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Dying to Work is a collection of short stories from and about workers who were injured or killed on the job. The stories are bookended by a brief history of safety laws that still today leave millions of workers without effective compensation and employers without any meaningful incentive to keep their workers safe. In the last part of the book, Dying to Work attempts to provide some answers to questions about worker safety, and to offer policy suggestions that may make American workers safer and employers more accountable. In the end, Dying to Work insists that Americans change their mindset that workplace death and injuries are caused by accidents.

When people cannot find good work, can they still find good lives? By investigating this question in the context of South Africa, where only 43 percent of adults are employed, this book invites readers to examine their own assumptions about how work and the good life do or do not coincide. The book challenges the widespread premise that hard-work determines success by tracing the titular “laziness myth,” a persistent narrative that disguises the systems and structures that produce inequalities while blaming unemployment and other social ills on the so-called laziness of particular class, racial, and ethnic groups. The book offers evidence of the laziness myth's harsh consequences, as well as insights into how to challenge it with other South African narratives of a good life. In contexts as diverse as rapping in a library, manufacturing leather shoes, weed-whacking neighbors' yards, negotiating marriage plans, and sharing water taps, the people described in the book will stimulate discussion on creative possibilities for seeking the good life in and out of employment, in South Africa and elsewhere.

From the early twentieth century until the 1960s, Maine led the United States in paper production. The state could have earned a reputation as the Detroit of paper production, however, the industry eventually slid toward failure. What happened? This book unwraps the changing US political economy since 1960, uncovers how the paper industry defined and interacted with labor relations, and peels away the layers of history that encompassed the rise and fall of Maine's mighty paper industry. For a century, the story of the nation's most widely read glossy magazines and card stock was one of capitalism, work, accommodation, and struggle. Local paper companies in Maine dominated the political landscape, controlling economic, workplace, land use, and water-use policies. Hillard examines the many contributing factors surrounding how Maine became a paper powerhouse and then shows how it lost that position to changing times and foreign interests. Through a retelling of labor relations and worker experiences from the late-nineteenth century up until the late 1990s, the book highlights how national conglomerates began absorbing family-owned companies over time, which were subject to Wall Street demands for greater short-term profits after 1980. This new political economy impacted the economy of the entire state and destroyed Maine's once-vaunted paper industry. The book tells the great and grim story of blue-collar workers and their families and analyzes how paper workers formulated a “folk” version of capitalism's history in their industry. Ultimately, it offers a telling example of the demise of big industry in the United States.