Unions, Then vs. Now

Steven Greenhouse was a reporter for The New York Times for 31 years, spending his last 19 years there as the Times’ labor and workplace reporter, before retiring from the paper in December 2014. He covered myriad labor topics, including conditions for the nation’s farm workers, the Fight for $15, Walmart’s locking in workers at night, the New York City transit strike, and factory disasters in Bangladesh. Greenhouse also served as the NYT’s Midwest business correspondent, based in Chicago, as its European economics correspondent, based in Paris, and as an economics and then diplomatic correspondent in Washington. He has written a new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, that Alfred A. Knopf published on August 6, 2019. The book looks at key historic episodes that built America’s labor unions and shows how unions and worker power helped build the world’s largest middle class as well as a fairer, more democratic America. A native of Massapequa, N.Y., Greenhouse, he is also graduate of Wesleyan University (1973), the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1975), and NYU Law School (1982). Greenhouse joined The Times in September 1983 as a business reporter, covering steel and other basic industries. He then spent two-and-a-half years as the newspaper’s Midwestern business correspondent based in Chicago. In 1987, he moved to Paris, where he served as The Times’ European economics correspondent, covering everything from Western Europe’s economy to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. After five years in Paris, he served as an NYT correspondent in Washington for four years, covering economics and the Federal Reserve and then the State Department and foreign affairs. His first book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, was published in April 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf. It won the 2009 Sidney Hillman Book Prize. Greenhouse has also been honored with the Society of Professional Journalists Deadline Club award, a New York Press Club award, and a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Reporting. He continues to freelance for, among others, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic and the Columbia Journalism Review.