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The Moral Underground

The Moral Underground

How Ordinary Americans Subvert An Unfair Economy

Lisa Dodson (Author)

$24.95
  • Publisher: New Press
  • Format: Book
  • Binding: hb
  • Pages: 240
  • Released: Aug 12, 2009
  • ISBN-13: 9781595584724

Details

"I pad their paychecks because you can't live on what they make."
—Supervisor of a fast-food pizza place

Here is a book that tells the real story of the countless unsung heroes who bend or break the rules to help those millions of Americans with impossible schedules, paychecks, and lives. Whether it is a nurse choosing to treat an uninsured child, a supervisor deciding to overlook infractions, or a restaurant manager sneaking food to a worker's children, middle-class Americans are secretly refusing to be complicit in a fundamentally unfair system that puts a decent life beyond the reach of the working poor.

In a national tale of a kind of economic disobedience—told in whispers to Lisa Dodson over the course of eight years of research across the country—hundreds of supervisors, teachers, and health care professionals describe intentional acts of defiance that together tell the story of a quiet revolt, of a moral underground that has grown in response to an immoral economy.

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