My previous posts this week have focused on the difficulties and injustices faced by millions of American workers--wage stagnation, growing income inequality, managers treating their employees in shockingly callous ways. (It's all part of the systematic squeeze that I describe in my new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. See stevengreenhouse.com)

It's July Fourth--and I'm feeling patriotic--so today I will focus on some of what's good in America. Some corporations do not just a good job, but a great job, in how they treat those workers, and I want to focus on some of these stellar employers because we can all learn from them and because they should serve as models for all of corporate America.

The casino-hotels of Las Vegas sponsor an amazing, no-tuition training program in which a $22,000-a-year busboy can train to become a $50,000 a year waiter and even a $75,000 a year sommelier. Each year Patagonia, the outdoors apparel company, gives 40 employees two-month paid leaves to work for the environmental organization of their choice. With its headquarters 150 yards from the Pacific, Patagonia happily allows its employees to go surfing for two-and-a-half hours at lunch time, so long as they get the job done.

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During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush and many conservative commentators attacked Al Gore for engaging in "class warfare" after Gore promised to help the little guy and criticized Bush for favoring the rich. Four years later, the Republicans, using a page from the same playbook, attacked John Kerry and John Edwards for being populist class warriors because of their talk of Two Americas.

In this year's campaign, there's a big difference, at least so far. John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have all used robustly populist language about the problems facing America's have-nots, but this year the attacks for engaging in class warfare have largely disappeared.

The reason for this may well be that the news media, political commentators and even many Republicans have come to recognize that income inequality has grown far worse and that many Americans are angry about the widening gap between those at the top and everyone else.

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My 22-year-old daughter graduated from college in May, and I'm worried about her as she enters the workforce--actually I'm worried about her whole generation as it enters the workforce. Many young people don't realize that they face a far less friendly workplace than when my generation entered the workforce in the 1970s.

To tell the truth, when I began researching my book, The Big Squeeze, Tough Times for the American Worker, I wasn't planning a separate chapter on the nation's young workers--by that I mean, workers under age 35, and especially young Americans who have recently entered the workforce. But as I proceeded with my research, I was surprised and chagrined to learn how tough things have grown for young workers--and that was before the current economic downturn. As a result, I added a chapter, "Starting Out Means a Steeper Climb."

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Soccer moms step aside. In this year's campaign working-class voters have elbowed you aside as the demographic group that candidates covet most.

As Barack Obama and John McCain seek to outmaneuver each other in wooing John and Jane Punchclock, the question that leaps to the fore is, what do working-class voters want?

Some answers to that question became clear to me when I was interviewing hundreds of workers for my new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. (see www.stevengreenhouse.com) In many ways, working-class voters want what Harry Truman was promising: A Fair Deal, or at least a Fairer Deal.

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What ever happened to the golden rule?

That's what I often asked myself as I was researching my new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. I often felt amazed, even appalled by the way many corporate managers treated their workers. It's understandable that corporate managers have grown tougher in recent decades because foreign competition and Wall Street have placed ever-fiercer pressures on companies to cut costs. But that hardly explains why so many managers seem to have grown downright callous and why so many treat their workers with a shocking lack of dignity.

Unfortunately, I found a disconcertingly large number of real-life examples to draw from as I was writing The Big Squeeze (for more information, see www.stevengreenhouse.com), which seeks to explain the tough times that millions of American workers--white-collar and blue-collar, male and female, twenty-somethings and fifty-somethings--face as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown worse, job security has shriveled, and many workers have been pressured to work harder and faster.

One company fired a computer engineer on Take Your Daughters to Work Day as his eight-year-old daughter looked on. At Electronic Arts, the video games giant, some employees complained that they were required to work 30 days a month, 80 hours a week.

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