Across the political spectrum, it seems as if the right to decent employment has disappeared from the agenda. Wars, natural disasters, and Donald Trump’s antics grab headlines while the closing of a major factory doesn’t register a blip. Even on the Left, a fatalistic acceptance of layoffs has numbed us to the human misery caused by contemporary capitalism’s widespread job insecurity.

Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It, a new book by labor educator Les Leopold, seeks to lay out the root causes of mass layoffs in our economy today and demonstrate that we need not accept them as inevitable.

Leopold cofounded the Labor Institute for popular worker education and authored the Runaway Inequality guide used by unions to train workers on combating wealth inequality. Leopold’s latest book carries on the same tradition of taking on big-picture issues of political economy in a straightforward way that most working people can understand.