Cleaning Up: How Hospital Outsourcing Is Hurting Workers and Endangering Patients , by D. Zuberi
基于约100次访谈和实地观察，本书揭示了医院后勤外包如何导致工人待遇差、培训不足，进而助长病毒和耐药菌传播，最终伤害患者。
Researchers sensitive to the plight of low-wage workers in advanced industrialized economies have long sought to convey the magnitude of the problem by retelling sorrowful tales of worker exploitation.Sadly, even their most sympathetic readers have numbed to these accounts.Author Dan Zuberi has found a clever way to transcend this apathy in his new monograph based on about 100 interviews plus behind-the-scenes observations of the impact of hospital support staff outsourcing on patients and workers.Through a well-developed understanding of the work process and changes in the employment relationship, he ties outsourcing and the resulting exploitation of hospital cleaners and food service workers to the spread of viruses, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and other deadly pathogens.In so doing, he succeeds in delivering his intended take-home message that "worker exploitation hurts us all" (p. 124).In short, the author shows that when hospital work is outsourced, contract employers are forced to privilege cost minimization over all other objectives.The result is a poorly rewarded, ill-trained, sweated workforce exposed to deadly disease-causing agents and ill-equipped to contain their spread.Workers are denied simple supplies as well as the training to manage and contain these pathogens.They are structurally prevented from even constructive communication with members of the care team.As a result, they are not only exposed to disease-causing agents, but they also involuntarily facilitate their spread.Thus, he argues that "knocking down germs" requires "lifting-up workers" (p.125).At first glance, Zuberi's argument is familiar: The apparent financial benefits of outsourcing are a facade.Society-at-large assuredly fares worse, as employers' "race to the bottom" with respect to wages and working conditions forces workers to rely on government transfers and to forego involvement in their children's lives and in the communities around them.Even the benefits to the outsourcing