Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live

The Great Recession threw huge economic challenges at nearly all Americans – rich and poor. In her book Down the Up Escalator, Barbara Garson writes about how those challenges played out in the lives of real people. This hour on Focus, host Jim Meadows talks with Garson about her book and about what happens to those at the bottom when a society’s organization favors those at the top.

We’ll also hear from Garson about about the people she spent time with in order to write the book. We’ll hear about four friends who’ve been a part of the group of Americans who now qualify as the long-term unemployed who formed a “Pink Slip Club” and will talk about spending an evening with a home-health care aid in California on the eve of her eviction.

Garson is also the author of All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, The Electronic Sweatshop, and most recently, Money Makes the Work Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy.