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Labor-environmental Coalitions
In 1984, the oil, chemical and atomic workers began a 5-year campaign to win back the jobs of its members locked out by the BASF Corp. in Geismar, Louisiana. The multiscale campaign involved coalitions with local environmentalists as well as international solidarity from environmental and religious organizations. The local coalition which helped break the lockout was maintained and expanded in the 1990s. This alliance is one of numerous labor-community coalitions to emerge increasingly over the past 20 years.\"\"Labor-Environmental Coalitions: Lessons from a Louisiana Petrochemical Region\"\" traces the development of the Louisiana Labor-Neighbor Project from 1985 to the present, within the context of a long history of divisions between labor and community in the U.S. The Project continued after the lockout, thriving during 1990s, expanding from one community to four counties to include 20 local member organizations, and broadening its agenda from the original jobs crisis and pollution problems to address a wide range of worker, environmental health, and economic justice issues.\"\" Labor-Environmental Coalitions\"\" explores the dynamics of the Louisiana coalition to offer lessons for other coalition efforts. The book seeks to understand coalitions as a necessary strategy to counteract the dominant forces of capitalist development. The author contends that the Labor-Neighbor Project, like labor-community coalitions generally, created a unique blend of politics shaped by the geographic nature industry's politics; by the relative openness of government; and by the class experience of labor and community members.The Louisiana Project demonstrates that for labor-community coalitions to thrive they must broaden their agenda, strengthen their leadership and coalition-building skills, and develop access to multiscale resources. The author argues that for labor-community coalitions to have longer term political impact, they should adopt an explicitly progressive approach by building a broader class and cultural leadership, and by demanding state and corporate accountability on economic, public health, and environmental justice issues.
eBook
With God on our side : the struggle for Workers' Rights in a Catholic hospital
When unions undertake labor organizing campaigns, they often do so from strong moral positions, contrasting workers' rights to decent pay or better working conditions with the more venal financial motives of management. But how does labor confront management when management itself has moral legitimacy? In With God on Our Side , Adam D. Reich tells the story of a five-year campaign to unionize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, a Catholic hospital in California. Based on his own work as a volunteer organizer with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Reich explores how both union leaders and hospital leaders sought to show they were upholding the Catholic mission of the hospital against a market represented by the other. Ultimately, workers and union leaders were able to reinterpret Catholic values in ways that supported their efforts to organize.
More generally, Reich argues that unions must weave together economic and cultural power in order to ensure their continued relevancy in the postindustrial world. In addition to advocating for workers' economic interests, unions must engage with workers' emotional investments in their work, must contend with the kind of moral authority that Santa Rosa Hospital leaders exerted to dissuade workers from organizing, and must connect labor's project to broader conceptions of the public good.
eBook
Do women suffer from network closure?
That social capital matters is an established fact in the social sciences. Less clear, however, is how different forms of social capital affect gender disadvantages in career advancement. Focusing on a project-based type of labor market, namely the U.S. film industry, this study argues that women suffer a \"closure penalty\" and face severe career disadvantages when collaborating in cohesive teams. At the same time, gender disadvantages are reduced for women who build social capital in open networks with higher degrees of diversity and information flow. Using large-scale longitudinal data on career profiles of about one million performances by 97,657 film actors in 369,099 film productions between the years 1929 and 2010, I analyze career survival models and interaction effects between gender and different measures of social capital and information openness. Findings reveal that female actors have a higher risk of career failure than do their male colleagues when affiliated in cohesive networks, but women have better survival chances when embedded in open, diverse structures. This study contributes to the understanding of how and what type of social capital can be either a beneficial resource for otherwise disadvantaged groups or a constraining mechanism that intensifies gender differences in career advancement.
Journal Article
Benefits-sharing agreements and nonideal theory
Community members seek benefits-sharing planning agreements to advance their own distributive justice goals by directing benefits to communities. Nonideal theory does much to explain the context and possibilities for these agreements. The agreements forged between communities and development interests seek to address, but not completely achieve, distributive justice via consensus about incremental changes in project benefit distribution. However, implementation and outcomes can vary widely. This article develops theory to conceptualize a practical framework for these planning agreements using nonideal justice theories, granted the triple concerns of inaction, tokenism, and rhetorical trickery posed by ineffective implementation. The Crenshaw Light Rail Project in Los Angeles illustrates the issues in play.
Journal Article
What Economists Should Do
There is controversy among economists over just what it is that economists should do. The controversy is centered on the question whether what is called \"neoclassical\" or \"mainstream\" economics provides the appropriate template for performing economic analysis. Neoclassical economics is based on the principle that economic behavior is guided by \"rational choice, \" i.e., choice based on reason rather than sentiment. Challenges to this principle come from several fields of study: behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, Austrian economics, Keynesian economics, and others. A common thread running through these fields is that the rational choice assumption is unrealistic and therefore not useful for analyzing economic policy choices. It is important, however, to distinguish between economic policy choices, which are frequently irrational, and how individuals are observed to react to these choices. Examples of irrational policy choices are minimum wage laws, buy-American rules, and corporate tax increases. The job of the economist is to play a role akin to that of preachers, in exposing such choices for their irrationality. Mainstream economics shows that people react to these choices in a manner that impairs the performance of the economy.
eBook
New Labour and the European Union
This book explores Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s attempt to sell the European ideal to the British people. New Labour came to power in 1997 promising to modernize the country and make it fit for the twenty-first century. In foreign policy, Blair and Brown set about rethinking core components of the British national identity, especially the country’s relationship to its past and its role in the world. Rebranding Britain, they argued, meant helping the British people feel comfortably at home in the European Union. What did New Labour achieve and did its European policy succeed? How did Blair and Brown try and persuade the British to accept a European future? What were the obstacles they faced and the strategies they used to overcome them?This timely study of New Labour’s effort to build a ‘pro-European consensus’ in Britain argues that the government failed to live up to its early promises. Based on evidence from well over one hundred of Blair and Brown’s foreign policy speeches supplemented by interviews with policy-makers, advisers and speech-writers from the time, the book is sympathetic to the challenge New Labour set itself but also critical of the rhetorical techniques it used to advance the Europeanist cause. Trapped between a broadly hostile media and an apathetic public, Blair and Brown failed to provide the necessary leadership to see Britain to a European future. Theoretically informed, empirically robust and methodologically innovative, this novel book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary British foreign policy, the New Labour project and Euroscepticism in Britain.
eBook
Applying total interpretive structural modeling to study factors affecting construction labour productivity
Construction sector has always been dependent on manpower. Most of the activities carried out on any construction site are labour intensive. Since productivity of any project depends directly on productivity of labour, it is a prime responsibility of the employer to enhance labour productivity. Measures to improve the same depend on analysis of positive and negative factors affecting productivity. Major attention should be given to factors that decrease the productivity of labour. Factor analysis thus is an integral part of any study aiming to improve productivity. Interpretive structural modeling is a methodology for identifying and summarizing relationships among factors which define an issue or problem. It provides a means to arrange the factors in an order as per their complexity. This study attempts to use the latest version of interpretive structural modeling i.e. total interpretive structural modeling to analyze factors negatively affecting construction labour productivity. It establishes interpretive relationship among these factors facilitating improvement in the overall productivity of construction site.
Journal Article
With God on Our Side
When unions undertake labor organizing campaigns, they often do so from strong moral positions, contrasting workers' rights to decent pay or better working conditions with the more venal financial motives of management. But how does labor confront management when management itself has moral legitimacy? InWith God on Our Side, Adam D. Reich tells the story of a five-year campaign to unionize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, a Catholic hospital in California. Based on his own work as a volunteer organizer with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Reich explores how both union leaders and hospital leaders sought to show they were upholding the Catholic \"mission\" of the hospital against a market represented by the other. Ultimately, workers and union leaders were able to reinterpret Catholic values in ways that supported their efforts to organize.
More generally, Reich argues that unions must weave together economic and cultural power in order to ensure their continued relevancy in the postindustrial world. In addition to advocating for workers' economic interests, unions must engage with workers' emotional investments in their work, must contend with the kind of moral authority that Santa Rosa Hospital leaders exerted to dissuade workers from organizing, and must connect labor's project to broader conceptions of the public good.
eBook
New Labour and the European Union
A study of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's failed attempt to sell the European ideal to the British people. Based on an exhaustive survey of New Labour's foreign policy speeches after 1997 and interviews with policy-makers involved in the formulation of New Labour's foreign policy.
eBook