The Moral Underground

Book excerpt: A “fascinating” look at the disconnect between corporate policies and workers’ real lives—and the everyday heroes who try to help (Publishers Weekly). For the poor, there are challenges every day that they don’t have extra money to solve: a sick kid, car trouble, an unexpected dentist bill. The obstacles can make it harder to hold on to a job—but a job loss would be catastrophic. However, there are countless unsung heroes who bend or break the rules to help those millions of Americans with impossible schedules, paychecks, and lives make it from paycheck to paycheck. This book tells their stories. Whether it’s 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 this 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. It documents a whole new phenomenon—people reaching across America’s economic fault line—and provides an account of the human consequences and lives behind the business-page headlines. “If only this book had been published in 2007. Then the hundreds of people interviewed by Lisa Dodson would have been able to pass along an important piece of advice: What’s good for business is not necessarily good for America.” —Time