Labor reporter Greenhouse leaving NYTimes

Steven Greenhouse, the longtime labor reporter at The New York Times, has accepted the paper’s buyout offer and will be leaving the business news desk later this month.

On Twitter, Greenhouse wrote, “With great ambivalence, I’m taking NYT buyout. I plan to write a book & still write lots of articles on labor & other matters.”

Greenhouse has held that beat since October 1995.

He joined The Times in September 1983 as a business reporter, covering steel and other basic industries. He then spent two-and-a-half years as the newspaper’s Midwestern business correspondent based in Chicago. In 1987, he moved to Paris, where served as The Times’s European economics correspondent, covering everything from Western Europe’s economy to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. After five years in Paris, he became a correspondent in Washington for four years, first covering economics and the Federal Reserve and then the State Department and foreign affairs.

As labor and workplace reporter, he has covered many topics, including poverty among the nation’s farm workers, Wal-Mart stores locking in their workers at night, labor’s role in politics, the shortcomings of New York State’s workers compensation system and the battles to roll back collective bargaining rights for public employees.

Greenhouse, a native of Massapequa, N.Y., is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut (1973), the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1975) and the New York University School of Law (1982).

Immediately before joining The Times, he clerked for Judge Robert L. Carter of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. From 1976 to 1979, he was a reporter at the The Record in Hackensack, N.J.

His book, “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” was published in April 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf. “The Big Squeeze” was published in paperback in February 2009 and won the 2009 Sidney Hillman Book Prize for nonfiction.