Terry Gross: You wrote recently that thanks to President Trump’s populist rhetoric, the most romanticized figure in America now is the blue-collar worker of yesteryear. Who do you think he’s romanticizing, and how does that compare with what you see when you look back on the “Golden Age?”
Rick Wartzman: He really has romanticized the blue-collar figure in America. But when you look back, the history’s actually a lot messier.
Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Peabody Award-winning weekday program from National Public Radio with nearly 5 million listeners around the world, welcomes the Drucker Institute’s Rick Wartzman for a conversation about his book, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America.
At the heart of their conversation is the story of how jobs offering security, decent wages and good benefits have become harder to find, in part because of automation, globalization and the weakening of unions.