Cleaning Up

Dan Zuberi is Associate Professor of Social Policy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Differences that Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada, also from Cornell.

• 1. "Stuff Gets Missed": An Introduction to a Growing Health Care Crisis2. Germs, Blood, and Cost-Cutting: The Daily Struggle to Keep Hospitals Clean3. Compromising Cleanliness: How Outsourcing Keeps Hospital Workers from Doing Their Jobs4. Untrained Workers, Unfit Managers5. Breaking Up the Team6. Down and Out in Vancouver: Struggling, Stressed, and Exhausted Hospital Support Workers7. Cleaning UpNotesReferencesIndex

Cleaning Up affords its readers crucial insight into the healthcare industry, closely examining thesocial and economic costs of profit-driven healthcare. Healthcare policy affects so many people:workers, patients, and all of their families. Zuberi succeeds in proving his point: it is time to take actionto improve our healthcare system.- Michelle A. Dressner (Monthly Labor Review) A book like this could easily read as a litany of woe and injustice, but the finalchapter, simply titled Cleaning Up, seeks to provide a roadmap forward thataddresses HAIs and worker justice....The book is written in an engaging and polemical style and the subject matterlends itself to catchy chapter titles and by-lines.- Shaun Ryan (Journal of Industrial Relations) Researchers sensitive to the plight of low-wage workers in advancedindustrialized economies have long sought to convey the magnitude ofthe 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 inhis new monograph based on about 100 interviews plus behind-the-scenes observations of the impact of hospital support staff outsourcingon patients and workers.- Adam Seth Litwin (Work and Occupations) While this empirically informed book makes for a quick and easy read, it is both informative and thought-provoking. Zuberi's book provides a wealth of evidence that the outsourcing of hospital jobs has resulted in deteriorating working conditions and that, in turn, such conditions are the cause of an increase in hospital acquired infections....undoubtedly a valuable addition to the literature on the quality of care in hospitals and its links to the privatisation and out-sourcing of healthcare services.- Eleanor K. Johnson (Sociology of Health and Illness)