The work that many Americans do in such areas as manufacturing, health care, food service, and retail are also the jobs that “seldom enable families and communities to thrive,” especially during economic downturns or other catastrophic events like the pandemic. In this book, Iversen probes the nature of working- and middle-class jobs via interviews with workers from a variety of different social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds. Once considered the “land of opportunity,” the U.S. has seen “a decoupling of wages from productivity in virtually all…industries” since the 1970s. An interview with a Latina working mother named Tisha, for example, reveals the slow growth in income in the manufacturing sector between the late 1990s and the 2000s. Indeed, the best job she could get kept her just 22% above the federal income poverty level. Translating those wages in 2019 dollars, Iversen concluded that even a $ 15-per-hour minimum wage would likely not help workers on the lower end of the economic spectrum prosper. Alex and John, a gay middle-aged couple who worked, respectively, in real estate and architecture and lived through the Great Recession, offer perspectives as educated professionals. Both men experienced unemployment and, later, partial employment as contractors. Iversen suggests that the kinds of community and small-business organizations they joined could be transformed into “generative sites for compensated civil labor,” providing one way for workers—who will continue to be replaced by machines—to earn comfortable, living wages. This book will appeal to sociologists, social policy researchers, and anyone interested in how the predicaments of American workers may actually contain answers to how to navigate the uncertain waters of a rapidly evolving workplace.