FOR THE RECORD

As the national labor reporter for The New York Times, Steve Greenhouse spends much of his time dealing with private-sector workplace issues, as well as covering local municipal union battles (a decade ago he broke the story that District Council 37 had rigged its 1996 wage contract vote).

His new book published last week by Knopf, "The Big Squeeze," which is subtitled, "Tough Times for the American Worker," makes a pretty good case for the benefits of being a unionized city employee by showing just how rough it's become for the rest of the workforce.

"One of the least examined but most important trends taking place in the United States today is the broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers - white-collar and blue-collar workers, middle-class and low-end workers - that began nearly three decades ago, gradually gathered momentum, and hit with full force soon after the turn of this century," Mr. Greenhouse writes.

"That the American worker faces this squeeze in the early years of this century is particularly troubling because the squeeze has occurred while the economy, corporate profits, and worker productivity have all been growing robustly. In recent years, a disconcerting disconnect has emerged, with corporate profits soaring while workers' wages stagnated."

He uses statistics to illustrate the disparity, writing, "For male workers, the average wage has actually slid by 5 percent since 1979. Worker productivity, meanwhile, has climbed 60 percent. If wages had kept pace with productivity, the average full-time worker would be earning $58,000 a year; $36,000 was the average in 2007."

One result, he notes, is that "Despite strong economic growth, the number of Americans living in poverty jumped by 15 percent from 2000 to 2006 - an increase of 5.4 million to 36.5 million."

Wal-Mart was praised last week by Mayor Bloomberg for its joining him in an initiative meant to better regulate gun sales across the country, but the titan of superstores has played a pivotal role in the erosion of wages and benefits in this country, Mr. Greenhouse writes. Last year, it paid its average full-time worker $19,100 - more than $1,000 below the poverty line for a family of four.

A primary force in the squeeze on American workers, Mr. Greenhouse states, has been the policies of the Bush Administration on matters from the minimum wage to worker training and safety.

"Even though the workforce has grown from 90 million to 145 million over the past three decades," the book states, "the number of federal wage and hour investigators has fallen."

In the two years prior to the 2006 explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia that killed 12 miners, the company was cited 273 times by Federal inspectors for safety violations, but it was never fined more than $460 for a violation, Mr. Greenhouse notes. This amounted to pocket change for the mine's owner, which reported annual profits of $110 million, and the U.S. Mine and Safety Health Administration during the first five years of the Bush Administration "failed to collect fines in almost half the cases in which it levied them."

This was just one example of why under the current President it has become "harder for beleaguered workers to turn to government for help," Mr. Greenhouse writes. "When investigators unearthed serious child labor violations at a dozen Wal-Marts, officials in the Bush Labor Department signed a highly unusual secret agreement promising to give Wal-Mart fifteen days' advance notice whenever inspectors planned to visit a Wal-Mart store to look for more such violations. Wal-Mart officials had been major donors to the Republican Party."

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Our favorite moment in last week's episode of "30 Rock" was not Mayor Bloomberg's cameo at the beginning presenting an award for a subway-track rescue to Dennis Duffy, the on-again, off-again boyfriend of protagonist Liz Lemon.

Rather, it occurred at the end of the show when Mr. Duffy, played by Dean Winters, told Tina Fey's Liz that his brief fame showed him what his life could have been like if he had passed the test for Firefighter.

"You failed the Firefighter exam?" Liz said incredulously. "Yeah," Dennis replied, "it's totally biased against the Irish, y'know?"