often denigrated when they speak out, but they must come together to foment change. Whether the essays focus on workplace harassment or date rape, they all hold key lessons for the importance of women’s sexual autonomy at work.

In the United States, we often describe the history of the women’s rights by talking about the first wave at the turn of the twentieth Century and the second wave beginning in the late 1960s.

Historian Dorothy Sue Cobble blows apart this distinction by looking at the women’s labor movement from the 1930s through the 1980s. From this perspective, outspoken women in labor unions like Myra Wolfgang fought for both equal rights and protective legislation throughout the twentieth Century. I loved reading about these fearless women.

Long before second-wave feminism, labor movement women battled to ease the burden of the “second shift” for working mothers, supported maternity leave policies, childcare programs, equal pay for equal work, and advanced social justice issues such as racial and economic inequality.

I love this book because one of the biggest barriers to pay equity for working women (from entry-level to CEO) is the fact that so many of us are uncomfortable negotiating for ourselves. The authors’ step-by-step guide can be used not only in our professional, but also our personal lives.

This book increased my empathy.

There’s a lot to absorb here, especially for a white, straight ally of the LGBTQ+ community who doesn’t cut her own grass. It's a novel about the effects of discrimination against race, class, and sexual identity. It’s the authentic experience of a 22-year-old Hispanic man who, against all odds, tries to make an honest living and figure out his place in 21st-century America.

On the banned books list, this novel seems to assault the sensibility of censors who want to protect the young and vulnerable against truth. It must be the language, graphic and raw at times, but in the end, it’s not possible to ban reality. The love of his broken family and cobbled-together community has his back as he embraces his sexuality.

When I studied with James Alan McPherson at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop over twenty years ago, he played stand-up records from the 1970s and asked students to read ancient drama translated from Latin.

He was teaching us how comedy works, and he had a long gaze. His collection Elbow Room is similarly expansive. The past bubbles into the present abruptly, as in the story “A Loaf of Bread,” where “older people began grabbing, as if the secret lusts of a lifetime had suddenly seized command of their arms and eyes.” 

This book held my hands to a high bar while accumulating, through good storytelling, the truths of a company, both clear and nuanced, as I searched for them in the early George A. Hormel & Company.

Arsenault’s book upends many beliefs we hold about “good companies” that provide stable, long-term jobs to hundreds of employees, like this prominent and popular paper mill in Mexico, Maine, where Arsenault’s family worked through multiple generations. The long-term economic safety and security that employees had felt for years is upended by their numerous life-threatening, sometimes intractable, cancers.

I loved this book for its investigative environmental journalism, its exposure of truths the powerful did not want to be exposed, and its influence on my own research. 

A superb title and an irresistible page-turner. I could have filled whole novels with the jobs described here. Each role was interesting in its own right but also collectively built up really interesting cultural insights. A very strong sense of daily life in all its fun and messiness and a brilliant book to engage not just adults but (with a bit of redaction!) older kids too. 

This book resonates with Golden Age sci-fi vibes. Set in the wonderfully described frontier that is the Mars colony, Ballingrad captures the difficulty and hardship experienced by people who venture to the edge of civilisation in hopes of a better life and reminds us that it is these hardworking people that build the foundations for everything that comes after.

Annabelle is a young girl who embarks on a journey seeking justice after bandits steal the last recording of her mother's voice. On her quest she falls in with a gang of ne’er-do-wells while all communication and transport from Earth mysteriously ceases.

If you enjoy space westerns and the bygone era of classic sci-fi, this book is for you.