union organizing

241 results back to index


pages: 423 words: 92,798

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Faith-based organizing has no such exigencies, and faith-based organizers and organizations often take several years to build to something like an initial majority or to take a first action.18 For all of these reasons, union organizers, much more than faith-based organizers, must hone their skills in identifying organic leaders, persuading constituents, and developing what union organizers call structure tests. Of course, since the McCarthy era, most unions haven’t even attempted to organize unorganized workers, run strikes, or win high-participation contract-ratification votes.19 This book’s purpose is to draw lessons for power building from the best examples of success under the most difficult conditions. This book is not about union organizing; it is about organizing. That unions are the focus is a hint to social scientists and the intelligentsia that the failure to study or understand unions as social movements has resulted in a lack of understanding of the most effective way to build power.

This alone is a radical difference from faith-based settings; it means union organizers have to be really good at the art of what is called the one-on-one conversation, often the first engagement between organizers and potential recruits. There also isn’t a do-or-die hard assessment of whether or not faith-based organizers have succeeded in winning a majority of congregants, since there are no government-supervised elections in each church to reveal the number of new organization members. Dues collection, through tithing, incentivizes faith-based organizers to push for as many new members as possible, but the legal structures around union organizing make winning a majority in a union election or a strike a matter of absolute necessity.

The day in, day out degradation of peoples’ self-worth is what can drive workers to form the solidarity needed to face today’s union busters. Earning my doctorate after long practical experience—as a young, radical student leader, then as a community organizer, a full-time educator at the Highlander Center, and, eventually, a union organizer and chief negotiator and an electoral campaign manager—I find it impossible to sort the process of progressive social change into two distinct piles or traditions. All of the unions I worked with were by any definition social movements, characterized by progressive goals that reached well beyond the workplace; prefigurative decision-making; and robust participation by workers, their families, and their communities.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

When NagaWorld fired four hundred workers, Chhim negotiated hard and won them their jobs back. Journalists compared the women’s militancy to that of textile workers in the 1970s American South. “NagaWorld Staff Go Norma Rae,” one headline blared. Norma Rae was the fictional name given to North Carolina textile union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton, played by Sally Field in the 1979 Oscar-winning film. In Cambodia, where two-thirds of workers are under thirty, Norma Rae and the J. P. Stevens textile strike immortalized in the film are relics of a distant time and place. Still, the young Cambodian rebel girls enjoyed the comparison.

In Johannesburg, Accra, Providence, Karachi, and London, hotel housekeepers demanded lighter duties for pregnant workers, and panic buttons that housekeepers can push to bring help if a man corners them inside a room. In Chicago, workers staged “Hands Off, Pants On” protests. Before the protests, UNITE HERE released a study showing that half of hotel housekeepers and three-quarters of casino workers experience unwanted sexual advances. The need is clear.16 Philippine garment union organizer Asuncion Binos held a press conference condemning politicians for placing corporate profits over the safety of women workers. “It is lamentable that our lawmakers have always struggled to pass laws and craft policies for . . . global competitiveness,” she said, “but leave behind women’s protection.”

Housekeepers showed up at city council hearings when the Procaccianti Group sought permits to construct new buildings. In October 2015, when workers at the Renaissance voted to unionize, Brito felt victorious. She still struggles with pain, but life is now getting better, she says. Union housekeepers clean fewer rooms and have more time to finish their work, so they no longer feel like cleaning machines. Union organizing has also made Brito feel more human, she says. She enjoys speaking at rallies, bargaining, helping other workers give their children a brighter future. By 2017, with Rhode Island’s minimum still only $9.60 an hour, service workers seeking raises began reaching out to sympathetic business owners.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

In 2011, they were joined by Occupy Wall Street’s militant street protests and then waves of public sector strikes as teachers took to picket lines in 2018–2019 across the country, raising the possibility of labor’s renewal even in Trump country. This momentum was undone by the pandemic. Strikes, walkouts, and other large protests weren’t as common in 2020, and no national march for essential workers flooded the DC Mall. Successful new union organizing drives also experienced a historic low.16 Yet the pandemic activism that did happen was perhaps even more important. In some cases, workers forced their managers, bosses, and corporate boards to provide lifesaving safety protocols, more paid sick days, raises, and better healthcare and other benefits.

During an executive meeting one week later, Amazon’s general counsel David Zapolsky, in notes that were leaked to Vice magazine, wrote: “He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers.”1 Zapolsky continued: “We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety.… Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”2 It’s hard to imagine a worse calculation. “Amazon wants to make this about me,” he responded in a prepared statement. “But whether Jeff Bezos likes it or not, this is about Amazon workers—and their families—everywhere,” he said. “Instead of protecting workers and the communities in which they work, however, Amazon seems to be more interested in managing its image.… This is not about me.

Multiple factors account for the decline in strike activity. The economy was operating at reduced capacity. With so many businesses closed, there were fewer workers who could strike. The record unemployment levels of 2020 made those who still had jobs feel like the “lucky ones,” hardly positioned to speak out. Union organizers, who are crucial to helping workers coordinate a strike, had almost no access to worksites. Sadly, some major labor leaders seemed to implicitly endorse the status quo, impeding workers’ fights for better working conditions. In April 2020, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, Chris Shelton of Communications Workers of America, Mary Kay Henry of Service Employees International Union, and James P.


pages: 152 words: 40,733

A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 by Claire Hartfield

desegregation, Ferguson, Missouri, indoor plumbing, new economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, strikebreaker, union organizing

When Gustavus Swift died suddenly in 1903, acknowledged by the Tribune as having “revolutionized the industry,” his son Louis filled his shoes without missing a beat. In contrast, time after time, quarrels between skilled and unskilled laborers left the work force weak and defeated. In 1903, the meatpacking laborers got a new leader, a passionate union organizer named Michael Donnelly. Their union, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, also got a new motto: Unity of all rank and file workers, “from the man who takes the bullock on the hoof until it goes into the hands of the consumer.” It was a new day. Interpreters were enlisted to reach out to workers in their own native languages and to translate speeches for them at rallies.

A workers’ strike could cut off food supplies, jeopardizing the war effort. Wilson was not about to let that happen. He took charge, stripping away the right to strike and appointing Judge Samuel Alschuler as federal administrator to arbitrate all disputes between the packers and the union. In February 1918, the union organized the people of Packingtown to tell their story to Judge Alschuler. Referring to a novel published in 1906 about Packingtown’s crumbling, disease-ridden community, union leader William Z. Foster commented, “It was as if the characters in The Jungle, quickened to life, had come to tell their story from the witness chair.”

Union leaders continued to press for unity, but they were talking against a tide of hate and mistrust. Whites wanted to force blacks to join the union. Blacks continued to resist. On the shop floor, fights broke out on a regular basis—barrages of racial and ethnic slurs, sometimes supported by guns and knives. Whites complained of black agitators who physically intimidated union organizers. One white union man accused a black laborer of threatening to split him open with a meat cleaver. Blacks complained of having bricks thrown at them. One man recalled, “Six or seven or eight Polocks [sic] grabbed a colored fellow out there . . . and said, ‘you son-of-a-bitch, you will join the union,’ . . . and one had him by this arm, and the other by this arm, and one fellow had him by the neck.”


Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

Economy," paper presented to the 17th International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Los Angeles, 253. Catherine Fisk, Daniel Mitchell Immigrant Janitors in Southern California," conference paper, 'Immigrants and Union Organizing in California," 254. The Sept. 1992. and Christopher Erickson, "Union Representation of May 1998. labor joumalist David Bacon has written scores of insightful articles covering both the labor upsurge in Southern California and the first stirrings of independent union- New Immigrants, Old Unions: Organizing Undocumented Workers in Los Angeles, Philadelphia 1993; "The Los Ange- ism les in the border maquiladoras. In addition, see Hector Delgado, Manvifacturing Action Project: Lessons Learned, an Opportunity Squandered?"

UPRISING OF THE MILLION Ana Alvarado is a Salvadorean fifteen years she kyo's luxurious New made beds and scrubbed hub of the toilets in Little To- Otani Hotel - one of the crown jewels of the thirty-year crusade to redevelop rate immigrant to Los Angeles. For Pacific downtown Los Angeles as a corpo- Rim. In 1995 she was fired for supporting a New union organizing drive. Suites at the owned by Kajima, the world's second largest construction conglom- erate) Otani (developed and go for anywhere from $475 to $1800 per night, but most of the hotel's staff (70 percent Latino, 25 percent Asian) earn Motel Six wages. After repeated pleas for help from a group of pro-union workers, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 11- led by a dynamic young full-scale the Latina, Maria-Elena organizing drive in 1993.

C£ Carol Zabin, "Organizing Latino Workers in the Los Angeles Manufacturing The Case of American Racing Equipment Company," unpubhshed research paper, U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, 1998; Ruth Milkman and Kent Wong, "The 1992 Southern 140. Sector: California Drywall Strike," conference paper, "Immigrants May fornia," 1998; and David Bacon, Unions and and Union Organizing in the Upsurge of Immigrant Workers, Cali- North- em California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, n.p., n.d. 141. Diana Marcum, "The Busboys of San Miguel," Los Angeles Times Magazine, 14 Dec. 1997. 142. Robert Rouse, "Mexican Migration," in David Guiterrez, Mexican Immigrants 143. Maria de los in the United States, Wilmington, Del. 1996, ed., Between Two Worlds, p. 253.


pages: 572 words: 134,335

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

‘By holding out the possibility of international trade unionism’, a trade-union leader wrote, ‘the ITSs and WCCs have simultaneously held back the development of stronger forms of working-class organisation and smoothed the way for the further growth of the Transnational Corporations.’77 Pointing out the selective solidarity of the WCC’s, Etty and Tudyka in their study quote a UAW pamphlet stating that the WCC’s are ‘an insurance for the strong and at the same time the best hope of strength for the weak’.78 However, the Kennedy offensive stopped far short of the full internationalization of US industrial relations, and by the late 1960s Atlantic unity at the level of the comprehensive international trade union organizations was breaking down. As we shall see in the next chapter, in line with the brief hegemony of an independent-spirited corporate-liberal bourgeoisie in Europe, the Fordist compromise would be recast in a European framework, in which the German co-determination tradition would become the frame of reference for European trade-union organization. The Flow of Portfolio Capital The acceleration of the internationalization of American capital after the establishment of the EEC affected the various segments of the bourgeoisie associated with it differently.

Between 1920 and 1930, the Rockefellers acquired the Equitable Life insurance group and the Chase National Bank, putting Winthrop Aldrich, John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s brother-in-law, in charge of their operation.7 The contribution of the Rockefellers to the characteristic profile of the state-monopoly tendency in the USA lay in two areas. In the field of labour relations, they developed a strategy of preempting trade-union organization via industrial representation schemes. After the Ludlow massacre of 1914, in which a tent camp of Colorado Fuel & Iron strikers was machine-gunned and burnt down, killing eleven children, J.D. Rockefeller, Jr., who was the principal owner of the company, began to venture into the labour-relations field.

At the very level of international trade-union cooperation, the Soviet Union also found itself on the defensive. At the high tide of wartime Allied cooperation in December 1943, the TUC announced plans to hold a world trade-union conference for 1944. Its proposal to include the Soviet trade unions in the preparations for a new international trade-union organization led to the AFL’s refusal to take part and ushered in the CIO. In the course of 1945, two conferences led to the foundation of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in September. United Nations recognition of the new organization, however, was withheld after the AFL galvanized British and American opposition.90 On the other hand, the Americans invested greater energy in reviving the old International Labor Organization (ILO), which was integrated into the United Nations framework.


pages: 200 words: 72,182

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Alan Greenspan, business process, full employment, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, McMansion, PalmPilot, place-making, post-work, sexual politics, telemarketer, union organizing, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero day

Rules against “gossip,” or even “talking,” make it hard to air your grievances to peers or—should you be so daring—to enlist other workers in a group effort to bring about change, through a union organizing drive, for example. Those who do step out of line often face little unexplained punishments, such as having their schedules or their work assignments unilaterally changed. Or you may be fired; those low-wage workers who work without union contracts, which is the great majority of them, work “at will,” meaning at the will of the employer, and are subject to dismissal without explanation. The AFL-CIO estimates that ten thousand workers a year are fired for participating in union organizing drives, and since it is illegal to fire people for union activity, I suspect that these firings are usually justified in terms of unrelated minor infractions.

My next stop is Winn-Dixie, the supermarket, which turns out to have a particularly onerous application process, featuring a twenty-minute “interview” by computer since, apparently, no human on the premises is deemed capable of representing the corporate point of view. I am conducted to a large room decorated with posters illustrating how to look “professional” (it helps to be white and, if female, permed) and warning of the slick promises that union organizers might try to tempt me with. The interview is multiple-choice: Do I have anything, such as child care problems, that might make it hard for me to get to work on time? Do I think safety on the job is the responsibility of management? Then, popping up cunningly out of the blue: How many dollars' worth of stolen goods have I purchased in the last year?

It whittles you down to he up to fifty times in the space of the fifteen minutes or so it takes to do a “survey,” even when there's a higher moral purpose to serve. Equally draining is the effort to look both perky and compliant at the same time, for half an hour or more at a stretch, because while you need to evince “initiative,” you don't want to come across as someone who might initiate something like a union organizing drive. Then there is the threat of the drug tests, hanging over me like a fast-approaching SAT It rankles—at some deep personal, physical level—to know that the many engaging qualities I believe I have to offer—friendliness, reliability, willingness to learn—can all be trumped by my pee.[23] In a spirit of contrition for multiple sins, I decide to devote the weekend to detox.


pages: 264 words: 74,785

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland

collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, Ford Model T, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair

From then on, wherever he goes in Flint Mortimer finds a car full of men observing his movements. Pinkerton detectives, maybe. The Pinks had a history of breaking strikes, going all the way back to Homestead in 1892. The Flint Common Council, which not surprisingly is under the influence of General Motors, has passed a number of ordinances intended to thwart union organizing efforts such as Mortimer’s. It is illegal to hand out literature on the street. It is illegal to use an amplifier to broadcast a message or speech. “To organize Flint, a town that was so completely dominated by the General Motors Corporation, would not be easy,” he writes in Organize! “An indescribable cloud of fear hung over the city, and it was next to impossible to find anyone who would discuss the union, or who would be seen in my company, much less to help in building one. . . .

The march is scheduled for eight o’clock that night. The hammer men are just waiting for Boysen’s OK. (Among the anti-union autoworkers are members of the Black Legion. The legion is a Midwestern offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan that considers the labor movement a Communist front and that has previously murdered and terrorized union organizers in Michigan.) “Violence begets violence,” Boysen’s fellow businessmen warn him. They’ve promised Governor Murphy that the strike will be settled peacefully. “I’m going to do it anyway,” Boysen says defiantly. The men lock the hotel-room door. “You got to fight both of us,” one tells Boysen, “but you are not going to get out of this room at eight o’clock.”

He appoints a director of industrial relations to deal with labor. Under his chairmanship, GM spends nearly $1 million on Pinkerton detectives who infiltrate the plants and report on organizing efforts. Sloan’s undercover operations are a deliberate contrast to the labor relations of Henry Ford, who employs an armed goon named Harry Bennett to intimidate union organizers. Public relations is a new profession, but Sloan understands it well enough to see that labor violence would be bad for GM’s brand. Working out of GM’s New York headquarters, though, Sloan has little contact with, or understanding of, the corporation’s Midwestern workforce. The sit-down strike takes Sloan by surprise, but once the strikers shut down his plants, he becomes the voice of resistance to the union, signing his name to the somewhat paternalistic manifestos that appear in the Flint Journal and other regional newspapers.


pages: 196 words: 55,862

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Someone in Paris had told us how fascist gangs travelled to Calais to beat up people in the jungle, and the police didn’t stop them. About a week later, a friend of mine designed us a parody logo. It was the Deliveroo Kangaroo, but the V-shaped ears were joined by a V-shaped two finger salute, meaning it looked like the kangaroo (i.e. the worker) was swearing at you. We wanted to link it to the two main unions organizing in Deliveroo, so we approached the IWW and IWGB and asked for their support. They happily gave it. The next step was to set up a network of workers to help produce and distribute it. There was no point in writing this thing and putting it out online in the hope someone picked it up – it had to go directly into the hands of workers across the country, and it had to be written by workers across the country.

They were an hourly paid zone, and many of them were facing cuts to their regular hours week-on-week. In December, rumours of a move to a full piece rate had led to a concerted effort to organize. They built a union base of around thirty workers. Then things started to go wrong. Two of the main union organizers in the city had their contracts terminated, and five more organizers had their fixed hours cut even further. However, they didn’t give up. They launched a campaign of strikes and demonstrations demanding the changes were reversed. As a result, the terminated organizers were given their jobs back, and the rest had their hours returned to normal.

Alfred DeMaria ‘specialises in combating union organisational campaigns and in developing programs to keep companies operating in a union-free environment’.13 He is, in short, a leading scab lawyer. DeMaria has written in a union-busting journal that: ‘Employer awareness of how employees can use new media tools, including social media and dedicated apps, to interact among themselves and with union organizers is absolutely necessary for maintaining nonunion status. Employers who ignore this potential stealth activity risk their union free status’ [emphasis mine].14 Alquati’s concept of invisible organization has a parallel in the bosses’ own literature. The 2018 Brazilian truck strike was one of the strongest examples of this phenomenon so far.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

The Lassalleans wanted to form a socialist political party and win reforms through the ballot box. In particular, they advocated for state funding for a network of cooperatives. Since they believed in an “iron law of wages,” they didn’t think there was a point in trade union activity. The Marxists took the opposite tack, believing that years of trade union organizing were needed before the ground would be ready for a socialist party. The Lassalleans managed to wrestle control of the Workingmen’s Party, with its leaders denouncing the 1877 strikes as futile. Many party activists, however, were actively engaged in the Great Railroad Strike. One was Albert Parsons.

The Communists were so far to the left that in 1919, amid the most important strike wave in US history, they denounced left-wing trade unionists like their future leader William Z. Foster. Without a base in the labor movement the Communists made pronouncements such as, “The revolution is the real issue in the steel strike,” and called for “the destruction of existing trade union organizations.”29 The Comintern fought against these isolating tendencies and tried to forge a multiracial movement that could win over non-Communist workers. It pushed radicals to work above ground, as well as within the AFL. At the Comintern’s Second Congress, international Communist leader Karl Radek noted that the massive postwar uptick in unionism had benefited reformist, not revolutionary, unions and that “there is no tactical advantage in our stubbornly refusing to join the A.F. of L.”

When a Daughters of the American Revolution chapter neglected to do its annual commemoration of Paul Revere’s famous ride, the Young Communist League hired a rider, dressed him up like a Minuteman, and had him gallop down Broadway with a sign reading “The DAR forgets, but the YCL remembers.”35 Less ridiculously, beyond its key role in trade union organizing, the party engaged with New Deal sentiments and shaped a broader left-liberal movement through its front groups such as the National Negro Congress and the American Student Union. The CPUSA amassed not just eighty-five thousand members but also a much larger network of fellow travelers. Communists came to play a prominent role in American cinema, music, and the arts.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Quite likely the effect will be to accelerate just what you’ve been describing—a flow of productive labor to Mexico. There’s a brutal and repressive dictatorship there, so it’s guaranteed wages will be low. During what’s been called the “Mexican economic miracle” of the last decade, their wages have dropped 60%. Union organizers get killed. If the Ford Motor Company wants to toss out its work force and hire super cheap labor, they just do it. Nobody stops them. Pollution goes on unregulated. It’s a great place for investors. One might think that NAFTA, which includes sending pro - ductive labor down to Mexico, might improve their real wages, maybe level the two countries.

Along with the increasing hours of work comes increasing harshness of work conditions, increasing insecurity and, because of the decline of unions, reduced ability to protect oneself. In the Reagan years, even the minimal government programs for protecting workers against workplace accidents and the like were reduced, in the interest of maximizing profits. The absence of constructive options, like union organizing, leads to violence. Labor [Harvard professor] Elaine Bernard and [union official] Tony Mazzocchi have been talking about creating a new labor-based party. What are your views on that? I think that’s an important initiative. The US is becoming very depoliticized and negative. About half the population thinks both political parties should be disbanded.

The leading financial journal in Mexico, which is very pro-NAFTA, estimated that Mexico would lose about 25% of its manufacturing capacity in the first few years and about 15% of its manufacturing labor force. In addition, cheap US agricultural exports are expected to drive several million people off the land. That’s going to mean a substantial increase in the unemployed workforce in Mexico, which of course will drive down wages. On top of that, union organizing is essentially impossible. Corporations can operate internationally, but unions can’t—so there’s no way for the work force to fight back against the internationalization of production. The net effect is expected to be a decline in wealth and income for most people in Mexico and for most people in the US.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

At the quarterly company assemblies, the head of IBM’s works council, Berger, reported on employee numbers as well as on the rate of union organization: of 2,141 employees in Böblingen and Sindelfingen in 1953, for example, 1,611 were union members, a total of 75 percent of all employees, with 93.8 percent of the 1,425 blue-collar employees and 38.4 percent of the 716 white-collar employees being organized in national unions.24 Berger also explained the reasons for organizing in national unions and even urged IBM employees to join their unions and achieve 100 percent union organization.25 German IBM employees thus continued their German tradition of organizing in national unions.

And if you work in tech, whether you write code for Uber or drive for it, whether you design network-attached storage devices or military drones, take the initiative to start organizing for the future even as you try to build it: because when you cannot make a difference as an individual you can still make a difference in a group. Talk to your coworkers and share your salary information to help all of you get equal pay. Schedule a meeting with a union organizer. Volunteer and join coalitions in your community. A fire can be extinguished, but it can’t be extinguished one cup of water at a time. Going forward, we have the same task in front of us that people trying to recover from a disaster always have: gather support from the bottom to force change at the top.

In West Germany, by contrast, the notion of the “family as a refuge” from outside influences (Fluchtburg Familie) promoted the idea that families provided security against the intrusions of (Communist or National Socialist) totalitarian governments as well as against the degrading forces of individualism, materialism, and secularism.22 Labor Organization in IBM’s German Subsidiary Of course, there was no such thing as an IBM family. But Mr. Watson’s gendered family rhetoric shaped IBM’s German labor relations, even if not precisely in the way he intended. In particular, Mr. Watson proved unable to achieve the major goal of welfare capitalism: to prevent union organization. The way that unionization and employee relations played out differently in IBM’s German subsidiary reminds us that labor relations are local affairs, different from country to country and sometimes even region to region—an important consideration in an international unionization drive. In Germany, the corporate constitution law of 1952 regulated a form of corporate governance called codetermination.23 Like all large companies—with over 1,000 employees in the iron and steel industry and over 2,000 employees in all other sectors—IBM Germany therefore had an elected works council that represented employees in grievance procedures and advocated for social benefits such as a pension system in the mid-1950s.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Report and Recommendations of the President of the IBRD to Executive Directors on a Proposed Structural Adjustment Loan to the Republic of the Philippines, Report no. P-2872-PH (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, August 21, 1980), p. 31. 47. Bello et al., Development Debacle, p. 170. 48. Elvira, Philippine trade union organizer, interviewed by Ellen Augustine, February 12, 2006. Hereafter cited as Elvira interview. 49. Marivic, Philippine trade union organizer, interviewed by Ellen Augustine, February 12, 2006. 50. Sta Ana interview. 51. Riza Bernabe, program coordinator of the Small Farms and Agricultural Trade Center of Centro Saka, interviewed by Ellen Augustine, February 5, 2006.

Steve took it upon himself to find someone who could be an editor and also serve as a sleuth: he’d have to ferret out prospective writers and convince them that loyalty to country, family, and future generations on every continent demanded that they participate in this book. After an extensive selection process, he, his staff, and I settled on Steven Hiatt. Steve is a professional editor—but he also has a long history as an activist, first against the Vietnam War and then as a teachers’ union organizer. In addition, he worked for a number of years at Stanford Research Institute, a think tank and consultancy organization serving multinationals and government agencies around the world and closely linked to Bechtel, Bank of America, and other players in the EHM world. There he worked on research reports that he describes as essentially “the corporatocracy talking to itself.”

Even Costa Rica, Peru, and Mexico, traditionally neoliberal strongholds, have experienced presidential elections almost entirely dominated by debate over trade liberalization.9 The global justice movement has also matured. For example, under the influence of unions such as Unite! and the Service Employees International Union, organized labor in the U.S. changed from first supporting corporate globalization to then supporting only instances that helped U.S. workers and then to a broader opposition grounded in the reality of the shared sacrifice of workers everywhere. In the U.S., white activists and NGOs have become less dominant, as farmworker, immigrant, nonunionized labor, and youth movements increasingly take the lead.


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

It eventually led me to spend years studying Chinese investment in Africa, knocking on countless factory doors, sweet-talking reticent Chinese owners into letting me onto the premises, and cajoling them into trusting me with their stories. I’ve visited more than fifty Chinese factories in Africa and talked to numerous Chinese businesspeople involved in other African sectors, along with a hundred-odd African workers, entrepreneurs, government officials, journalists, and union organizers who are partnering with and responding to Chinese interest in their countries in a variety of ways. It was on one of these research trips in eastern Nigeria that I had my aha! moment. At the end of a long, hot day of visiting factories, I showed up at the address of my last appointment and found myself in a courtyard ringed by buildings painted blue and white.

She had become a shop steward, the union representative on the factory floor—that linchpin figure responsible for signing up workers, collecting dues, and channeling grievances. She had spent nearly eight years working in a clothing factory while also being active in the union, so when the factory she worked in closed, the union asked her to join as a full-time organizer. I met two other female union organizers that day: Mampoi and Mopa. Mampoi had become active in the movement after experiencing discrimination at the factory where she worked. Mopa had worked at a denim factory for years before being fired, but still organized workers there to demand improved conditions. Her highest-priority demand?

People adapt, learn new skills, provide for their families, invent new futures, perhaps find voices they didn’t know they had. I’m reminded of Mopa’s description of her fight to get heaters in her factory—a long struggle that spanned her employment there, her being fired by that factory, and her becoming a full-time union organizer negotiating repeatedly with her former employer. She remembers being called into a meeting with the factory’s management and being told that after so much uncertainty over so many years, it had happened. It was only heaters, but it was real change, and it was finally here. “You cry for so many years,” she said.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

One-quarter of almost 500 corporate executives who responded to a 1992 Wall Street Journal survey, for example, confessed to exploiting the threat of relocating abroad under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a bargaining tool in wage talks.22 And, Scott’s report for EPI concluded that more than 50 percent of union organizing campaigns in the mid-1990s featured corporate spokesmen threatening to close some or all of the target plants.23 The use of such intimidation tactics doubled in elections monitored by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) after NAFTA was enacted in 1993.24 Cornell economist Kate Bronfenbrenner examined the impact of NAFTA on union-organizing elections in 1998 and 1999. Threats of offshoring notably reduced the organizers’ election success to 38 percent compared to 51 percent in elections where such threats were absent.25 The Reagan era has delivered precisely what many voted against in 1980.

And that support has remained steadfast in the modern era, as indicated by this 1986 pastoral letter from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: “No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself.”48 The success of wage compression tactics targeting unions in the Reagan era is indicated not only by wage stagnation, but also by the union share of the private sector workforce, which has dwindled to below 7 percent from 35 percent in the 1950s; including the public sector, that share has dropped to about 11 percent. A major reason has been the barriers erected during the Reagan era to union organizing. A comparison with Canadian law and practice is instructive. While the share of employees interested in joining unions is similar to the US, membership is nearly three times higher in Canada because labor organizers face fewer roadblocks. Indeed, the Canadian membership rate is close to the US rate during the golden age, when organizing rights were better enforced.49 As Kris Warner with the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research noted, a Canadian union is generally recognized once a majority of employees indicate intent to join over employer objections.

“Employers found out they could just ignore the Wagner Act and fire pro-union workers right before so-called ‘secret-ballot’ elections; they found out there was no real limit on what they could use as a threat.”52 These public relations campaigns were conducted in conjunction with niche law firms specializing in union busting. Lawyers taught executive suites where enforcement was weak, how to bend the rules, and how to greatly muddy the simplicity of union-organizing elections. New York Times journalist David Leonhardt explained: “Companies pay minimal penalties for illegally trying to bar unions and have become expert at doing so, legally and otherwise.”53 The ultimate goal was to slow-walk the union election process, in order to buy time for executive suites to ferret out and fire union sympathizers.


pages: 385 words: 133,839

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, Internet Archive, laissez-faire capitalism, market design, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

Unconvinced, the Guatemalans appealed to the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), a Geneva-based super-union, which issued a call to boycott Coke in Novem­ ber 1979 and instigated work stoppages at Coke plants in Finland, Swe­ den, and New Zealand. As the situation quickly grew out of hand, the company assured critics that it would not be renewing Trotter’s contract when it expired in 1981. Meanwhile, the rampage continued, with four more union organizers killed. Street protests against Coke in Guatemala led to a dramatic fall in the company’s market share. Finally, the pressure was too much for Coke to stall any longer. Even though it had repeatedly claimed it could do 1 54 THE COKE MACHINE nothing until the contract expired, company execs flew to Houston in July 1980 to present Trotter with an offer he couldn’t refuse—a generous buy­ out by two handpicked bottling executives, with most of the financing provided by Coke Atlanta, and no questions asked.

In September 1999, they issued an arrest warrant not only for Cepillo, but for Marín and Milan as well, declaring them under investigation for mur­ “SYRUP IN THE VEINS” 183 der, terrorism, and kidnapping. The evidence “leaves not the slightest doubt that [Milan] and [Marín] were behind inducing and encouraging the paramilitary group to finish off the union organization at the com­ pany,” prosecutors wrote, saying their behaviors “demonstrate there was a preconceived plan . . . leading to the dissolution of the union.” Both Milan and Marín declared their innocence, claiming that they’d never met with paramilitaries or threatened the union—in fact, they said, they’d been threatened by paramilitaries themselves.

With that view in mind, he traveled to Barrancabermeja that first trip to gather stories of union officials, including the local president of SINAL­ TRAINAL, William Mendoza. On his second trip, in March 2001, he heard about the case of Isidro Gil, which immediately struck him as a flagrant use of paramilitaries to rub out union organizing. “Here you have a guy killed within the walls of the plant by paramilitaries,” he says. “He was killed after the manager threatened to wipe out the union. The para­ militaries returned, gathered all the workers within the plant, told them to resign from the union or they would be killed.” In his mind, the finger pointed all the way up to the top.


pages: 934 words: 135,736

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990 by Mary Fulbrook

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, centre right, classic study, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, Sinatra Doctrine, union organizing, unorthodox policies

With the Page 22 continued expansion of industrial capitalism, the 'old' middle classes the small producers, shopkeepers and traders found their already declining position ever more threatened. New sections of the population were increasingly politicized: with many men away at the front, and with the large numbers of war casualties, women and young people were drawn into sectors of the economy in which they had not previously worked, and gained first-hand experience of union organization, confrontation with employers, and notions of 'class war'. Even those women who were not part of the paid labour market may have become somewhat politicized through the sheer struggle for survival, and the realization that the government rather than the individual might be held responsible for the difficulties they found in feeding their families.

Again, these tendencies predated the onset of economic recession, and weakened the internal structure of Weimar democracy even before it was subjected to the sustained battering of the depression years. As early as 1923, employers had mounted an effective attack on the eight-hour-day agreed in the Stinnes Legien agreement of 1918; and the failure of the Zentral-Arbeits-Gemeinschaft (ZAG) to resolve industrial disputes led to the official resignation Page 48 of the trade union organization, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), in January 1924. After 1923, trade unions began losing members, funds, and credibility. They had increasingly to rely on the state as the effective guarantor of their position. Yet employers, despite their relatively strong position, remained on the defensive.

As they lost faith in a system for which they had never, in any event, had much love, so also they began to withdraw support and funds from the liberal parties of the bourgeois middle. More broadly, the Weimar Republic was identified with the institutionalized power of workers and their political and union organizations which employers, who had formed their attitudes in what were now seen as the golden days of Imperial Germany, tended to regard as essentially illegitimate, by definition little more than 'enemies of the Empire' (Reichsfeinde), in Bismarck's phrase. Labour relations constituted but one element in undermining support for the Republic among certain economic elites.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

In March 1970, the Pittsburgh police arrested two women for picketing their employer, Presbyterian-University Hospital. Helen Lyles and Henrietta Goree, both African American, were charged with forcibly seeking to prevent their fellow employees from going to work.2 The picket line that Lyles and Goree walked was part of a citywide hospital union organizing drive launched by Local 1199, a militant union founded in New York in the 1930s that emerged nationwide in the late 1960s. Although hospital workers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), Local 1199 aimed to mobilize the rising militancy and consciousness of Black workers to overwhelm employer resistance and win union recognition extralegally.

Industrial and Labor Relations Review 4, no. 1 (October 1950), 81. 26. Jacob Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Klein, For All These Rights; Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of the New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). See also Jonathan Levy, “From Fiscal Triangle to Passing Through: Rise of the Nonprofit Corporation,” in Corporations and American Democracy, ed. Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 213–244. 27.

., Caring on the Clock: The Complexities and Contradictions of Paid Care Work (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Rebecca Kolins Givan, The Challenge to Change: Reforming Health Care on the Front Line in the United States and the United Kingdom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2020). 56. Joan C. Tronto, Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review 100 (July–August 2016), 99–117. 1. Down in the Hole 1.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

But it also showed how, in developed societies, organized labour is still capable of channelling and overwhelming the more chaotic, spontaneous protests. And it was an advance preview of the problem which youthful, socially networked, horizontalist movements would have everywhere once things got serious: the absence of strategy, the absence of a line of communication through which to speak to the union-organized workers. The limits, in short, of ‘propaganda of the deed’. Despite all this, what was obvious by late 2010 is that we were dealing with something new: something produced by bigger changes in society. But what? 4 So, Why Did It Kick Off? The Social Roots of the New Unrest If the Arab Spring had happened in isolation, it might have been categorized as a belated aftershock of 1989; if the student unrest had been part of the normal cycle of youth revolt, it could have been quickly forgotten.

‘I don’t trust him,’ López says, pointing out that Obama also promised a law to offer illegal migrants ‘earned amnesty’. But that did not happen. In fact, by the summer of 2011 Obama was in trouble: healthcare reform got whittled down to a minimum and was now gridlocked at state level; a law to lift obstacles to trade union organization never got to first base; the promised pullout from Afghanistan turned into a surge of troops; and the Dodd–Frank Act, aimed at curtailing the power of Wall Street, had become a toothless object of derision on Wall Street. But Obama was so determined to stick at two trillion dollars’ worth of cuts for the needy—instead of $2.5 trillion—that, at one point, he walked out of negotiations with the Republicans.

I saw people who had slept on cold marble for weeks gladly share or give away camping mats and pillows … And when the pizza supply was cut off, I saw people who hadn’t eaten all day gladly share their only slice.11 If these had been just the usual consumers of organic burritos, the students or the radical left, the occupation could have been easily cleared, or coerced into clearing itself. But trade unions organized 100-strong delegations to sleep in the Capitol in shifts: plumbers, electricians, firefighters. Though it was to be defeated, the #wiunion protest was one of the clearest examples in 2011 of explicit ‘role-allocation’ and division of labour between workers and students. The workers understood that their role was to provide the protection of respectability to the youth activists who’d initiated the sleep-in.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

The only way I could have possibly gotten to know Corbin and the dozen other future leaders I recruited on that trip was by talking to them on the phone. Sure, face to face would have been better, but the Bernie campaign was and the revolution is national in scale—we have to make do with the phone. When I started out as a union organizer, we spent hours every day doing “call time”—following up with members of our organizing committees. We had to do call time from whatever dingy hotel we were working out of, hunched over our notes on the bed because the phone cord didn’t reach to the desk. I remember thinking ahead to a cell phone future and thinking how great it was going to be to do call time from the car on the way home from house visits, or from a café or park!

What I was doing with Corbin was just the normal, natural process of getting to know one of my colleagues in the movement, a peer who I would need to work alongside in order to succeed. My free-ranging conversations did not follow a set format—such as the “five steps of a one-on-one” that I had learned as a union organizer—but instead sought to simply get to know him, learn all that I could from him, and develop a truly mutual relationship that would hopefully become the basis of a productive partnership. In big organizing, we get back to building organizations by empowering thousands of people on our lists to become builders.

Becky is a cofounder of CREDO SuperPAC, which was named by Mother Jones as one “2012’s Least Horrible Super-PACs” for helping to defeat five sitting Tea Party Republican Congressmen. She lives in San Francisco, California, with writer, designer, and book artist Emily McVarish. Zack Exley served as a senior advisor on the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and was an architect of the campaign’s national, volunteer-driven grassroots campaign. Zack was a union organizer before becoming MoveOn.org’s first organizing director in its campaign to prevent the war in Iraq in 2003. As an early advisor to the Howard Dean campaign, he helped transfer MoveOn.org’s early fundraising and organizing discoveries into presidential politics, and he then served as John Kerry’s director of online fundraising and communications in the general election where his team raised more than $100 million online for the nominee.


pages: 335 words: 104,850

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia, Bill George

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, income per capita, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Elkington, lone genius, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, six sigma, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

They also have funded many organized attacks against our company and have tried to smear our reputation and brand numerous times. In 2002, a narrow majority of team members at the Whole Foods Market store in Madison, Wisconsin, voted to unionize, in what we later discovered was a setup. Several union organizers gained employment at the store for the purpose of organizing it; most of them quit soon after the union was elected. The union organizers made many promises to our team members about what they would do for them if the store was successfully unionized: raise their pay, increase vacation time, increase their store discounts, improve their health coverage, liberalize the dress code, and so on.

Unrealistic promises by unions are common when an organization campaign is under way, and the many restrictions that now exist due to strict National Labor Relations Board regulations make these promises almost impossible for companies to counter effectively. Ironically, companies are prohibited from making any promises concerning either compensation or working conditions once a union-organizing campaign has begun and the National Labor Relations Board has been notified. The union-organizing campaign was a huge wake-up call for me personally. My reaction was “Wow—how is this possible?” Clearly, we were not doing a good-enough job of ensuring team member happiness. If we were, the union would not have been able to get a foothold. So I took it upon myself personally to find out where we had gone wrong and how we could improve.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

However, this restriction also means collaborative efforts such as works councils would need to be part of a collective-bargaining agreement between an employer and a union. 35. Lydia DePillis, “Why Volkswagen Is Helping a Union Organize Its Own Plant,” Washington Post, February 10, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/02/10/why-volkswagen-is-helping-a-union-organize-its-own-plant/; and Mica Rosenberg, “UAW Wants Works Council with ‘Tennessee Flavor’ at VW Plant,” Reuters, December 9, 2014, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-volkswagen-uaw/uaw-wants-works-council-with-tennessee-flavor-at-vw-plant-idUSKBN0JN29H20141209. 36.

For hazardous occupations, the minimum age was eighteen.20 MOTHER JONES AND THE FIGHT AGAINST VIRTUAL INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE When the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition against slavery and involuntary servitude was passed on January 31, 1865, Mary Harris Jones was a teacher, dressmaker, and mother of four. Few could have imagined that she would become a take-no-prisoners union organizer who took on the virtual involuntary servitude of mine workers employed by the big coal companies. Not long after, however, Jones lost all four of her children to yellow fever. And then she lost her home and dressmaking shop to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. From there, she found a new purpose: organizing for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union, adopting the title “Mother” along the way.

On that day, Perkins heard commotion and cries for help coming from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and ran to the scene, where she witnessed the “horrifying spectacle”31 of more than fifty young female workers forced to jump to their deaths from the burning building.32 The women, Perkins recalled watching, “had been holding on until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer.”33 The ninth-floor exits had been closed by management seeking to prevent theft, keep out union organizers, and prevent walkouts. The city’s fire brigade ladders were too short to reach the floors where the factory was contained, and many of those who reached the fire escape died as it collapsed under the heat and the weight of workers trying to flee.34 It was one of the deadliest industrial disasters in New York City’s history.


pages: 275 words: 77,955

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Corn Laws, Deng Xiaoping, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, liquidity trap, market friction, minimum wage unemployment, price discrimination, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing

If in fact some employees would prefer to work in firms that have a closed shop and others in firms that have an open shop, there would develop different forms of employment contracts, some having the one provision, others the other provision. As a practical matter, of course, there are some important differences between FEPC and right to work. The differences are the presence of monopoly in the form of union organizations on the employee side and the presence of federal legislation in respect of labor unions. It is doubtful that in a competitive labor market, it would in fact ever be profitable for employers to offer a closed shop as a condition of employment. Whereas unions may frequently be found without any strong monopoly power on the side of labor, a closed shop almost never is.

Another special feature that is important in practice is the conflict between federal and state law and the existence at the moment of a federal law which applies to all the states and which leaves a loophole for the individual state only through the passage of a right-to-work law. The optimum solution would be to have the federal law revised. The difficulty is that no individual state is in a position to bring this about and yet people within an individual state might wish to have a change in the legislation governing union organization within their state. The right-to-work law may be the only effective way in which this can be done and therefore the lesser of evils. Partly, I suppose, because I am inclined to believe that a right-to-work law will not in and of itself have any great effect on the monopoly power of the unions, I do not accept this justification for it.

Even the strong and powerful unions have only a limited effect on the wage structure. It is even clearer for labor than for industry why there is a strong tendency to overestimate the importance of monopoly. Given a labor union, any wage increase will come through the union, even though it may not be a consequence of the union organization. The wages of domestic servants have risen very greatly in recent years. Had there been a union of domestic servants, the increase would have come through the union and would have been attributed to it. This is not to say that unions are unimportant. Like enterprise monopoly, they play a significant and meaningful role making many wage rates different from what the market alone would establish.


pages: 242 words: 245

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

By the late 1990s, one out of every eighteen workers involved in an organizing campaign was a victim of workplace discrimination at the hands of THE ECONOMICS OF UNFAIRNESS an employer.4 A compiler of these statistics, Professor Charles Morris, concludes that "a substantial number of employers involved in union [organizing] campaigns deliberately use employment discrimination against employees as a device to remove union activists and thereby inject an element of fear in the process of selecting or rejecting union representation.*'5 The NLRA provides an elaborate process of litigation to deal with such cases, but a determined employer can exploit the immense inertia of the system to draw out litigation for years.

Ernest Duval, a Haitian immigrant unfairly dismissed in 1994 by the King David Nursing Home in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1999 received $1,793 in back pay for the five years it took to litigate his case.6 Few workers have the stamina for these legal marathons, and even those vindicated by the NLRB or the federal courts often do not seek reinstatement with their original employer. The illegal firing of pro-union workers is one among a battery of lawless acts that companies use to defeat union-organizing campaigns. Others include the use of threats and intimidation during the run up to an election; the manipulation of wages and benefits to penalize union supporters and favor opponents; the refusal to bargain with a newly established union committee, even if the validity of a union election has been upheld by the NLRB; and a refusal to bargain in good faith once 175 176 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY negotiations do get under way.

See also Managed care organizations (MCOs); Medical reengineering Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), 178 Piore, Michael, 37 Populism as Democratic message, 180,181 Poverty and lower-income families, 2-3,182 Preferred provider organizations (PPOs), 118 The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor), 24, 45, 46, 51, 76 Privacy issues, 100, 185 Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology (Davenport), 68, 81 Procops, Tony, 96, 97 Progressivism, 185 Protectionist policies, 183-84 Proxy Remote Control Gateway, 97, 98 Radclyffe Group survey of call center industry, 107-09 Randomized clinical trials (RCTs), 146^8 Raskin, Josh, 121 Real-time monitoring, 12,15, 67, 70, 75-76; customer call centers, 93-98; effect on manager-employee relationship, 101-02,107-08; ERP monitoring as, 156-57,164; "informate," 75; Internetmonitoring system, 98; live listening, 94; patient care systems, 126; privacy issues, 100,185; quality monitoring, 96, 97; stealth monitoring, 98; types of, 93-96 Reengineering, 4-5, 60-79; and customer relations management, 80-99; and ERP, 155,157-59,160; IT as tool of, 71-76; Japanese influence on, 58-59, 67; managerial vs. operational processes, 70-71; methods of, 7-8; of relationship between manager and employee, 74-75, 84; relationship to scientific management, 68-70, 76, 170; resistance to, 77-79; separation of decision making tasks, 71-73; software to support, 171; of structure of work, 73-74, 84. See also Medical reengineering; Real-time monitoring Reengineering the Corporation (Hammer & Champy), 68, 71, 81-82 221 INDEX Reengineering Management (Champy), 76 The Reengineering Revolution (Hammer), 77-79 Reichheld, Frederick, 112-13, 187 Retaliation against union organizing, 102-03,174-75 A Revolution in Manufacturing, the SMED System (Shingo), 50-53, 55 Rockefeller, John D., 18 Rogers, Joel, 179,181-82,183 Roos, Daniel, 50, 51 Sabel, Charles, 37 Sales and marketing. See Call centers; Customer relations management (CRM) SAP (German software maker), 5, 153-54,157,159,171; manual on ERP software, 156; monitoring potential of, 168.


pages: 497 words: 161,742

The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, corporate governance, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, Etonian, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, union organizing, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, éminence grise

The ousting of Cheddi Jagan is one of the last known covert operations overseas involving MI5, which had a powerful ‘counterintelligence’ role in the British colonial system. MI5’s cooperation with the CIA in British Guiana was carried out on the direct orders of the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. After the Cold War, Jagan returned to office in Guyana, this time as president.5 In common with other Western international trade-union organizations, PSI officials insist their outfit was ‘cleaned up’ long ago. It is certainly true that, in later years, more left-led British unions joined PSI and helped steer it away from its traditional Cold War role. Windsor himself claims that by the early 1970s the CIA agents working at the PSI headquarters had all been cleared out and that the international was a thoroughly respectable outfit.

It was Charles Clarke, the Labour leader’s chef de cabinet, who handed Dalyell the request to call the NUM’s former chief executive – jotted down on the leader of the Opposition’s office notepaper. A year earlier, in an interview with Channel Four television, Windsor had taken a more relaxed, but similar, line when asked if he had had any contact with the intelligence services. I’ve never had anything to do with intelligence. I worked for ten years for an international trade-union organization. I’ve been a member of the Labour Party for many years. I’ve served as a Labour councillor. Yes, of course, I could be a place by the CIA, perhaps even I don’t know about it, but it’s ridiculous. My telephone’s been tapped, my family and my wife have been subjected to a tremendous amount of adverse publicity and pressure as a result of this … I rebut it as absolute sheer nonsense.

Money was raised for it both in Britain and all over the world, though nothing was contributed from the Soviet Union. But as the dispute wore on, the NUM leaders became increasingly anxious for financial backing for the running of the strike itself. In particular, they wanted cash to pay for the essential day-to-day expenses of the union organization, which, with the loss of all contributions income, had become a major headache. This was what they lobbied the Russians for – among others – from the summer onwards. Soviet officials accepted relatively quickly that they had ‘an obligation to help’ and promised to transfer a substantial sum.


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

The complaint was upheld by the US National Labor Relations Board, which ordered trivial penalties after years of delay, standard procedure. The NAFTA study, by Cornell University Labor economist Kate Bronfenbrenner, was authorized for release by Canada and Mexico, but delayed by the Clinton administration. It reveals a significant impact of NAFTA on strike-breaking. About half of union organizing efforts are disrupted by employer threats to transfer production abroad; for example, by placing signs reading “Mexico Transfer Job” in front of a plant where there is an organizing drive. The threats are not idle: when such organizing drives nevertheless succeed, employers close the plant in whole or in part at triple the pre-NAFTA rate (about 15 percent of the time).

In crafting its human rights policies for China, the administration might have also recalled the constructive advice of a Kennedy military mission to Colombia: “As necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents” (a term that covers peasants, union organizers, human rights activists, etc.). The pupils learned the lessons well, compiling the worst human rights record of the 1990s in the hemisphere with increasing US military aid and training. Reasonable people can easily understand, then, that it would be counterproductive to press China too hard on such matters as torture of dissidents or atrocities in Tibet.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

A third reason for opposing unification, Leffler observes, was concern over the “appeal of the left,” reinforced by “the more vigorous recovery and political activism in the Soviet zone,” including the space allowed for works councils with some managerial authority in denazified enterprises, and trade union organization. Washington feared that a unified labor movement and other popular organizations might interfere with US plans to restore traditional business rule. The British Foreign Office also feared “economic and ideological infiltration” from the East, which it perceived as “something very like aggression”; political successes by the wrong people are commonly described as “aggression” in the internal record.

We need not linger on the record of mass slaughter, genocide in the highlands, disappearance, torture, mutilation, and other standard accompaniments of Free World victories; admittedly, a display of imperial benevolence that has been somewhat excessive in the case of Guatemala. The contours, at least, should be recalled. The terror began as soon as the US-run military coup succeeded in overthrowing the reformist capitalist democracy. Some 8000 peasants were murdered in two months in a terror campaign that targeted particularly United Fruit Company union organizers and Indian village leaders. The US Embassy participated with considerable fervor, providing lists of “Communists” to be eliminated or imprisoned and tortured while Washington dedicated itself to making Guatemala “a showcase for democracy.” At a comparable stage, the Khmer Rouge were condemned for genocide.

The first warning was sounded in 1932, when the Norris-LaGuardia Act exempted unions from antitrust prosecution, granting labor rights that it had received in England sixty years earlier. The Wagner Act was entirely unacceptable, and has by now been effectively reversed by the business-state-media complex. In the late 19th century, American workers made progress despite the extremely hostile climate. In the steel industry, the heart of the developing economy, union organization reached roughly the level of Britain in the 1880s. That was soon to change. A state-business offensive destroyed the unions with considerable violence, in other industries as well. In the business euphoria of the 1920s, it was assumed that the beast had been slain. American labor history is unusually violent, considerably more so than in other industrial societies.


pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

When Governor Gardner pulled out some of the state troops, a vigilante group called the “Committee of One Hundred,” organized by mill owners and civic leaders, moved in to patrol the strike zone. As the conflict escalated, it became perfectly clear that the strikers and union organizers were not just facing off against their employers, but against the combined strength of industrialists, civic leaders, local law enforcement, the press, National Guardsmen, and the terrors of extralegal violence. In the tent city where workers moved after they were evicted from mill housing, bands of hired mill thugs arrived nightly, destroying union property, beating and kidnapping union organizers, and terrorizing the three hundred strikers and their families who held out until the bitter end

By assigning more looms to each worker, curtailing break times, paying workers by-piece rates, and increasing the number of supervisors to keep workers from slowing down or talking, management doubled employees’ work while reducing their wages. Unsurprisingly, it was a universally reviled practice. In the spring of 1929 union organizers Fred Beal and Ellen Dawson, from the New York City–based, communist National Textile Workers’ Union (NTWU), traveled to Gastonia, North Carolina, drawn by reports of merciless stretch-outs and notoriously dirty and dangerous conditions in the city’s Loray Mill. The pair arrived to find millworkers who needed very little persuasion to gear up for militant action.

Didn’t last very long because they were not welcome. And the unions could not organize here. ’Course everybody knows the story of Chiquola Mill where some folks, you know, had gotten killed. Some people did want to unite but most of ’em didn’t. As far as I know very few of the mills have ever unionized. They closed labor organizing.” The union organizer was remembered as a carpetbagger, a notable victory for the southern capitalist. That afternoon I went to the South Carolina room in the Hughes Main Library. I searched for references to the 1934 strike and found a 1974 doctoral thesis entitled “Greenville, Unionism, and the General Strike in the Textile Industry, 1934,” by Stan Langston.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Taft-Hartley also eliminated so-called card check certification, an alternative to secret-ballot elections that involved the quiet collection of authorization cards from a majority of employees. The disadvantage to unionizing via card check (a method that labor tried and failed to get Congress to revive after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008) is that it risks subjecting wavering rank-and-file members to unseemly and perhaps thuggish pressure from union organizers. But the absence of card check (as an alternative to an NLRB-supervised election; the method remains legal as a step to initiate a union election, as we saw with Josh Noble’s organizing effort) has allowed employers to engage in fear-mongering campaigns (and some thuggery of their own against employees who campaign visibly for unionization) prior to union elections.17 The formal union elections required under Taft-Hartley can also drown organizing drives in procedure.

As we saw in chapter 8, Taft-Hartley played a major role in labor’s gradual postwar decline. But even before Republicans regained the House of Representatives in the 2010 election, labor unions were unable to persuade Congress to repeal just one part of Taft-Hartley by restoring “card check,” an informal method of union certification wherein union organizers quietly collect authorization cards from employees as an alternative to secret-ballot elections (which are easily manipulated by management). “The Democrats wouldn’t support it,” Stern explained. “In the end, many of the Democrats don’t believe in unions. It’s not their funding base. In terms of their hard-dollar contributions, particularly for senators, they all come from a class of people who are not particularly pro-union.

But Stern noted that there are some profitable employee stock ownership plans, among them the Publix supermarket chain, one of the ten largest-volume supermarket chains in the country. Wage levels, Stern told me, should be negotiated industry-wide (as they were under the Treaty of Detroit), thereby removing wages from price competition. In exchange, Stern said, perhaps business and government could be persuaded to support easing existing restrictions on union organizing. The obvious difficulty here is that, as we saw in chapter 8, management had little inclination to let unions participate in non-labor decisions even back in the 1940s and 1950s, when unions were much more powerful. But Stern argued that heightened global competition of a sort undreamed of in the mid-twentieth century has increased pressure on government and business to work together as a team—as occurs in many countries that the United States competes with—and that labor is a logical member of that team.


The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

In 1973, WEMA, an industry association to which Intel belonged and in which Noyce actively participated, offered a two-day seminar for “companies that are non-union and wish to remain so.” Led by an attorney who specialized in labor law, the seminar featured a simulated union organizing drive, so participants could practice making decisions in realistic scenarios. WEMA (which changed its name to the American Electronics Association [AEA] in 1977) also provided legal aid to companies facing union drives and furthermore served as a highly efficient clearinghouse for information about union activity throughout the electronics industry. As one union organizer explained, “Whenever organizers passed [out] leaflets in one plant, a copy of the leaflet would be on the desk of every human resources director in the Valley within two or three days.”7 Conventional wisdom within the semiconductor industry held that no matter how rich a company’s wages and benefits package, it would cost 25 percent more to operate the business with a union in house.

Everything was under yellow lights, and we were petrified.”11 Intel found that a number of its new employees were quitting after only a few days on the job because, as Flath put it, “they were just so nervous they’d go home and shake at night because they [hadn’t known] what they were going to get into.” The strangeness of the clean room that terrified workers gave union organizers hope. Indeed, the most significant unionizing effort Intel faced was at Fab 3 the late 1970s.12 But that effort failed, too, as did every other attempt to unionize the semiconductor industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Union organizers in these years were swimming against the tide. Between 1970 and 1988, the percentage of California workers represented by a union dropped from 36 percent to 22 percent. By the end of the 1970s, nearly three-quarters of semiconductor production workers were women and almost half were members of minority ethnic groups (mostly Hispanic or Asian).

In any case, Intel’s failure to follow its own policies led someone at the company either to contact the Teamsters or to listen carefully when approached by them. “I felt we brought the unionization problem on ourselves,” Bowers explains. “If we had followed our own policies, it never would have happened.” The timing of Intel’s misstep coincided with a spike in union-organizing activity throughout Silicon Valley. In 1974, the United Electrical Workers (UE) created an organizing committee specifically to target the Silicon Valley labor force. Many in the labor movement thought that workers might be more open to collective bargaining after the massive 1974 layoffs, especially if someone pointed out to them that with every passing year, more semiconductor production jobs moved offshore.


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The attack in Wisconsin on the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain is a clear example.10 The issues in Wisconsin have nothing to do with the state budget deficit. That’s a fraud that’s simply used as a pretext. The issue is the right of collective bargaining, one of the basic principles of union organization. The business world wants to destroy that. Rhetoric aside, has the Democratic Party really been a friend of organized labor and the working class? Compared with the Republicans, yes, but that’s not saying much. The studies of Larry Bartels and other political scientists show that working people and the poor tend to do somewhat better under Democratic than Republican administrations.11 But that just means that the Republicans are deeper in the pockets of the corporate system than the Democrats are.

That’s an example of a spark that didn’t lead to a conflagration. In order to mount resistance and challenge power, it’s necessary to overcome the barrier of fear. It seems that the Occupy movement has done that. It has. It’s costly to oppose power. No matter if you’re a graduate student, a child in school questioning something that’s happening, a union organizer, or a political dissident, whatever you may be, it’s going to carry a personal cost. Power systems, whatever they are, very rarely abdicate their power cheerfully. They usually resist. In a society like ours, they have many means at their disposal. We have a very class-conscious business class in the United States.


pages: 1,106 words: 335,322

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, God and Mammon, Gregor Mendel, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, New Journalism, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, plutocrats, price discrimination, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, yellow journalism

One biographer has gone so far as to say of Rockefeller, “He was the best employer of his time, instituting hospitalization and retirement pensions.”19 He was a fine boss if workers abided by his rules, but if they did something foolish, like show interest in a union, they promptly forfeited his sympathy. Rockefeller never acknowledged the legitimacy of organized labor, nor did he tolerate union organizers on the premises. He also reserved the right to pass judgment on the private lives of employees. Imposing his own prudish standards on his staff, he penalized any executive implicated in an adulterous affair and frowned on divorce. Sabbath observance was de rigueur, and if colleagues wrote to him when they should have been in church, they tended not to put the real dates on their letters.

Because of Bowers’s demonstrated proficiency in running the Great Lakes ore fleet, the Rockefellers reposed extraordinary— and ultimately misplaced—trust in the abilities of this former wholesale grocer from upstate New York who became vice president of the Colorado company and the Rockefellers’ chief liaison with it. Despite this fresh leadership, the Colorado investment seemed as misbegotten as the Mesabi investment had been charmed, and for years CFI did not pay a penny on its stocks or bonds. Hobbled with a money loser, the Rockefellers took an intransigent tone with union organizers. As early as October 1903, Junior sent fighting words to CFI’s president on the subject: “We are prepared to stand by in this fight and see the thing out, not yielding an inch. Recognition of any kind of either the labor leaders or union, much more a conference such as they request, would be a sign of evident weakness on our part.”2 In his decades in business, Senior had learned never to budge on the prerogatives of capital, especially when it came to unions.

William Lyon Mackenzie King (left) and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., don denim overalls at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, September 1915, after the Ludlow Massacre. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center) Under Rockefeller rule, it was heretical for anyone in CFI management to concede any legitimacy to unions. To scare off union organizers, Bowers and CFI president Jesse Welborn resorted to terror, fielding spies and detectives and firing union sympathizers. At the same time, they tried to inoculate workers against unions through paternalistic measures, raising their wages 10 percent and introducing an eight-hour day. As a chastened Junior later said of Bowers, “He had the kindness-of-heart theory, i.e. that he was glad to treat the men well, not that they had any necessary claim to it, but because it was the proper attitude of a Christian gentleman.


pages: 291 words: 95,468

Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton, John Huey

book value, inventory management, profit motive, union organizing

Today, some of our company's critics would like everybody to believe we started our profit-sharing program and other benefits merely as a way to stave off union organizing. The traditional version of what happened is that the Retail Clerks Union organized a strike against us when we opened store number 20 in Clinton, Missouri, and another one when we opened store number 25 in Mexico, Missouri, and that in response to those troubles we started all these programs to keep the unions out. That story is only partly true. We did have labor trouble in those two stores, and we did fight the unions —legally and aboveboard—and we won. In fact, we've never lost a union organizing election. But the idea for sharing profits and benefits had come up even before we went public, not from me, but from Helen.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

As noted in chapter 2, organized labor movements and unions historically depended on two factors to rally workers. They made use of the coherence of a professional identity—machinists, steelworkers, teachers—to lay the groundwork for a common cause. Union organizers also relied on the solidarity of face-to-face interactions at the work site and, when striking, the power of collective action as a force for change. Social solidarity, as seen from the earliest days of union organizing, could also include xenophobia and insularities. Ironically, the homogeneity of a full-time workforce and the tacit, unexamined discrimination that can make workplaces hostile to difference led some people to try on-demand work.

We would have to rent another floor to make room for their machines; we would have to buy the machines, and we would have to have gas and heat, and then have to pay them more, may be, into the bargain.”13 Unions proved themselves no more motivated than the factory owners to recognize the value of women’s contingent labor, either on-site or working from home. The largest, most progressive union, the United Garment Workers, organized in 1891, tried to root out what it saw as the “menace of the outworkers” and make them “a coherent part of its growth,” but to no avail.14 Union organizers focused on getting young women to fill vacancies on the factory floor. But these approaches did not contend with or even recognize how often women worked on contract through piecework, because factory work was still considered morally suspect for a young, unmarried woman and, practically speaking, took her away from her other full-time job of cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and elders at home.


pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

CLASS The critique of domination gives anarchists a wide lens to identify instances of oppression. Their integral analysis of state oppression and capitalist exploitation has also provided a fertile ground for building alliances with non-anarchist socialists. Anarchists have often been energetic union organizers and have pursued sometimes aggressive anti-bourgeois agendas to mobilize class actions: it is not difficult to find the language of class struggle in anarchist writing. In that sense, Ricardo Flores Magón’s 1911 Manifesto of the Mexican Liberal Party often sounds virtually indistinguishable from Marx and Engels’s 1848 Communist Manifesto: [H]umanity remains divided into two classes whose interests are diametrically opposed – the capitalist class and the working class; the class that has possession of the land, the machinery of production and the means of transporting wealth, and the class that must rely on its muscle and intelligence to support itself.

Born in New York, he joined the youth organization of the American Communist Party, the Young Communist League aged nine. Alienated by the adoption of the Popular Front policy, he broke with Stalinism in 1935 and was expelled in 1937 during the Spanish Revolution for anarchist-Trotskyist tendencies. He worked in New Jersey as a foundryman and union organizer for the Congress of Industrial Unions. After being demobbed from the US Army he became a car worker and participant in the General Motors strike of 1946. Writing under the pen-name Lewis Herber, he published Our Synthetic Environment in 1962 to promote social ecology. In the latter part of the decade he developed the concept of post-scarcity, finding a foothold in the countercultural movements that blossomed in the 60s.

He wrote nearly thirty books, including the collection Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982), Urbanization without Cities (1992) and Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995).6 TOM BROWN (1900–1974) Brown was an anarchist syndicalist born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in the north-east of England. Apprenticed as an engineer, he became a union organizer and shop steward. He joined the Communist Party after the Bolshevik takeover and served as its industrial organizer in the north-east. Disillusioned with Bolshevism, he subsequently quit the party. In 1934 Brown was involved in foundation of the Anti-Fascist League, a direct-action organization established to counter the rise of the British Union of Fascists in the north-east.


pages: 319 words: 102,839

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

The seas sure seemed stormy on the Tidewater waterfront. But, as Wilbur Wright once observed, no bird soars in a calm. 3 Steel Vets FALL 1976 Known to some by the nickname Castro because of his penchant for quoting Malcolm X during the turbulent 1960s, Bill Bowser seemed the most unlikely of possible union organizers. Compact, nimble, and wiry, he spoke in a surprisingly commanding voice, which he used to hammer home point after point after point. Bowser seemed a more likely candidate, by his own admission, to wind up dead in a bloody race riot. Oddly, he became a union and shipyard legend exactly during that kind of action.

They stood side by side in front of the yard gates, talking with the river of workers as they filed into the yard in the gray-blue dawn before the first shift, about the absolute need for union representation. “Together, we can make a difference.” The couple traveled to places like Gloucester County, talking up a union. There, locals gave Bill Bowser reason to be apprehensive, if not scared. Folks on the other side of the York River greeted uppity Black and White union organizers with equal contempt. One day, a deputy in those parts gave them the age-old Southern warning: “It’d be best if you weren’t here when the sun went down.” Bowser’s father issued his own warning about the likely company response to all this union stuff: “They’ll get you—they’ll get me.” But once he started, Bowser couldn’t stop.

Of course, the steelworkers at Local 8888 touted the accomplishment of launching the Kennedy three months early. But down at the union hall, President Charles Spivey focused on another milestone of sorts. As the yard hired those five thousand new workers over the past few years, Spivey, a former union organizer, sought to raise the local membership. In this year—the fortieth anniversary of the steelworkers’ official entry into the yard and the twentieth anniversary of the game-changing 1999 strike—Local 8888 closed in on a membership of ten thousand. Spivey wanted to build on the success of recent contracts and force the company to provide better pensions when they renegotiated in 2021.


pages: 161 words: 52,058

The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger by Ken Auletta

Albert Einstein, Bretton Woods, data science, George Gilder, job satisfaction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, union organizing

Olson and his wife, Constance, became special friends of Riboud’s. Every two or three months, Riboud took the train to Washington to spend a weekend with them. The three would stay up talking until dawn, sleep until midafternoon, talk until dawn. Unlike Riboud, Olson came from a working-class background; his father was a mailman and a union organizer in Massachusetts. Riboud read Mao Zedong’s writings aloud in French to Olson, who used several of Mao’s lines in his 1949 poem “The Kingfishers,” and who wrote enthusiastically of Central America’s “Communist future.” Olson, who was something of a mystic, taught English at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, and was considered a leading avant-garde figure of his day.

America fell asleep. Is Schlumberger going to fall asleep, too?… I am now asking you to add a new and more important parameter to your job: you are responsible for the fundamental motivation of the Schlumberger people. This is a totally new dimension to your job.” Riboud added, sounding like a union organizer, “You must have and ask for a higher position in the corporate totem pole, in the salary scale.” What Riboud has called “the will to win” hints at a final reason for Schlumberger’s success—what employees refer to as “the Schlumberger spirit,” or what Peters and Waterman label “corporate culture.”


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

To help clarify this vague definition, courts apply an economic realities test to evaluate the particular employment situation surrounding a worker and an employer. This potentially gives the agency responsible for enforcement the latitude to adjust to changing employment conditions on the ground.13 The National Labor Relations Act, the federal statute governing union organizing and collective bargaining, also uses an economic reality test for defining employment. However, a Supreme Court decision in 1944 holding that boys who sold newspapers on the street on commission were in fact Hearst employees despite the company’s contention that they were independent contractors led enraged conservatives in Congress to amend the National Labor Relations Act in 1947 to specifically exempt independent contractors.14 This has led historically to very narrow readings of coverage and application of the act.

Workers operating under one roof communicate and quickly discover a lot about their co-workers. This includes whether the person sitting in the next cubicle is being paid more for doing the same job. Paying individuals who do similar jobs different wages could have deleterious consequences on productivity, increase turnover, or even inspire a union-organizing drive. Unified personnel policies and simplified compensation structures for workers with varying levels of productivity play a fundamental role in reducing frictions among workers. Fairness and Wage Determination Fairness matters. In contrast to assumptions of traditional economics that individuals maximize gains solely for themselves, a large empirical literature from psychology, decision science, and more recently behavioral economics reveals that people care not only about their own gains but also about those of others.

For example, AT&T does not directly employ cell tower maintenance workers, but its use of turfers has clear impacts on hazards (and fatalities) on the tower sites it operates. As we shall see, OSHA has been wrestling with this issue for decades in establishing citation policies for construction and other multiemployer work sites. At the other end of the spectrum, the NLRA, the federal statute governing union organizing and collective bargaining, uses a restrictive definition and a narrow economic reality test for defining employment, more closely adhering to common law notions. Originally, the Supreme Court in ruling on the NLRA’s employer-employee definitions deferred to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

It was not uncommon for women to compose more than 30 percent of the combatants in Latin American guerrilla organizations in the late twentieth century, for example, with an equal percentage in leadership positions.90 This was a much higher percentage of female participation and leadership than in other sectors of these same societies, such as political or trade union organizations, and much higher than in state military regimes elsewhere. In the Nicaraguan case, after the Sandinista victory many women combatants complained that they were not able to maintain leadership positions in the postrevolutionary power structure. An impressive number of women did hold important positions in the victorious Sandinista government, but not nearly as many as in the Sandinista guerrilla forces.91 This is one symptom of the process of de-democratization of the guerrilla movements.

The demands for “guaranteed income,” for example, an income due to all citizens regardless of employment, which have circulated in Europe, Brazil, and North America for several years, is such a constituent project aimed against poverty.62 If extended beyond the national realm to become a global demand of guaranteed income for all, this could become an element of a project for the democratic management of globalization. Such a common scheme for the distribution of wealth would correspond to the common productivity of the poor. Our claims of the wealth, productivity, and commonality of the poor have immediate implications for trade union organizing. The old form of trade union, which was born in the nineteenth century and aimed primarily at negotiating wages for a specific trade, is no longer sufficient. First of all, as we have been arguing, the old trade unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short-term contracts, all of whom participate actively in social production and increase social wealth.

None of these revolts, however, formed a cycle of struggles in which the common was mobilized extensively across the globe. We should not minimize, of course, the numerous more limited instances of communication among struggles. One of the most fascinating contemporary examples is the Justice for Janitors movement, one of the most successful and creative union organizing efforts in the United States. The organizers face challenges that traditional unions have not been able to address: a mobile population, predominantly very recent immigrants, many of whom do no speak English, possessing few marketable skills. One of the secrets of the success may be that, at least in the Los Angeles region, where the movement won its first victories, many of the leading figures are veterans of the FMLN who fought in the civil war against the government of El Salvador.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Even before platforms, workers’ schedules were shaped by global economic forces. Each day, prospective workers from London’s deprived East End would queue up outside the gates of the docks, waiting to see if they would be ‘called on’ by a foreman. As Ben Tillett (1910: 8), a dock worker who later became a union organizer, explained: We are driven into a shed, iron-barred from end to end, outside of which a foreman or contractor walks up and down with the air of a dealer in a cattle market, picking and choosing from a crowd of men, who, in their eagerness to obtain employment, trample each other under foot, and where like beasts they fight for the chances of a day’s work.

In India, there have been large strikes of Uber drivers, including drivers for Ola – the Indian-based competitor. For example, in October 2018 there was a combined strike of Uber and Ola drivers in Mumbai and Delhi, with demands for higher fares to meet rising fuel costs. These were coordinated by existing union organizations like the Mumbai Taxi Drivers’ Union.4 In Bangalore, we met with Tanveer Pasha, the President of Ola, Taxiforsure and Uber drivers and Owners Association, to discuss organizing at these companies. While there was little participation in Bangalore in the previous strike, the union represents around 55,000–60,000 drivers.5 While they are yet to win concessions from Uber, it shows that sustained organization is possible.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

New England’s oldest textile towns, like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Central Falls, Rhode Island, turned into new immigrant centers in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, as textile employers recruited workers in Puerto Rico and Colombia.12 Meatpacking followed a somewhat different trajectory. While the textile industry was able to use the threat of plant relocation to successfully undermine union organizing attempts or to keep unions weak, the meatpacking industry became one of the bastions of industrial union organizing in the 1930s, which succeeded in significantly improving the conditions of workers. “From the 1930s to the 1970s,” explains Lance Compa, “meatpacking workers’ pay and conditions improved. Master contracts covering the industry raised wages and safety standards.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

It required major public investment, and it emerged from a nationwide grassroots reform movement, as Claudia Goldin has emphasized.71 Why did Americans so enthusiastically support public educational investments from 1910 to 1970? And why did that popular support then wane? That is the sense in which “we” took our foot off the accelerator. Why we did so is an important conundrum to which we shall return. Unions72 In the Gilded Age union organizing provided a potential counterweight to the captains of industry, representing the norm of mutualism and solidarity against the norm of individualism. Unions spread rapidly but unevenly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, they faced firm opposition from owners and managers and from the courts in the name of the individual freedom of workers and owners.73 The Knights of Labor, based on the premise that workers of all types should be enrolled in “one big union,” had boomed from 28,100 members in 1880 to 729,000 six years later, but then fell back to 100,000 in 1890 and collapsed in 1894 in the face of internal conflicts between the skilled and unskilled, as well as between blacks and whites.

However, they faced firm opposition from owners and managers and from the courts in the name of the individual freedom of workers and owners.73 The Knights of Labor, based on the premise that workers of all types should be enrolled in “one big union,” had boomed from 28,100 members in 1880 to 729,000 six years later, but then fell back to 100,000 in 1890 and collapsed in 1894 in the face of internal conflicts between the skilled and unskilled, as well as between blacks and whites. Its leading role was soon taken over by the American Federation of Labor, along with a series of unions organized along craft and industrial lines—mine workers (founded in 1890), electrical workers (1891), longshoremen (1892), garment workers (1900), teamsters (1903), and so on. In barely seven years (1897–1904) nationwide union membership almost quadrupled from 3.5 percent of the nonagricultural workforce to 12.3 percent.

To be sure, new legislation would eventually make it easier for unions to organize. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 is most famous, but even prior to Franklin Roosevelt’s election, the landmark Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 had removed certain legal and judicial barriers against union organizing. This earlier bill was cosponsored by two Progressive Republicans and signed into law by a third—Herbert Hoover. Legislation was not the sole explanation for renewed union growth, however, for the resumption of growth after the slump of the 1920s predated this legislation. Much of union growth in the 1930s was bottom-up: Most workers in this period were organized by unionization strikes, not by NLRA elections.77 Legislation was important, but workers themselves were coming to feel solidarity toward one another, even occasionally across ethnic and racial lines.78 In short, the argument sometimes heard that the New Deal itself accounts for the growth of unions in the 1930s is an oversimplification, although the New Deal and World War II are clearly part of the story behind the remarkable growth between 1935 and 1945.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Branding teenagers who send nude pictures of themselves as sex offenders, with life-long consequences, does not protect anyone. We are often so afraid of losing our bread and circuses and so quick to fear and hate others that we're ready to give up our neighbors without a struggle. We often clap as authorities drag away the wretched lawbreakers. And the labeling continues: "extremist," "communist," "liberal," "union organizer," "intellectual," "atheist" -- and the midnight knock on the door is for our parents, brothers, children, ourselves. Torturers and brutes know no limits except those we place on them. That is, we cannot as society expect authority to behave itself and then act surprised when it does not. The secret services will spy on us illegally.

We can break it into two periods. The First Wave was roughly from 2000 to 2010 and brought a half-billion Africans the freedom to speak to each other across any distance. The Second Wave covers roughly 2010 to 2020, and will bring a billion Africans on line and into the global Internet. I was talking to a trade union organizer in Lomé, Togo during the crest of the First Wave. She explained how now, if there was a strike at one mine, say in Namibia, news would spread to all mines owned by the firm, across the continent, and workers could shut down operations in fifty mines the next day. The question is how that First Wave ever started.

To hide unethical behavior. Manipulating nicotine levels in cigarettes, lending money to dictators to conduct genocides, conducting dangerous product trials on uninformed test subjects, using child labor, buying black-market materials, polluting rivers, stealing pension funds, bribing politicians, muffling union organizers, and so on. As with financial delinquency, profits can suffer when such acts become public knowledge. To hide internal corruption. Directors, with the right to set their own salaries and benefits, regularly stretch the limits of what is appropriate. When confronted by unhappy shareholders, the response is usually, "Those are standard market practices," meaning "Everyone else is cheating their shareholders, so why shouldn't we?"


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

The judges found that all this was carried out for political purposes—to destroy the Communist Party and then “prop up a violent, dictatorial regime”—with the assistance of the United States, the UK, and Australia.49 It wasn’t only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.50 The prime responsibility for the massacres and concentration camps lies with the Indonesian military. We still do not know if the method employed—disappearance and mass extermination—was planned well before October 1965, perhaps inspired by other cases around the world, or planned under foreign direction, or if it emerged as a solution as events unfolded.

“The Chilean extreme right wants to repeat that massacre,” the article explained. “What does that mean concretely? The terrorists have a plan which consists of killing the entire Central Committee of the Communist Party, the top of the Socialist Party, the national directors of CUT, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Chile union organization, leaders of social movements, and all prominent figures on the Left.” The article was published on February 22, signed by Carlos Berger, the Communist Party member who had argued with Carmen Hertz about left-wing tactics and the meaning of the Indonesian massacre when she was back at the University of Chile.37 Carlos and Carmen Hertz were now married.

Life was a permanent cat-and-mouse game, and Guatemala City became a deadly, sprawling obstacle course, sometimes for the entire life span of its victims. Miguel Ángel Albizures, the same little schoolboy who never forgot the trauma of the sulfatos bombs dropped near his school during the US-backed coup in 1954, grew into a union organizer. The unions were not uniformly left-wing. As a teen, not long after the overthrow of Árbenz, he joined the Catholic Christian Workers’ Movement, and by the 1970s he was a bit of a small-time leader. The union movement had moderate communists, and Christian Democrats, as well as some who supported the more radical guerrillas.


pages: 230 words: 71,320

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, computer age, corporate raider, crew resource management, medical residency, old-boy network, Pearl River Delta, popular electronics, power law, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, union organizing, upwardly mobile, why are manhole covers round?

He doodles when he thinks. He mumbles when he talks, and when he makes his way down the halls of Skadden, Arps, conversations drop to a hush. Flom grew up in the Depression in Brooklyn's Borough Park neighborhood. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Isadore, was a union organizer in the garment industry who later went to work sewing shoulder pads for ladies' dresses. His mother worked at what was called pieceworkdoing applique at home. They were desperately poor. His family moved nearly every year when he was growing up because the custom in those days was for landlords to give new tenants a month's free rent, and without that, his family could not get by.

Carnegie Hall didn't know about it. It was just between you and Mary. It was a bit of a journey, but we would go back once or twice a month.”“” Friedman's mother was a Russian immigrant. She barely spoke English. But she had gone to work as a seamstress at the age of fifteen and had become a prominent garment union organizer, and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that. The garment industry was boot camp for the professions. * The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

It had gone so far as to offer workers fully paid healthcare benefits and equity, both uncommon in janitorial work (and professional work, for that matter). Its workers spoke highly of the opportunity to advance along a career path. Wasn’t this, too, a valid model for creating good jobs? Even if Dan were worried about the union organizers that were hovering near the office building door, as he started speaking into a microphone, he looked more comfortable than he had at the formal press conference. “I know it’s Saturday,” he started, “but personally there’s nowhere I’d rather be.” He ran through the highlights of the past few days, how the secretary of labor had come to speak at Q, and showed photos of “these beautiful operators” whose well-lit portraits had appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

Only about 11% of the workforce (and just 6.6% of the non-government workforce) belonged to a union in 2016, compared to about 20% in 1983 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Union membership as a percentage of employed wage and salary workers), and the growing group of independent workers like Kristy, Curtis, Abe, and Terrence’s students fall outside of union organizing rights altogether. Dynamo was not the only idea for how to organize these workers outside of the traditional union system. A website called Coworker attempted to create online groups of workers and help them petition their employers. Starbucks employees used it to campaign for a policy change that allowed for visible tattoos and went on to win wage increases, scheduling improvements, and changes to parental leave policies.


pages: 255 words: 68,829

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

Traditionally, organizational reforms of the state and of public services have followed a carefully managed process: inspectors general from all branches of the civil service are dispatched to the field to conduct investigations, to question agents, and so on. Reports are drafted to set out paths to improvement. The ones that seem least dangerous are then negotiated with union organizations. This very administrative process implicates agents, intermediate supervisors, and at the end of the chain, the top officials, as well as union organizations with which negotiations have been held to determine the measures, the personnel, and the costs involved. It is a long process simply because it involves negotiations, because if this slow mechanism is short-circuited, there is a strike, and the reform is not adopted.


pages: 602 words: 120,848

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

As we saw in chapter 2, U.S. laws governing industrial relations were becoming dramatically less effective in supporting union organization due to two linked challenges faced by organized labor. The first was a rise in capital mobility, which enhanced the capacity of businesses to use the famous 14(b) provision of the Taft-Hartley Act to shift their operations to right-to-work states, where unions were barred from making union membership a condition of employment in a firm or industry. The second threat, as also discussed in chapter 2, was the rise of much more aggressive employer tactics to block union organizing. Between 1960 and 1980, there was a fourfold increase in charges of unfair labor practices, a threefold rise in charges of unlawful termination, and a fivefold increase in workers awarded back pay or granted reinstatement orders.19 These stunning figures suggest that employers increasingly saw such practices as simply a cost of doing business, and far preferable to successful unionization.

Levy and Peter Temin, “Inequality and Institutions in 20th Century America,” NBER Working Paper No. 13106 (May 2007), 33. 29 John Logan, “The Union Avoidance Industry in the United States,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 44, no. 4 (December 2006): 654. 30 Robert J. Flanagan, “Has Management Strangled U.S. Unions?” Journal of Labor Research 26, no. 1 (December 2005): 48–49. 31 Henry S. Farber and Bruce Western, “Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Declining Union Organization,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 40 (2002): 385–401. 32 See Kate Bronfenbrenner, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing,” Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper No. 235 (May 30, 2009), 13. 33 Ibid., 9. 34 Jacob S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jacob S.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

With a few differences over the interpretation of Switzerland and France, Crouch (1993), Katznelson and Zolberg (1986), Luebbert (1991), Slomp (1990), and Thelen (2004), among others, have argued that the working class grosso modo developed in a unified way in the protocorporatist countries but not in the liberal. Ebbinghaus makes a similar distinction between, on the one hand, solidaristic unionism (the Scandinavian cases) with encompassing unions organized by social democratic parties and segmented unionism (Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium) with strong interlinking between the social democratic party and unions but also with religious cleavages, and, on the other hand, laborist unionism with sectional unions creating a party as in the UK and Ireland, the French case being one of polarized unionism (Ebbinghaus 1995).

Hence, in the late nineteenth century, uncoordinated businesses chose one of two strategies: where it was difficult for individual companies to exclude unions, they accepted unionization for skilled workers while tending to move away from product markets which required substantial craft-skilled labor in order to compete. Or, as in the United States or France, where the political system allowed it, large companies excluded unions in part by violence and in part by developing technologies which minimized the need for blue-collar skills, and craft unions organized in small companies and in the artisan sector (Katznelson and Zolberg 1986). For skilled workers—including laborers with basic literacy and math skills, as well as higher-educated engineers, accountants, mid-level managers, and so on—employers turned to the general educational system, which went through a major expansion in the first half of the ninteenth century, fueled by government spending at both the local and central levels.

These differences help explain persistent variance in government policies and outcomes, which will be analyzed in later chapters, so we sketch their causes in this section.16 Once the shift to democracy was seen as inevitable, there were no deep partisan struggles over the fundamental economic and political institutions of modern capitalism. In the protocorporatist countries where guilds and agricultural cooperatives were strong, employers coordinated, and unions organized along industry lines, both right and left parties ended up supporting proportional representation (PR) as a political mechanism to protect their mutual investments in cospecific assets. Where guilds and agricultural cooperatives were weak, employers poorly organized and poorly coordinated, and unions divided by crafts, the center and the right opposed PR in order to prevent risk of radical redistribution.


pages: 1,041 words: 317,136

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

Soon afterwards, the CIO was formally asked by the Roosevelt Administration to stop its organizing drive at the Berkeley lab. By 1943, however, Oppenheimer had long since turned his back on union organizing. He did so not because he had changed his political views but because he had come to the realization that unless he followed Lawrence’s advice he would not be allowed to work on a project that he believed might be necessary to defeat Nazi Germany. During their arguments in the autumn of 1941 over his union-organizing activities, Lawrence had told him that James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University, had rebuked him for having discussed fission calculations with Oppenheimer, who was not then officially in the bomb project.

After joining the Communist Party in 1929, he wrote his worried family, “Certainly now you must see that I am doing what I believe in, want to do, do best, and most enjoy doing. . . . you must see that I am really happy.” He spent a few months in Chicago, where, after speaking before a crowd of thousands, he was beaten by the notorious “Red Squad” of the city police. By 1932, Dallet was a union organizer in Youngstown, Ohio, where he served on the front lines of the rough-and-tumble CIO campaign to bring steelworkers into the fold of organized labor. He bristled with physical courage in the often violent confrontations with the steel companies’ thugs. On several occasions, local police clapped him into jail to keep him from speaking at labor rallies.

He taught physics for a while at the University of Wyoming, and late in the war, Phil Morrison got him a job at the Met Lab in Chicago. But security officers caught up to him after six months there, and he was fired. After the war, when his name surfaced in the HUAC investigations into atomic spying, the only job he could get was at the University of Puerto Rico. Like Lomanitz, Friedman had been associated with union organizing within the Rad Lab for Local 25 of FAECT. Army intelligence officers equated such activities with subversive tendencies and they easily jumped to the conclusion that they should get rid of Lomanitz and Friedman. As for Weinberg, he was put under close surveillance, and when no other evidence emerged to connect him to espionage, he too was drafted and sent to an Army post in Alaska.


Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, disinformation, dual-use technology, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, military-industrial complex, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

In fact, the U.S. role in Guatemala is unmentioned in this story. Gruson describes the increase in kidnappings, torture, and murder; the worsening situation in the cities; and the “de facto military dictatorship” in the countryside (quoting Americas Watch Observer Anne Manuel). The main targets in the cities are “labor leaders, union organizers and leftists.” A spokesman for an independent human rights organization says that “there’s a democratic façade now, nothing more. The façade hides that all the power is held by the army and that the situation is getting worse.” An Americas Watch report released two weeks later accused the government of prime responsibility for the serious increase in human rights abuses, now reaching a level of about two a day, presumably a considerable underestimate, Americas Watch concludes.147 As 1988 came to a close, government atrocities mounted in the client states.

National Labor Relations Board, which ordered trivial penalties after years of delay, the standard procedure. The NAFTA study, by Cornell University labor economist Kate Bronfenbrenner, has been authorized for release by Canada and Mexico but not by the Clinton administration. It reveals a significant impact of NAFTA on strikebreaking. About half of union organizing efforts are disrupted by employer threats to transfer production abroad, for example, by placing signs reading “Mexico Transfer Job” in front of a plant where there is an organizing drive. The threats are not idle: when such organizing drives nevertheless succeed, employers close the plant in whole or in part at triple the pre-NAFTA rate (about 15 percent of the time).


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Circuit in August 2015.38 The proposed changes were favored by some states (Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, and New York), all of which submitted briefs in support of the new rule, while other states (Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin) submitted briefs opposing the new rule.39 The win both delivers material gains for the workers and, as important, finally recognizes their occupations as “real work”—a major victory for a workforce that is expected to grow from 2 million workers to over 3 million by 2022.40 SEIU represents about 600,000 home care workers, a scale that lends itself to comparisons with the great industrial union organizing of the last century.41 This is substantial progress, but unlike the contracts negotiated for the mostly white and mostly male blue-collar manufacturing workers, these jobs don’t remotely provide the wages and benefits that allowed the previous working class to live a middle-class lifestyle. And thanks to another Supreme Court ruling, the ability of unions to organize home care workers took a big hit.

Unions in the Most Unexpected Places Ben Speight is exceedingly good at a difficult job. He’s an organizer for the statewide Teamsters Local 728 based in Atlanta, Georgia. A thirty-three-year-old white man, he’s been organizing since he was eighteen, spending eleven of the past fifteen years as a union organizer with the Teamsters. He doesn’t see his work as being in the service of others but as organizing with others. As he explained, “In my fifteen years of organizing, I have never been a part of a campaign where the core of our support and the majority of our support did not come from black workers.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

At the moment, unionization efforts can be logistically difficult and legally fraught: the fragmentation of work in the gig economy is a serious challenge for union organizers. Gone are the regular shifts before and after which groups of workers would congregate to voice their grievances, the geographic proximity of workers with shared interests, and the sense of being a united workforce. Whereas London cab drivers can congregate in their famous lit- tle tea huts dotted across the streets of the city, ride-sharing drivers are forced to hide out in increasingly rare open parking lots, often struggling to find a place to rest or even to go to the toilet.61 Most countries grant union organizers paid time off for their work and protect them against employer reprisals, as employers and legislators recognize the value of having a clear voice to represent workers’ concerns.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

In Britain, a new wave of entrepreneurial financiers began to consolidate large fortunes. If the project was to restore class power to the top elites, then neoliberalism was clearly the answer. Whether or not a country could be pushed towards neoliberalization then depended upon the balance of class forces (powerful union organization in West Germany and Sweden held neoliberalization in check) as well as upon the degree of dependency of the capitalist class on the state (very strong in Taiwan and South Korea). The means whereby class power could be transformed and restored were gradually but unevenly put into place during the 1980s and consolidated in the 1990s.

Korean businesses acquired a very high debt-to-equity ratio and therefore became vulnerable to any rapid rise in interest rates.29 Internally, South Korea also had to deal with the rising power of organized labour. Massive industrialization entailed equally massive proletarianization and urbanization, which favoured labour organization. In the early years, independent union organizations were fiercely repressed. But Park’s assassination (by his own director of intelligence) in 1979, followed by a brutal massacre of civilian protesters in Kwangju in 1980, sparked a popular movement of students, citizens, and workers for democratization. This was formally achieved in 1987. Wages then rose as unions consolidated their power in the face of continuing governmental repression.


pages: 353 words: 81,436

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, basic income, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency risk, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, profit maximization, risk tolerance, shareholder value, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

The monetary stabilization of the world economy in the early 1980s was a tour de force that came with a high political risk; it could be undertaken only by governments, such as those of Reagan and Thatcher, that were willing to trade mass unemployment for the restoration of ‘sound money’ and to crush the expected social resistance at whatever cost.62 In fact, the deflation of capitalist national economies, backed up with lasting unemployment and neoliberal labour-market reforms, brought about a worldwide decline in union organization (Fig. 1.6) that made the strike weapon virtually unusable in distributional conflicts; the incidence of strikes fell towards zero nearly everywhere and has remained there ever since (Fig. 1.7).63 At the same time, the gap separating the promises of capitalism and the expectations of its clientele from what ever more powerful markets were willing to deliver not only persisted but tended to grow wider; once again, under changed conditions and with new instruments, it had to be politically bridged, however provisionally.

It follows collective ideas of fairness, correctness and reciprocity, concedes demands for a minimum livelihood irrespective of economic performance or productivity, and recognizes civil and human rights to such things as health, social security, participation in the life of the community, employment protection and trade union organization. Neither market nor social justice is uncontroversial. Émile Durkheim already considered the question of what was required for competition to be fair and its outcome to count as just.22 In practice, standard economics assumes that most markets are sufficiently ‘perfect’ that what emerges from them can be considered both just and efficient.


pages: 75 words: 22,220

Occupy by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, Martin Wolf, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, union organizing

After the first few years, by the mid-1930s—although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today—nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.” There was militant labor union organizing, especially CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), organizing going on. It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are really very frightening to the business world—you could see it in the business press at the time—because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself.


pages: 380 words: 153,701

Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels by Rachel Sherman

Abraham Maslow, deskilling, emotional labour, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, knowledge worker, means of production, move 37, new economy, pink-collar, Savings and loan crisis, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, work culture , yield management

When my family was staying in the hotel, my father and I picked up cookies as a parting gift for my coworkers (this was common practice for workers’ family members, who stayed at reduced rates). As we walked into the hotel, I said to Joel, “Look, we got cookies for the workers.” He responded sarcastically, “Yeah, the proletariat,” speaking, as I wrote in my notes, “in this way that was like the proletariat had nothing to do with him.” I was unaware of any discussion of union organizing in either hotel, with the exception of a rumor that Royal Court restaurant workers were thinking about trying to unionize, which I heard only once. One might assume that workers admired guests’ wealth because they identified with guests or aspired to be rich themselves.5 In my twelve months in both hotels, however, I spoke with only two workers who explicitly dreamed of consuming at the same level as guests.6 Few workers seemed to believe or even wonder whether they could reach these heights of consumption, and often they criticized guests for their extravagance.

Ironically, though, these conditions probably act as a disincentive to unionize, since workers already enjoy many of the advantages of the union contract. UC_Sherman (O).qxd 10/3/2006 2:01 PM Page 267 Conclusion 267 I suspect, however, that their lack of interest in unionization is also related to the stability of manager-worker and guest-worker relations, which reinforce each other. As union organizers know, it is often harder to organize front of house workers because of their relationships with clients.26 At the Luxury Garden, managers tended not to transgress worker prerogatives related to autonomy and games, and they generated resources for powerful self-conceptions, such as discourses of prestige and a division of labor that allowed workers to make distinctions between themselves and their colleagues.

First, I wondered if I should disclose my political position—both my experience with the union and the reason for my interest in luxury service, which was that I found its availability unbelievable and basically unconscionable. I was fairly sure that if I had been forthright about either of these issues I would not have gained access.4 However, given that I had no interest in muckraking or in union organizing in these hotels, I decided that I did not have an obligation to disclose my political views unless managers asked me directly, which they did not. Indeed, I was shocked by the extent to which they assumed I shared their interests. I believe they made these assumptions for several reasons. It appeared to me that managers in both hotels, and many workers, thought I was studying hospitality management even when they had been told otherwise.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

[T]hey have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage." '4 Nonetheless, the workmen "very seldom derive any advantage of those tumultuous combinations," except "the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders." ' 118 Scale economies in industry and firm size grew during the nineteenth century. Yet most individuals continued to work for themselves as farmers or small proprietors, and union organizing efforts, like those described by Adam Smith, continued to "generally end in nothing." 17 The legal and political standing of unions changed only as the scale of enterprise rose. The first unions that succeeded in organizing were craft unions of highly skilled workers, who normally organized without extensive violence.

These efforts were generally most intense during periods when real wages were rising due to deflation. When owners attempted to adjust nominal wages, this often triggered protests leading to violence. Such incidents were widespread in the depression that followed the Panic of 1873. In December 1874, open warfare erupted in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. The unions organized a violent strike force in the guise of a secret society named the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Also known as the "Molly Maguires," after an Irish revolutionary, this group was known for terrorizing the coal fields and preventing those miners who wished to work from doing so. Sabotage and destruction of property, 119 outright murder and assassination, were all charged against its members."

He presumed that unions "always will have" what he described as "large powers of coercion and intimidation." In fact, unions are fading away, not merely in the United States and Great Britain, but in other mature industrial societies. The reason they are fading, what Simons missed and what even many union organizers fail to understand, is that the shift to an Information Society has altered megapolitical conditions in crucial ways that sharply increase the security of property. Microtechnology has already begun to prove subversive of the extortion that supports the welfare state because even in the commercial realm it creates very different incentives from those of the industrial period. 1.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

But as huge crowds cheered the haggard, bearded, smiling men who marched out of the occupied Flint plants, everyone knew that the world had changed; workers had shown that they could bring one of the most powerful corporations in the world to its knees by shutting down the giant factories in which they labored.69 The UAW victory set off a wave of strikes and union organization everywhere from giant factories to local retail stores. Nearly five million workers took part in walkouts during 1937, including four hundred thousand sit-downers. For its part, General Motors gave its workers a 5 percent pay hike and agreed with the UAW to a shop-steward system and the use of seniority in layoffs.

After the war, Kaiser leased the Willow Run plant from the federal government to produce automobiles for the newly established Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, which remained in the car business until 1955.7 Defense production—especially in huge factory complexes—elevated the social prestige of the blue-collar worker, already raised by the substance and imagery of the New Deal and the great union organizing drives. Political, military, and labor leaders repeatedly stressed the importance of the industrial home front to victory, overlaying patriotism on the Promethean heroism already associated with the giant factory and the workers within it. Flags, bond sale rallies, blood drives, and collection points for British, Soviet, Greek, and Chinese relief made factories, mills, and shipyards into arenas of patriotic expression.

When siting new factories, companies looked for locations where labor costs were lower and unionism was less likely to succeed, or at least be of a less militant sort. Repeated prewar efforts by the United Rubber Workers to unionize Goodyear’s Gadsden plant and Firestone’s Memphis plant failed, with a reign of terror in Alabama that included severe beatings of union organizers by company thugs and antiunion workers in cahoots with local law enforcement.11 The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) also reacted quickly to labor militancy. In 1936, a month-long strike, overcoming imported strikebreakers and police violence, led to the unionization of the company’s two-million-square-foot complex in Camden, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, where 9,700 workers (75 percent female) produced nearly all of its products.


pages: 523 words: 159,884

The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, accounting loophole / creative accounting, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, California high-speed rail, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cross-subsidies, Ford Model T, high-speed rail, intermodal, James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban sprawl, vertical integration

Attempts to hire unskilled “scabs” inevitably led to failure, since most railroad jobs required skills and experience. The managers were faced with uniquely powerful opponents who were further strengthened by their sheer numbers. It is hardly surprising that the railroads were fertile territory for union organization and, indeed, would become “the seedbed of the American labour movement.”21 The brotherhoods’ industrial and political strength meant that they could pioneer methods of collective bargaining, union organization, and grievance procedures that later would become universal across the labor movement. Railroad workers were able to exploit their skills by moving to rival railroads, often in the expectation of bettering themselves, even if by only a few cents an hour.

Increasingly aware of their industrial muscle, railroad workers were among the first to form local unions and then, crucially, to expand these into national federations that “quickly became the most powerful and effective unions developed in the United States before the twentieth century.”20 The first stirrings of labor organization occurred before the Civil War, but they were very local in scope and generally involved only a small number of skilled workers. In 1863, a Brotherhood of the Footboard, later becoming the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, was formed in Michigan, and this was soon followed by similar brotherhoods representing railroad conductors and “locomotive firemen and enginemen.” These were still, however, not modern-style unions organized to put pressure on management to improve wages and conditions, but rather fraternal organizations providing mutual support and holding social events. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, larger brotherhoods and craft unions began to emerge. Not surprisingly, the railroad companies were reluctant to recognize organized labor.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

The best place to start is Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003). Korstad argues that tobacco workers waged a multipronged attack on “economic exploitation, political disfranchisement, and racial discrimination,” illustrating deep linkages between union organizing and civil rights organizing. For an overview of the union organizing drive at Winston-Salem that is sympathetic to R. J. Reynolds, see, Nannie Mae Tilley, The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1985), 373–414. For an oral history conducted with black tobacco workers in Durham, see Beverly W. Jones, “Race, Sex, and Class: Black Female Tobacco Workers in Durham, North Carolina, 1920–1940, and the Development of Female Consciousness,” Feminist Studies 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), 441–451.

Shimp confessed concern that “there are not more women represented on the council.”47 It is striking that Shimp would be so straightforward in articulating her concerns about gender equity to a group of well-credentialed near-strangers, nearly all of whom were men. But Shimp’s vision for representation was rooted in her experience as part of a labor union—at the very heart, in fact, of what Ruth Milkman has described as the “fourth wave” of union organizing in the pink- and white-collar telecommunications, secretarial, and airline sectors.48 “The majority of employees trapped in the ‘ghettoes’ of the workforce (secretarial pools, clerical areas, etc.) are women,” Shimp wrote.49 “Ghetto” was a revealing choice of words. During the 1970s, feminist observers of the American workplace spoke increasingly of the “secretarial ghetto” or the “pink-collar ghetto”—the poorly paid, low-status, dead-end service and clerical jobs that were feminizing the labor force.50 The right to breathe smoke-free air was, for Shimp, a question of workplace rights.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

When as a senior he showed a date around New Haven and “she was totally uninterested,” he took that as grounds enough to end the relationship.12 Logue’s bond with Yale’s low-level employees, so appalling to his dining-services supervisor from freshman year, only grew over his college career and drew him into helping with a full-scale union-organizing drive mounted during his senior year, 1941–42. The 1930s and early 1940s were a dynamic period for labor in New Haven, as elsewhere in the United States. Garment workers, clock workers, metalworkers, and other local laborers succeeded in organizing unions for the first time. Even the drivers for the Chieppo Bus Company, hired by the university to drive students to the Yale Bowl and other sports fields, struck for union recognition.

Experimenting with job training and placement, prekindergarten education, legal assistance, community schools and health centers, tutoring, adult literacy, juvenile delinquency prevention, and other programs, CPI was widely recognized as the incubator for many of the community action programs—such as the Job Corps, Head Start, and Neighborhood Legal Services—that would become signatures of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s (LBJ) national War on Poverty by the mid-1960s. From its inception in 1962 until 1966, CPI was headed by Mitchell “Mike” Sviridoff, a pal of Logue’s going back to his union-organizing days at Yale.4 Born in the same working-class neighborhood of New Haven as Dick Lee, Sviridoff, like Lee, could not afford college upon graduating high school and so headed into the labor force, where he became a sheet metal worker on the assembly line of United Aircraft in Stratford, Connecticut.

Ed, Frank, and Gordon also went to Yale Law School on the GI Bill. (COURTESY OF FAMILY OF EDWARD J. LOGUE) A UNION ACTIVIST ON CAMPUS, 1942. Logue (with union button) expressed his liberal Democratic politics at conservative Yale by supporting unionization of the university’s hourly workers during his senior year and becoming a full-time union organizer upon graduation. Agitating against the Yale administration launched a pattern in Logue’s life of enjoying being a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast. (COURTESY OF FAMILY OF EDWARD J. LOGUE) STUDYING EUROPEAN CITIES FROM THE AIR IN WORLD WAR II. Logue entered military service in early 1943 hoping to be a pilot but ended up a bombardier instead.


pages: 323 words: 95,188

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, call centre, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing

The Round Table had been his idea. He brought the two sides together. He faced down communist hard-liners threatening to bolt the party at that stormy January meeting of the Central Committee. Ultimately, he would push them to success. Those who led Solidarity would later admit that they “owed” Jaruzelski. Jacek Kuron, a union organizer who spent seven years in jail and would go on to become minister of labor, put it bluntly: “Jaruzelski was the one who saw it just wasn’t working anymore, not just communism but the whole system. He was big enough to see it.” That Jaruzelski should reach out to the hated Solidarity, at a moment when he saw Poland threatened every bit as much as in 1981, was as much an act of courage as it was pragmatism or expedience.

In Warsaw, snappy jingles introduced the candidates on radio and TV. Buses, billboards and shop windows were papered with posters and jaunty red-and-white Solidarity banners. All the candidates had their photos taken with Lech Walesa. They smiled forth from every kiosk, billboard, wall and flat surface in the city. Union organizers passed out Solidarity lapel pins, organized fund-raising concerts and canvassed for support outside churches and on street corners. Walesa himself was ubiquitous. “Ride the Solidarity tank to freedom,” he exhorted voters. The communist party, by contrast, was invisible. In all of Warsaw, it seemed, only a couple of government candidates had bothered to put up campaign posters.


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing, urban planning

Again on the NAFTA model, a separate state would provide a useful weapon against the Israeli working class, offering ways to limit their wages and benefits, and to undermine unions; much as in the U.S., where manufacturers develop excess capacity abroad that can be used to break strikes, and threaten “transfer” to Mexico to disrupt union organizing, a significant consequence of NAFTA that has probably impressed Israeli manufacturers.50 Poor Israeli workers in “development towns” and the Arab sector would be particularly affected, as has already happened. During the neoliberal onslaught of the 1990s, Israeli port workers struggled against privatization of the ports and dismantling of collective-bargaining agreements endorsing rights they had won.

There were a few scattered mentions in the U.S. press (April 19), none in the national press. 49. Asher Davidi, Davar, February 17, 1993; translated by Zachary Lockman in Middle East Report (MERIP), September–October 1993. 50. See Kate Bronfenbrenner, Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages, and Union Organizing (Cornell, September 6, 2000), under contract with the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission, updating a 1997 study, also undertaken under NAFTA rules. Such studies are routinely ignored in public commentary, but not by workers (or, presumably, employers). 51. See economic correspondent Efraim Davidi, “Globalization and Economy in the Middle East,” Palestine-Israel Journal VII.1 and 2, 2000. 52.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

As the unemployed flooded into the Chapare in search of land to grow coca—for many, the only moneymaking option available—the United States launched its Bolivian drug war, funding the military unit Unidad Móvil de Patrullaje Rural (“Mobile Rural Patrol Unit”), or UMOPAR, which was tasked with the destruction of illegal coca crops. Morales and the cocalero unions organized to defend themselves against the onslaught. At the time, both left-wing insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries were involved in the Latin American drug trade. Given that the latter were protected by the CIA, that agency’s mission tended to collide with that of the DEA. In 1982, the Reagan White House issued an order that the CIA was not required to disclose to the DEA when it was working with a suspected drug-smuggling operation.

Communist organizers had been making inroads against the corrupt mob unions, so Luciano had good reason to cooperate with the feds. The mob gave U.S. Naval Intelligence operatives access to its docks and instructed its people to ferret out any German spies. In return, the government allowed the mob to battle the radical union organizers threatening to shut the ports with impunity. Between 1942 and 1946, more than two dozen dockworkers and organizers were killed, their murders left unsolved. Luciano also opened up channels of communication between exiled Sicilian mobsters and those still at home, yielding intelligence that would be used during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Sicily.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

College presidents, paid enormous salaries as if they were the heads of corporations, are judged almost solely on their ability to raise money. In return, these universities, like the media and religious institutions, not only remain silent about corporate power but also condemn as “political” all within their walls who question corporate malfeasance and the excesses of unfettered capitalism. Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class struggle and filled with members who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated negotiators with the capitalist class. Cars rolling off the Ford plants in Michigan were said to be made by UAW Ford.

It was one of the first new pieces of postwar legislation to roll back the gains made by workers under the New Deal. The Wagner Act, known as “the labor bill of rights,” had created the NLRB, and it forbade employers from engaging in unfair labor practices. Although the gains by workers were made primarily in the North, since southern whites sought to block union organizing among blacks, the NLRB represented a major achievement for working men and women. To get it in place, Roosevelt had permitted the NLRB to exclude agricultural and domestic workers, a coded way to exclude blacks and keep southern politicians, who were mostly Democrats, behind him. The Taft-Hartley Act, which is still law, prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, and secondary boycotts—union strikes against employers who continue to do business with a firm that is undergoing a strike.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

In the 1930s, sit-down strikes in the United States proved overwhelmingly effective in recruiting workers to a cause of militancy and hence forcing management to the negotiating table. In Flint, Michigan, the United Automobile Workers was able to get a contract with General Motors over the course of three months in early 1937. The entry of the United States into the Second World War momentarily stalled union organizing, but strike activity had returned to 1937 levels by 1944 and surged again after peace in 1945.66 In postwar Japan, automakers tried to avoid the labor unrest characteristic of the American experience. Unable to smash unions entirely, they opted for managerial reorganization: instead of a single, vulnerable factory, they created a cascading series of subcontractors to produce and assemble all the components of a car, through which labor militancy could be defused and concessions more easily squeezed from workers in competition with one another.67 When workers’ demands couldn’t be corralled they were accommodated, even as visions for wider economic and social transformation—particularly those of American communists and socialists—were smashed by McCarthyism in the United States and parallel practices of anti-communism elsewhere.68 In the global workplace, this accommodation meant the rise of corporatism, what Michael Burawoy has called a shift from “despotic” to “hegemonic” factory regimes.69 Factory operators learned from one another, but so did workers, with more automotive strikes happening globally.

When the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company squeezed their wages, coal miners organized.72 Their strike, from spring 1913 to winter 1914, remains a signal moment in US labor history. On April 20, 1914, around twenty men, women, and children were killed at a striker’s camp in Ludlow, Colorado. Subsequent outrage, particularly against the mine owner, John D. Rockefeller Jr., led to congressional investigation and, fueled by further union organization, restrictions on child labor and the introduction of the eight-hour working day.73 Timothy Mitchell points out that the labor politics of carbon had a profound impact on the twentieth century. Set aside the discussion of whether a particular country is “cursed” by a resource like fossil fuel or minerals.74 Look instead at how the extraction of those resources built a working class that was able to resist its exploitation and whose demands for equality could be met through the energy its labor made profitable.75 All of a sudden, national destinies could be dreamed far bigger than before—precisely because such national dreams were underwritten by cheap energy.


pages: 90 words: 27,452

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

In the past forty years, trade unions have almost disappeared, to the point where only 10 percent of workers bargain collectively according to negotiated contracts; manufacturing jobs in steel and autos, the heart and soul of the new labor movement invented in the 1930s, have been exported to low-wage, non-union regions, including the American South; employment increases have been concentrated in white-collar occupations, which are notoriously inhospitable to union organizing (at least as abetted by the courts); temporary and contingent labor have become the norm in the design and allocation of office space as corporations themselves come and go in a quickening spiral of mergers, bankruptcies, relocations, or rebrandings; and technological change now threatens to erase most of the job classifications the Labor Department has used for a half century to calculate employment patterns and trends.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

The international air police would in some future extirpate militarism and nationalism from the world. One of the advocates, of many, was the coal owner and endower of the study of international relations David Davies, who financed the New Commonwealth Society to promote the idea. The League of Nations Union organized a Peace Ballot in 1935, which was once cited by historians as evidence of pacifist sentiment, but is now more likely to be used to show how powerful was the view that international peace should be secured by sanctions and by the use of force, especially international force. The liberal internationalists gained new strength in the Second World War.

In 1910 a Federation of Transport Workers, made up of two general dockers’ unions (one southern, one northern) and the sailors’ union (its leader was a Liberal MP), was formed. A National Union of Railwaymen emerged in 1913 by merger (though the drivers’ union, ASLEF, remained aloof). By 1914 these three groupings created a ‘triple alliance’ which was threatening a general strike. Union organization was mirrored by employer organization, at the top level by the Trades Union Congress and the National Confederation of Employers’ Organizations (founded 1919), at lower levels by the likes of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Employers’ Federation and the Federation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades, which were already national before 1914.

Of course, the rationale of trade unions was precisely that workers were weak in the face of the private interests of particular employers and the sectional interests of all employers. Yet the very limited power of workers and unions could be presented as much greater than it actually was because this could only express itself in visible ways – in trade union organization, in trade union elections, in strikes. There is no doubt about the relative strength of organized labour in the 1970s compared to earlier periods. Through the 1970s the number of trade unionists rose, peaking in 1979. The proportion of unionized workers was higher than ever before, reaching to more than half the workforce.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

The complaint was upheld by the US National Labor Relations Board, which ordered trivial penalties after years of delay, the standard procedure. The NAFTA study, by Cornell University Labor economist Kate Bronfenbrenner, was authorized for release by Canada and Mexico, but delayed by the Clinton administration. It reveals a significant impact of NAFTA on strikebreaking. About half of union organizing efforts are disrupted by employer threats to transfer production abroad, for example, by placing signs reading “Mexico Transfer Job” in front of a plant where there is an organizing drive. The threats are not idle. When such organizing drives nevertheless succeed, employers close the plant in whole or in part at triple the pre-NAFTA rate (about 15 percent of the time).

Working hours have gone way up—Americans apparently work about a month a year more than they did 25 years ago, wages have stagnated, support systems have gone down, working conditions have deteriorated. The decline of US labor costs to the lowest, second to England, in the industrial world was hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “a welcome development of transcendent importance,” and that’s part of the United States being happy and satisfied. Illegal firing of union organizers tripled in the 1980s, along with other violations of law, which continue under Clinton. The Reagan administration essentially informed the business world it wasn’t going to apply the laws, and this was reported rather accurately in the business press.8 That’s a big factor in the increase in inequality, the attack on wages and incomes.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

Every available means of communication was employed. By the 1980s, with the bitterly antilabor Reagan administration, the attack was again underway in full force. President Reagan made it clear to the business world that the laws protecting labor rights, never very strong, would not be enforced. The illegal firing of union organizers skyrocketed, and the United States returned to the use of scabs, outlawed almost everywhere in developed countries except South Africa. The liberal Clinton administration undermined labor in different ways. One highly effective means was the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) linking Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 26.   6. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam Classics, 2003).   7. Kate Bronfenbrenner, “We’ll Close! Plant Closings, Plant-Closing Threats, Union Organizing and NAFTA,” Multinational Monitor 18, no. 3 (March 1997): 8–14.   8. Richard B. Freeman, “Do Workers Still Want Unions? More than Ever,” Economic Policy Institute, 22 February 2007, http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp182.html; Gallup Poll, “In U.S. Majority Approves of Unions, but Say They’ll Weaken,” 30 August 2013, http://www.gallup.com/poll/164186/majority-approves-unions-say-weaken.aspx.   9.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

After telling me I’m too late, the whole system has collapsed, and it’s just awful in Germany now, she then said, “I have just the person. He advised our works councils in IT.” She said he used to be a CEO of a high-tech company. Now he works as a full-time organizer for IG Metall. “What?” I said. “You’re saying this guy was a CEO like Bill Gates and now he’s a union organizer?” But it turned out to be true. His name was Wigand, and he had white hair, and he looked like the drummer for the Rolling Stones. He also looked like a U-boat commander, except he was in jeans and smoked more than they’d let you on (or “aboard”) a submarine. Right after we shook hands, I had to ask: “Were you really a CEO of a high-tech company?”

(Streeck) German model of social democracy and capitalism child care benefits children in poverty civic trust college attendance rates college tuitions in contrast to France education system elderly poor English-speaking GDP per capita and German character and Germans who resemble Americans Germany as “Green” Germany’s darkness and historical trauma government-provided benefits/entitlements green technology holiday weekends and leisure time hours worked and standard-of-living income equality/inequality law students and bar exam middle class military draft nursing-home benefits and parent care pensions and retirement political conversations political identity and political educations quality control reading and print culture retirement age savings rates size and history in Europe small houses and unification U.S. elites’ opinions of weak state and socialist-friendly private corporations welfare women’s benefits and birthrates See also Berlin, Germany; financial meltdown of 2008 (the Krise) and German model; German model of social democracy (future of); German model of social democracy (German socialism); German model of social democracy (jobs/employment); German model of social democracy (labor and industry); German model of social democracy (unions and labor movement) German model of social democracy (future of) ascension of CDU changes to the European model decline of labor unions/union organizing financial meltdown of 2008 (the Krise) Germans’ despair about pension crisis rumors of collapse SDP-Green government and Agenda 2010 German model of social democracy (German socialism) and Catholicism co-determination contrast to older state socialism and German capitalism labor unions and wage-setting and postwar U.S.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

A revised Master and Servant Act renewing the prohibition on breach of contract by workers was adopted by Parliament in 1823 and 1867. Between 1858 and 1867, there were ten thousand prosecutions under these acts. These cases typically started with the arrest of workers about whom there was a complaint. These laws were also used consistently against union organization, until they were fully repealed in 1875. These conditions of the working class were entirely in line with the vision of the politically powerful segments of society. Their attitudes, and the implications thereof, are well illustrated by the 1832 Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws, convened to reform these laws dating back to Elizabethan times.

Industrial growth brought people together in workplaces in cities and allowed the organizing and developing of shared ideas. This changed politics both in the workplace and in the nation. In Britain, Chartism and the rise of trade unions expanded political representation and transformed the scope of government action. In the United States, union organization combined with farmer protests did the same. Throughout Europe, the rise of factories meant that it was easier to organize workers. More democracy helped greatly with the sharing of productivity gains as it facilitated collective bargaining for better working conditions and higher wages. With new industries, products, and tasks increasing worker productivity and rents being shared between employers and workers, wages increased.

In the United States, on the other hand, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act weakened some of the pro-union provisions of the Wagner Act and legislated that collective bargaining had to take place at the business-unit level. It also banned secondary industrial action, such as boycotts in sympathy with strikers. Consequently, American unions organize and negotiate wages in their immediate workplaces, with no industry coordination. This arrangement breeds more conflictual relations between business and labor. When managers think that a hard line against unions can reduce wages and create a cost advantage relative to competitors, they are less likely to accept union demands.


pages: 350 words: 112,234

Korea by Simon Winchester

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, life extension, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, union organizing

Chi-Woo, who had driven down from Seoul the night before with his wife and two children, is a celebrated poet, a former aesthetics student at Seoul National University. ‘Korea’s Oxford,’ he said proudly. ‘I have to tell you we are not a very popular family with the government,’ he explained. ‘One of us has become a monk because of the Kwangju massacre. Another is a schoolteacher. Here am I, well known as an anti-government poet. And the fourth is a trade union organizer in Inchon, and he is in hiding. He has been on the run from the police for most of the last two years. So you have picked yourself dangerous company.’ By the time the last couple had arrived—a woman and child whose role in the family was never explained—mother emerged from wherever she had been hiding these past hours, and a lacquer table was brought in with scores of steel and china dishes balanced precariously on it.

Now he employs more than a hundred thousand men and women, and his empire is worth billions. Brilliant organization, Confucian dedication, an innate sense of duty, carefully applied company paternalism, and an unforgiving regime of discipline—all this, coupled with low wages and precious little interference from union organizations—all helped to bring Kim and his colleagues at Hyundai and Gold Star and Samsung and the other chaebols, who started, as he had, from nothing in those ruined days following the war, the immense power and industrial might they enjoy today. The Japanese industrial giants are often much older and more venerable institutions or were founded by men with great fortunes or by the members of ancient aristocracies—Sony, for instance, was created by a man whose family firm had made a fortune out of sake more than a century ago.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Bridget Anderson maintains that employing domestic workers in the home consolidates social status and class, and that the highly exploitative conditions associated with domestic work exist because it is “the worker’s ‘personhood,’ rather than her labour power, which the employer is attempting to buy.”66 In response to these exploitative labor relations and carceral social formations, the International Domestic Workers Federation brings together domestic workers’ unions and associations from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, South and North America, and Europe. The first global union organization run by women, it won a historic Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention, adopted by the ILO in 2011. Geraldine Pratt and Migrante BC powerfully argue, “Although domestic work is feminized, the strength of domestic worker organizing disrupts the conventional images of femininity and must be understood in terms of the spatiality and materialities of domestic workers’ lives.”67 Around the world, migrant workers are spearheading vital labor, feminist, antiracist, and migrant justice campaigns calling for an end to policies of temporary labor migration that facilitate racialized, gendered indentureship based on citizenship status.

fourteen-years-of-nafta-and-the. 52.Laura Dowley, “How an Indigenous Woman Left Her Mark on a Tumultuous Presidential Campaign in Mexico,” OpenDemocracy, March 20, 2018, www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/indigenous-women-presidential-campaign-mexico/. 53.Aldo Gonzalez quoted in Christina Santini, “The People of the Corn,” Cultural Survival, December 2006, www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/people-corn. 54.de Ita, “Fourteen Years of NAFTA.” 55.Manuel Perez-Rocha, “5 Reasons Mexican Workers Would Cheer the Demise of NAFTA,” Foreign Policy in Focus, February 28, 2018, https://fpif.org/5-reasons-mexican-workers-cheer-demise-nafta/; Paley, Drug War Capitalism, 101. 56.Reyna Cruz López quoted in Dowley, “How an Indigenous Woman Left Her Mark.” 57.Tracy Jan, “With NAFTA in Trump’s Crosshairs, Mexico’s Border Factories Brace for the Unknown,” Washington Post, February 21, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-nafta-in-trumps-crosshairs-mexicos-border-factories-brace-for-the-unknown/2017/02/21/f91a3960-ee49-11e6-b4ff-ac2cf509efe5_story.html; Patricia Fernandez Kelly, “The ‘Maquila’ Women,” NACLA, September 25, 2007, https://nacla.org/article/%27maquila%27-women. 58.Chacón and Davis, No One Is Illegal, 117. 59.John Geddes, “How Many Jobs Has NAFTA Really Cost the U.S.?” Maclean’s, August 16, 2017, www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/how-many-jobs-has-nafta-really-cost-the-u-s/. 60.Kate Bronfenbrenner, “We’ll Close! Plant Closings, Plant-Closing Threats, Union Organizing and NAFTA,” Multinational Monitor 18, no. 3 (1997): 8–14. 61.Robinson, “What Is behind the Renegotiation of NAFTA?” 62.Jonathan Fox and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States (La Jolla: Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies / Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, UCSD, 2004). 63.David Bacon, “Globalization and NAFTA Caused Migration from Mexico,” Political Research Associates, October 11, 2014, www.politicalresearch.org/2014/10/11/globalization-and-nafta-caused-migration-from-mexico. 64.Bacon, “Globalization and NAFTA.” 65.Bill Clinton quoted in Gabriela Flora and Gabriel Camacho, “NAFTA’s Not Delivered, Except for Corporations,” American Friends Service Committee, www.afsc.org/resource/naftas-not-delivered-except-corporations. 66.Grandin, The End of the Myth, 247. 67.Cynthia Bejarano, Maria Cristina Morales, and Said Saddiki, “Understanding Conquest through a Border Lens,” in Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, Jenna M.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

“Like, are you a communist?” I decide to go with the least complicated answer that’s also true, which is no. “But you do support the unions?” About one sentence into my rambling explanation of that one, Akasha loses interest and darts off to the bar. In hindsight, I realize she was probably asking if I was a union organizer—Amazon is hardcore antiunion and has historically made workers sit through a lot of propaganda to make them suspicious of unions. Melody sips her drink, saying somewhat blissfully that this is her first day off in a month. I mention how I tried to pull off working two jobs seven days a week when I was twenty-three, and that it made me so tired, irritable, and depressed that friends staged a semi-intervention.

Well, yeah—if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be driving anymore, so you would have never spoken. Ford’s workers who decided it wasn’t worth it or got too injured to continue were by definition no longer around to contribute to internal investigations and research. * Ford was pretty into eugenics, as you might expect. * A union organizer once said that Detroit was “full of cripples who had stamped on their backs: ‘Made by Ford.’” * If this section interests you, I suggest picking up Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, 3rd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), a readable and much more in-depth look at these ideas. * It’s the same reason water shoots out of a garden hose faster when you put two fingers over the mouth


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

These struggles by American workers reached their peak in the early 1890s, when the dramatic strikes that marked the first attempts at industrial unionization in steel, rail, and metal mining briefly threatened to coalesce with farmer radicalism, before the strikes were broken through severe state repression.42 The capitalist class regrouped through the formation of a wide variety of local civic, social, and cultural organizations, as well as through powerful new national institutions like the National Association of Manufacturers (formed to stimulate US exports, as well as being an active anti-union organization). The most important expression of this regrouping was a new alliance between business and the Republican Party that was forged in the run-up to the 1896 election. It was an alliance founded on an explicit recognition that “a system based on private property needs class-conscious leadership just as much as a revolutionary movement.”43 The Republicans’ historic victory over Bryanite populism in the 1896 election ushered in two key developments in the American state.

With workers desperate to hold on to their jobs, by the end of 1982 “major concessions had been negotiated in airlines, meatpacking, agricultural implements, trucking, grocery, rubber, among smaller steel firms, and in public employment.”47 Anti-union appointments to the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board had immediate effects in checking union organizing drives and sustaining employers’ bad-faith bargaining tactics. But, as Alan Greenspan subsequently reflected, in discussing Reagan’s legacy, “perhaps the most important, and then highly controversial, domestic initiative was the firing of the air traffic controllers in August 1981 . . . his action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.”48 The strike by PATCO (the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), which had actually endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election campaign) was broken not only by the permanent dismissal of 12,000 controllers, but by military personnel being brought in to run the airports, while many of the strike leaders were arrested and led away in chains.49 Notably, Volcker himself thought that the breaking of PATCO did “even more to break the morale of labor” than had the earlier “breaking of the pattern of wage push in the auto industry.”50 The “contradictions of success” that had erupted with worker and social-movement militancy in the mid 1960s were thus finally resolved in the early 1980s.

Mortgage borrowers are the beneficiaries of what amounts to a global competition to lend to American home buyers.104 Indeed, by the mid 1990s household consumer and mortgage debt surpassed the total debt of nonfinancial corporations, and it also exceeded the debt of federal, state, and municipal governments combined. The global competition to lend to American workers combined with the global competition that free trade represented to integrate as well as weaken American labor. The main goal of the reform leadership slate elected to the AFL-CIO in 1995, committed to increasing the density of union organization, was to try to get “progressive competitiveness” back on the agenda: “We want to increase productivity,” the AFL-CIO’s new president declared in 1996. “We want to help American business compete in the world.”105 Yet US labor’s accommodation to the making of global capitalism by the end of the twentieth century was accompanied by the emergence of the new anti-globalization protest movement.


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Although the company has enjoyed unusually harmonious industrial relations, it would be a mistake to overidealize that aspect of its culture. As in any organization, there have been conflicts, disagreements, and disgruntled groups and individuals. In the mid-1990s, dissident Lincoln Electric employees took part in a union-organizing campaign to “force management back to better lines of communication” with regard to decisions that had reduced the company’s commitment to promoting from within, and altered the way its pension plan was funded. When management subsequently reversed those decisions, the employees promptly called off the organizing drive.

The Depression was so devastating for American workers that many began to form trade unions. By the mid-1930s, almost every business in San Francisco had been organized. The one major exception, Levi Strauss & Co., then found itself targeted for organization by the United Garment Workers of America (UGWA). But when union organizers approached the Levi plant’s employee entrance, they were largely ignored by the company’s workers, who apparently were grateful to have been spared the curse of unemployment. Resolved to win the right to represent the workers, the UGWA began to picket the facility. The union had a significant point of leverage: it demanded that its members buy only products affixed with a “union-made” label.

14 In the 1970s, Cummins appointed an ethics officer long before ethics and compliance officers became de rigueur in American corporations. At Cummins, ethical practices began with the way the company treated its employees. To create a sense of community among its workers, no Cummins facility had more than five thousand employees (a large number, but small for diesel factories). In 1936, when CIO union organizers attempted to enlist the workers in Columbus’s largest companies, Miller rejected his fellow industrialists’ concerted efforts to prevent unionization; he even refused to join the Indiana Chamber of Commerce because it backed so-called right-to-work legislation. His reason: “We don’t feel right fighting our own people.”15 Years later, after Cummins workers had rejected the CIO bid and formed their own Diesel Workers Union, Miller remarked, “I wouldn’t know how to run a big business without a strong union.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

The more successful the movement, the greater the backlash from the state and the more important such solidarity will be. A tangible example of how solidarity was built at scale can be seen in the work of the Bristol-based Easton Anti-Poll Tax Union. We concluded that people would only refuse to pay if they felt others around them would also do so. Once it had grown sufficiently, the Union organized a representative for every street in Easton. That person took responsibility for knocking on every door in that street with a survey. One of the key questions ran along the lines of ‘If 75 per cent of people in your street say that they won’t pay the Poll Tax, will you also not pay?’ We collated the responses and then went back to every household with the results, at the same time inviting people to group meetings.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

The local Department of Labor did little to keep them from “being locked up in barracks with fences around them, . . . and didn’t even think there was any reason to investigate it.”34 In 1994 and ’95, the islands’ raw material—the imported guest workers themselves—started refusing to play their assigned role. A wave of union organizing swept across Saipan, and the government was put to the ultimate test. Workers at grocery stores, restaurants, and several of Saipan’s hotels decided to take matters into their own hands, with the assistance of an organizer sent by a hotel workers’ union in Hawaii, one Elwood Mott. But this kind of liberty—well, let’s just say it might have blown up the laboratory altogether.

Torres on the profits unions make: “One More Time Against Unions,” Letter to the Editor, Marianas Variety, date not visible on my copy (probably 1995). Torres on bigwigs in limousines: “Torres Shuns Unions for Aliens,” Marianas Variety, August 4, 1995. Persona Non Grata: Ninth Northern Marianas Commonwealth Legislature, HR No. 9-141, December 18, 1995: “A House Resolution to declare Elwood Mott, a resident of the State of Hawaii and a union organizer, a persona non grata in the Commonwealth.” One reason cited by the CNMI legislature for its bizarre move was that “the formulation of unions here effectively promotes a division between resident and non-resident employees.” 39. Torres’s two-year proposal would obviously have been in violation of the nation’s labor laws, which prohibit discriminating against union members in such a fashion.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

Quinn decision of 2014, that took rights away from home care workers, ruled, in Janus v. AFSCME , that the entire public sector was now “right-to-work.” That meant that a union that has won the right to represent a particular workforce no longer has a right to collect a fee for its costs. The backers of Janus , a who’s who of anti-union organizations, expected the public sector, and particularly teachers’ unions, to hemorrhage members, though so far the damage has been blunted—largely, it appears, by the willingness of teachers to fight. 44 When the teachers in West Virginia organized a strike in 2018, closing every public school in the state to demand fair pay, they kicked off a strike wave that spread to at least fourteen states, further changing the calculus about public schools.

Jaffe’s decades of shrewd and discerning journalism helped her produce this excellent book. It is a multiplex in still life; a stunning critique of capitalism, a collective conversation on the meaning of life and work, and a definite contribution to the we-won’t-settle-for-less demands of the future society everyone deserves.” —Jane McAlevey, author of A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy


pages: 424 words: 123,180

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

African American men and women attended the “Negro” dances or played bridge, table tennis, and swam at local high schools for Black children.26 The new Census Building had a cafeteria—and next to it was a smaller “Colored” cafeteria.27 One crucial census worker activity did cross the color line: union organizing. Moriyama might at some point have walked past a flyer hanging on a census office bulletin board, from January 1941, that read: “Democracy Begins at Home.” Director Austin definitely saw the flyer—a copy ended up in his archival papers. The flyer’s authors were affiliated with the United Federal Workers of America (UFWA), one of the three unions that represented census workers.

Willis, Carol Wilson, Woodrow women Wood, Robert Elkington Woodward & Lothrop (Woodies) workers; African Americans as; citizenship proved by; enumerators’ classifications of; internet and; jobs needed by; machines obscuring; in Mississippi; with partners; in photographs; Social Security racializing; unions organizing; wages of; in warehouse; women Works Progress Administration “World’s Greatest Quiz Session” (article) World War II Young, Eph Young, William W. ILLUSTRATION CREDITS Here  Fairfax County, Virginia, E.D. 30–26, sheet 62B. Here  U.S. House of Representatives, Sixteenth Decennial Census of Population: Message from the President of the United States, 77th Congress, 1st Session, Document 45 (January 8, 1941), 2 in File 5.1180 General, Box 2, Entry 228, RG 29, NARA, D.C.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

The well-paid leaders of the AFL were protected from criticism by tightly controlled meetings and by “goon” squads—hired toughs originally used against strikebreakers but after a while used to intimidate and beat up opponents inside the union. In this situation—terrible conditions of labor, exclusivity in union organization—working people wanting radical change, seeing the root of misery in the capitalist system, moved toward a new kind of labor union. One morning in June 1905, there met in a hall in Chicago a convention of two hundred socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States.

A textile strike in Rhode Island in 1922 among Italian and Portuguese workers failed, but class feelings were awakened and some of the strikers joined radical movements. Luigi Nardella recalled: . . . my oldest brother, Guido, he started the strike. Guido pulled the handles on the looms in the Royal Mills, going from one section to the next shouting, “Strike! Strike!” . . . When the strike started we didn’t have any union organizers. . . . We got together a group of girls and went from mill to mill, and that morning we got five mills out. We’d motion to the girls in the mills, “Come out! Come out!” Then we’d go on to the next. . . . Somebody from the Young Workers’ League came out to bring a check, and invited me to a meeting, and I went.

But Republic Steel was organized, and so was Ford Motor Company, and the other huge plants in steel, auto, rubber, meatpacking, the electrical industry. The Wagner Act was challenged by a steel corporation in the courts, but the Supreme Court found it constitutional—that the government could regulate interstate commerce, and that strikes hurt interstate commerce. From the trade unions’ point of view, the new law was an aid to union organizing. From the government’s point of view it was an aid to the stability of commerce. Unions were not wanted by employers, but they were more controllable—more stabilizing for the system than the wildcat strikes, the factory occupations of the rank and file. In the spring of 1937, a New York Times article carried the headline “Unauthorized Sit-Downs Fought by CIO Unions.”


Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg

blue-collar work, Brownian motion, dematerialisation, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Loma Prieta earthquake, low skilled workers, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, pets.com, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave

For many were not influenced by Cotton decades afterwards, the city was celebrated as a cosmopolitan version of the Wild West town, with malleable social mores, eccentrics and adventurers a big part of the social mix. tieth century, it was becoming By a center for the twen- immigrant Wobblies and union organizers Italian anarchists, not only the most tightly organized city in America but . . . States, the stronghold of trade unionism in the United " asserted Carey McWilliams.^'^ Conscientious objectors flocked here after poets who would later be World War II. and the celebrated as beat and as the San Francisco Renaissance started coming in the 1940s and 1950s; .


pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 11 The Triumph of the Oligarchy DIG UNDER THE SURFACE of the system and you see individuals making deals that generated billions for themselves—such as Carl Icahn’s corporate raids, Jack Welch’s attacks on GE’s workers and unions, Warren Buffet’s investments in corporations with moats, and Sandy Weill’s and Jamie Dimon’s unfettered financial supermarkets and betting parlors. Dig deeper and you see how these deals depended on seemingly small changes in laws and regulations, such as preventing companies from defending themselves from raiders, neutering antitrust enforcement, imposing small fines on corporations for firing union organizers, refusing to regulate derivatives, and dismantling Glass-Steagall. Bore still deeper and you see a vicious cycle in which, starting around 1980, wealth and power began concentrating among a relatively small group at the top, giving them increasing political clout to get changes in laws and regulations that concentrated their wealth and power even more.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

For those who worried that the bill would promote strikes, the law also established a national committee—composed of labor, industry, and public officials—that could assert jurisdiction in local construction disputes. Believing that a law passed in 1975 would have no trouble in 1977, labor leaders did not ask for Carter’s support and it was not volunteered, although Carter promised to sign the legislation.18 But labor underestimated anti-union organizing, led by Associated General Contractors, which assembled a grassroots movement and a united business lobby. On March 23 the House of Representatives killed the bill, 205–217. Neither the labor movement nor the Carter administration had been fully aware of the increasing militancy of business.

The AFL-CIO had wanted the three clauses to remain so that a strong bill could weather the inevitable congressional compromises. But, having lost the picketing bill and requiring presidential support, labor acquiesced. The bill still contained numerous changes that would speed up elections, stiffen penalties for labor law violators, and make certain that union organizers had access to workers. In early July, Carter publicly embraced the principles of labor reform but not the reform bill itself. He advocated sped-up elections, expansion of the NLRB from five to seven members, and measures penalizing law-breaking companies with both double back pay for illegally discharged workers, and debarment from federal contracts.


pages: 450 words: 134,152

The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T by Steve Coll

Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, cross-subsidies, George Santayana, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, union organizing, vertical integration

Once, vacationing on a Caribbean island and finding himself stranded by a local airline strike, McGowan had chartered a jet to the States and paid for it by selling tickets to frustrated tourists at the airport, rescuing his fellow travelers and clearing a handsome profit at the same time. He had grown up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a bleak Appalachian coal town colored gray by smoke and soot from dozens of nearby anthracite coal plants. His father was a union organizer who worked with the men at Wilkes-Barre’s bustling railyards, where tons of coal moved in and out of the city on five different railroad lines. McGowan knew early and profoundly the ethic of relentless hard work that drove Wilkes-Barre’s smokestack industries, and if he was ever inclined to forget that ethic in adolescence, the corporal discipline meted out by the nuns in the Catholic schools he attended provided a painful reminder of his obligations.

By the time Bill McGowan pushed through a revolving glass door into the lobby of 195 Broadway at about 9:30 A.M. on Friday, March 2, 1973, the MCI chairman had worked himself into a lather. He was ready to play hardball with his AT&T counterpart, and he was not going to be overmatched—as the son of a union organizer, McGowan had learned early in life about the use of threats and intimidation in business negotiations. John deButts, AT&T’s patrician southern gentleman, was about to be introduced to a style of negotiation prevalent thirty years earlier in the smoky railroad union halls of Wilkes-Barre. McGowan was now on AT&T’s turf, however, and the headquarters building at 195 Broadway conjured up a culture far removed from the Dickensian milieu of an Appalachian coal town.


Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It was puzzling at first: wouldn’t a company want to encourage those who were striving to do well and who took pride in how competently they carried out their work? But after a while it became clear: the megastores want the work done, but they do not want employees to have any degree of self-confidence or sense of their own worth, which only leads to costly problems, like demands for wage increases, independent thinking, and union-organizing drives. “They like to put people down,” Turner explained. One wonders how many of his coworkers, especially those he described as the store manager’s favorites, had also had entire days deleted from their paychecks, but, rather than stand up for themselves, had opted to just let it go. Trying to support a family on less than nineteen thousand dollars a year became virtually impossible—an endless series of hard choices between food and health care, electricity and rent.

Those who find some way, licit or otherwise, to meet the budget, earn substantial bonuses that can double or triple their base pay; those who do not are either demoted or fired. Moreover, annual increases in a store’s sales are expected to exceed the rate of growth in payroll costs—so every year, the screws tighten. Above all, it is the store manager’s responsibility to snuƒ out any attempts by workers to form a union. Organizing a retail store is already extremely di‰cult, due to the high rate of employee turnover and the vulnerability of a workforce that is easily replaced. Sporadic organizing drives at stores operated by Home Depot, Target, and other chains have collapsed, often amid allegations that union supporters were illegally intimidated or even fired by store managers.


pages: 473 words: 140,480

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

The men employed fifty workers at the start, Scots-Irish mountain men and black sharecroppers, rugged farmers and moonshiners, all of whom were happy to work for five cents an hour. Like most refugees, the first generation of Southern mill hands were known for their patience. Desperate to feed their families, they brought with them an individualism nurtured by solitary life on small farms—a trait that would make them putty in company owners’ hands, especially when union organizers came to town. (They may not have loved their bosses, but they trusted them more than they trusted the outsiders.) They had lived in coves, distant from the cash economy. Now they traveled to work on foot, carrying lanterns in the predawn, some from as far as eight miles away. For one hundred dollars, J.D. hired a traveling furniture designer he’d met in Grand Rapids to develop blueprints, beginning with bedroom furniture because that was simplest to make.

Now unemployment was rising, and people were eager to get to work. “He was very adamant with the workers that if the union ever came back in, he would shut the plant down,” Sumter controller Ellen Hill recalled. “If they had a problem, they were supposed to come tell him; the line of communication was always open.” We can help you better than some union organizer “who lives off in Timbuktu,” he told them. If a worker or manager had any problem at all, he wanted to know about it before it reached critical mass. “Come on, guys, at least bring me a live body to revive!” he told them. “Don’t bring me a corpse!” He presented himself casually to the workers, wearing his trademark sweat-stained golf cap, khakis, and a tattered sweater vest (usually embroidered with the logo of one of his exclusive golf clubs).


What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

banking crisis, British Empire, Doomsday Clock, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, informal economy, liberation theology, mass immigration, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, oil shale / tar sands, operational security, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

Actually, public sector unionization has stayed pretty steady, which illustrates the fact, as we know from other sources, that workers would join unions if they could.6 In the public sector, there are rules that make it difficult to employ illegal measures to block unionization. In the private sector, since Ronald Reagan, the government has made it explicit that employers can use illegal measures to undermine union organizing, and it’s done constantly.7 There have been other changes in the international economy that affect unionization. Can this be reversed? It certainly can. But it’s going to mean overcoming a lot of pressures. There are no new secrets about this. The methods of organizing are known. They just have to be pursued.


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

In short, there is a conflict between the government, which is the enemy, and the people, who are living the American dream together: the sober working man, his loyal wife (now maybe with a job herself), the hardworking executive toiling for the benefit of all, the friendly banker eager to lend money when needed, all a model of harmony, their happy lives disrupted only by “outsiders” and “un-Americans” of various sorts—union organizers and other riffraff. That is the picture that has been diligently crafted by the Public Relations industry, vastly expanded after the shock of popular organizing in the 1930s shattered the belief that the end of history had been reached in a kind of utopia of the masters. With some variants, the picture has endured in business propaganda, the entertainment industry, and much of the popular and intellectual culture.


pages: 218 words: 44,364

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom

Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Burning Man, creative destruction, disintermediation, experimental economics, Firefox, Francisco Pizarro, jimmy wales, Kibera, Lao Tzu, Network effects, peer-to-peer, pez dispenser, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing

Some people fit naturally into the role of hunt saboteur; others didn't. But Sky never said anything negative or discouraging. His job, as he saw it, was to get a group on its feet. The members could eventually figure out who fit in, who didn't, and what actions to take together as a group. In many ways, Sky was like a union organizer. He was also a TAKING ON DECENTRALIZATION perfect example of a catalyst. He'd come into a progressive town like Berkeley and connect with the local animal rights activists. They usually weren't very difficult to find—every college town has at least one animal rights group, and the animal rights community is small and intimate enough that the major activists across different cities all know each other.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

Not only American firms but also German, Japanese, and South Korean car companies have avoided dealing with unionized workforces in the American “rust belt” by moving jobs to nonunion workforces in the American South and Mexico.13 The use by employers of immigrants, both legal and illegal, to weaken or destroy unions in US sectors like agriculture and meatpacking and janitorial work has been well documented.14 The mere threat of replacement by foreign workers or immigrants can serve to intimidate a much larger group than those who are actually replaced. During the economic boom of the 1990s more than half of all employers in one study, to discourage union organizing, threatened to shut down all or part of a plant, even though employers acted on the threat in fewer than 3 percent of the cases.15 * * * — IN ADDITION TO weakening organized labor, high levels of immigration can reduce public support for welfare state services that bolster the bargaining power of workers by allowing them to “hold out” longer in negotiations with employers.


Killing Hope: Us Military and Cia Interventions Since World War 2 by William Blum

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, kremlinology, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, trickle-down economics, union organizing

To add to the concern of American leaders, Sukarno had made trips to the Soviet Union and China (though to the White House as well), he had purchased arms from Eastern European countries (but only after being turned down by the United States),7 he had nationalized many private holdings of the Dutch, and, perhaps most disturbing of all, the Indonesian Communist Party (PK1) had made impressive gains electorally and in union-organizing, thus earning an important role in the coalition government. It was a familiar Third World scenario, and the reaction of Washington policymakers was equally familiar. Once again, they were unable, or unwilling, to distinguish nationalism from pro-communism, neutralism from wickedness. By any definition of the word, Sukarno was no communist.

Joaquin Balaguer remained in office for the next 12 years, ruling his people in the grand Latin American style: The rich became richer and the poor had babies, hungry babies; democracy remained an alien concept; the police and military regularly kidnapped, tortured and murdered opponents of the government and terrorized union organizers.46 But the man was not, personally, the monster that Trujillo was. There was relative calm and peace. No "communist threat" hovered over the land. The pot was sweetened for foreign investors, and American corporations moved in with big bucks. There was stability and order. And the men who ran the United States looked and were satisfied.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

The end of World War II brought an end to the promise many unions had made not to strike during wartime, accompanied by a post-war boom in demand for the products the workers made. Thanks to the New Deal’s National Labor Relations Act, which established a breakthrough menu of protections for union organizing and collective bargaining, this gave workers and their union leaders unprecedented power. They used it aggressively. In 1946, there were strikes involving more than five million workers, many of them prolonged standoffs. Taft-Hartley was passed to recalibrate the balance of power. It survived a veto by President Harry Truman, in part with the votes of Democrats, particularly those from the South.

But by 1980, the Stevens fight had attracted widespread news coverage, sparked by a union-led boycott of Stevens’s consumer products (which included towels and sheets under the Fieldcrest, Laura Ashley, Utica, and Ralph Lauren brands), and by the blatancy of Stevens’s defiance. In 1979, there was even a hit movie about the confrontation, Norma Rae, for which Sally Field won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a fired union organizer. That, and belated judicial threats to jail Stevens executives for contempt of multiple court orders, gradually tamed the company. Robert Stevens replaced Blakeney as his lead lawyer, and the company began to allow union elections. The contests were still resisted by the company, but they were fair enough so that 17 percent of the company was unionized by the mid-1980s.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The result of the pound’s overvaluation was a triple disaster for Britain. The real economy suffered because Britain at its old exchange rate was uncompetitive, leading to unnecessary agonies as industry was squeezed, export industries such as coal mining contracted, unemployment soared, and the trade unions organized a general strike. In 1931, with 22 percent of the workforce unemployed, the British government, with its gold reserves rapidly depleting, took sterling off the gold standard for the first time in peacetime since Sir Isaac Newton established the gold parity in 1717. The pound fell by more than a third against the dollar (from $4.86 to $3.25), forcing other countries to follow suit, first the Scandinavian and Baltic states, with their close ties to the British market, then Japan, then much of Latin America.

Eisenhower filled his cabinet with businesspeople: as well as appointing Charles Wilson, the CEO of General Motors, as secretary of defense, he appointed a couple of former General Motors distributors to Cabinet posts, leading Adlai Stevenson to quip that “the New Dealers have all left Washington to make way for the car dealers.” Big labor was more of a problem. In the eighteen months after the war, unions organized 550 strikes, involving 1.4 million workers, in order to demonstrate their newfound power, conferred by the prolabor legal changes of the 1930s and the tight labor markets of the postwar years. The UAW launched a particularly determined strike against General Motors that was only settled when the management offered not just higher wages but company-sponsored pensions and health care.


pages: 525 words: 153,356

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 by Selina Todd

"there is no alternative" (TINA), call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, different worldview, Downton Abbey, financial independence, full employment, income inequality, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Red Clydeside, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, sexual politics, strikebreaker, The Spirit Level, unemployed young men, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

‘The fear was that if you had to speak to the manager, you might be dismissed,’ he said. ‘With the trade union, you would have someone who would put your case and that could make a very big difference.’ All the same, it took two years to unionize the workers at Alf’s Kingswood tram depot – just one of many, many battles being fought by union organizers across the country.23 Among the union’s pioneers were the workers of Ingrams Rubber Factory in Hackney Wick. Ingrams was one of the area’s largest employers and one of its oldest. In 1933 the firm had made more than £300,000, but paid low wages: just 9d per hour to men, and less than 25s per week to women.

But Hazel quickly came to sympathize with the strikers when John joined the picket lines: ‘it was the only way they could get anything,’ she said. Unofficial strikes often erupted in protest at the inaction or indifference of senior trade union officials and managers. Thirty-year-old Ricky Tomlinson – later to become a famous actor – became union organizer of the motorway construction gang of which he was a member. He was surprised to discover that ‘some of the other union officials were lazy and corrupt. One in particular would never return my calls … One day I rang and said I was [a manager] calling from McAlpine’s [a large building firm]. He came to the phone straight away, sounding like a grovelling toad.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

No such power is exercised today,” by bosses in the 1950s, only because the overworked workers had risen up and “brought it to an end.” That is, during the 1930s, in addition to enacting a minimum wage and child labor laws, citizens through their government created a system that let workers’ unions organize and negotiate fairly, and instantly union membership more than tripled. By the 1950s, a third of all jobs at private companies had been unionized. But the new countervailing power wasn’t just about employees forcing businesses to share more of their profits. Citizens elected legislators and governors and presidents to enact new rules concerning how big business could and couldn’t conduct itself in other ways, and created new regulatory agencies to enforce those rules.

But the news media’s new generation deciding en masse to form and join unions, individual aspirations to become brands and stars notwithstanding, is a leading zeitgeist indicator and will surely have an outsize impact on coverage and public attitudes, as the media do. In addition to the long slog of union organizing, there are other political means to empower workers. A minimum wage and overtime pay and standard forty-hour workweeks, for instance, all came into being by passing federal laws eighty years ago. Over the last five or six years, as a result of popular protest (“Fight for $15”) and lobbying, most states have increased their minimum wages, most have set them higher than federal law—several now reaching fifteen dollars an hour—and many cities have set legal minimums higher than their states require.*2 In 2018 that shift in public opinion, as well as employees murmuring about organizing a union, persuaded Amazon to adopt a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum for its hundreds of thousands of workers.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

“Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible, make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.” Zapolsky, who said he didn’t know Smalls’s race at the time, later went to considerable lengths to apologize publicly for the remark, including sending out an email to his staff expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement that gained momentum from the murder of George Floyd that May. “I should never have let my emotions get to me,” he told me. “I shouldn’t have used that characterization for any Amazon employee. It was incredibly regrettable.” But the company’s opposition to anything that even whiffed of union organizing was now cast starkly into the open, in cynical and arguably prejudicial terms.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 14.One study estimated that in the 1990s, unions lost two thirds of the elections in which employers deployed the threat of plant closure. Kate Bronfenbrenner, “We’ll Close! Plant Closings, Plant-Closing Threats, Union Organizing and NAFTA,” Multinational Monitor 18 (March 1997), 8–14; Kate Bronfenbrenner, “Raw Power: Plant-Closing Threats and the Threat to Union Organizing,” Multinational Monitor 21 (December 2000), 24–30; Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000 (New York: Viking, 2012), Part III; Lichtenstein, State of the Union; chapter 6; Levinson, Outside the Box;Godfrey Hodgson, More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 45; Century Foundation, What’s Next for Organized Labor (New York: Century, 1999). 15.Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe, “CEO Compensation Has Grown 940% Since 1978,” Economic Policy Institute, August 14, 2019, https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/, accessed September 8, 2020.


pages: 394 words: 110,352

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), collaborative editing, crowdsourcing, Debian, DevOps, digital divide, digital rights, do what you love, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, Guido van Rossum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, openstreetmap, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, software as a service, Stephen Fry, telemarketer, the long tail, union organizing, VA Linux, web application

Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Read-mostly communities Drupal community, Governance Does Not Suck, Dries Buytaert, Drupal and Acquia, Dries Buytaert, Drupal and Acquia DVCS (Distributed Version Control System), Source Control E East Bay and Tri-Valley SPCA, The Gates of Your Community, The Gates of Your Community Easterbrook, Gregg, Statistics and Automated Data eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay Ebron, Rafael, Mary Colvig, Mozilla economy, social, The Art of Community (see social economy) editing, collaborative, Collaborative Editing, Reporting, Reporting ego, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You Ekiga (SIP client), Voice over IP (VoIP), Voice over IP (VoIP) electing council members, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council electrical power, at events, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo elevator pitch, Assessing Contributors, Assessing Contributors email, about private topics, Privacy entitlement, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You environment, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging familiarity of, effect on confidence, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging positive, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View equipment, for events, Equipment, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Infrastructure, Infrastructure errata, If You Like (or Don’t Like) This Book escalation of issues, Escalation, Escalation, Escalation, Escalation clarifying when expanding governance, Escalation, Escalation in Ubuntu community, Escalation, Escalation Esguerra, Richard, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle ethos, collaboration-driven, Collaboration-Driven Ethos, Collaboration-Driven Ethos Ettrich, Matthias, Enlightened Dictatorship Eucalyptus open source cloud infrastructure, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus events, The Art of Community, Events, Events, Organizing a Community Event, At the event, Attracting Contributors, Events and Conferences, Events and Conferences, Choosing Events, Choosing Events, Choosing Events, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Building Family Values, Building Family Values, Events, Events, Events, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Location/venue, Location/venue, Accommodation, Accommodation, Equipment, Equipment, Date/time, Date/time, Cost, Cost, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Catering, Catering, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Organizing a Summit, Inside a session, Inside a session, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Medium, Virtual worlds, Date/time, Date/time, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo (see also Ubuntu Developer Summit) benefits of, Events, Events building buzz with, Attracting Contributors choosing, Choosing Events, Choosing Events, Choosing Events costs of, Events and Conferences, Events and Conferences family-building effects of, Building Family Values, Building Family Values, Events online events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Medium, Virtual worlds, Date/time, Date/time, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes date and time of, Date/time, Date/time discussion meetings, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting medium for hosting, Medium, Virtual worlds overview of, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events tutorials, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes organizing, Events, Events, Organizing a Community Event, At the event, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time allocating time for event, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time collaboration on, Events, Events deadlines for, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 3: Set Deadlines finding help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help Google's experience with, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time meetings for, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help use of social media for, Organizing a Community Event, At the event physical events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Location/venue, Location/venue, Accommodation, Accommodation, Equipment, Equipment, Date/time, Date/time, Cost, Cost, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Catering, Catering, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Organizing a Summit, Inside a session, Inside a session, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo accommodations, Accommodation, Accommodation catering for, Catering, Catering, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes conferences, Organizing Physical Events cost of, Cost, Cost, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo date and time for, Date/time, Date/time, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes equipment at, Equipment, Equipment, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes insurance needs, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions location of, Location/venue, Location/venue registering attendance, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes remote participation in, Inside a session, Inside a session sprints, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes summits, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Summit, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes types of, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events unconferences, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes union requirements, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions presentations at, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo attracting presenters, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo delivering, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations long vs. short, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations promoting, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk slides in, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations submitting proposal for, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper excitement, The Art of Community (see buzz, creating) experience, vs. theory, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins F fables, The Basis of Communication Facebook, Being Social, Being Social, Facebook, Facebook, Getting started with Facebook, Getting started with Facebook, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness, Events, The buildup, The buildup collaboration via, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness, Events, The buildup, The buildup for campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness for event coordination, Collaboration, Events, The buildup, The buildup getting started with, Getting started with Facebook, Getting started with Facebook history of, Facebook, Facebook overview of, Being Social, Being Social facilitators, The Role of a Facilitator, Be clear, Inside a session, Inside a session of resolution conflict, The Role of a Facilitator, Be clear of summits, Inside a session, Inside a session family, vs. belonging, Building Family Values, Building Family Values FC (Ubuntu Forums Council), Codifying Your Council, Codifying Your Council, Escalation Fedora Board, Commercial sponsorship feedback, The Art of Community, Leading by Example, Leading by Example, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Being Social, Feedback, Feedback, Feedback, Feedback, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback, Perception of you, Perception of you, Perception of you, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Part 2: Get the facts, Community feedback, Community feedback (see also measuring community) about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues about quality of communication, Leading by Example, Leading by Example criticism, Gathering feedback for conflict resolution, Part 2: Get the facts gathering, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback about workflow, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback process of, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback messenger of, to company, Community feedback, Community feedback obtaining via social media, Being Social, Feedback, Feedback, Feedback, Feedback, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback by asking for, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback importance of, Feedback, Feedback overview, Being Social Ubuntu 11.04 release example, Feedback, Feedback via debates, Debates, Debates personal, Perception of you, Perception of you, Perception of you Field, Jason, Planning Your Community finances, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Revenue Opportunities, Donations (see also costs) (see also money from sponsors) required resources, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community revenue opportunities, Revenue Opportunities, Donations financial economy vs. social economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy Firefox, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla, Mary Colvig, Mozilla fixed release cycles, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan Flash plug-in, Videos focus, increasing with events, Events FooCamp (Friends of O'Reilly camp), Organizing an Unconference Ford, Henry, Working Together Is Success, Working Together Is Success Fort Minor, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park forums, Choices, Choices, Choices, Choices, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism, Discussion forums, Discussion forums of LugRadio, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism use by users vs. developers, Choices, Choices, Choices, Choices frankness, Setting tone Free Culture communities, Write-centered communities, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons Free Software community, Unwrapping Opportunity, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership Freenode network, IRC Freeware Summit, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Freudenberger, Herbert, Dealing with Burnout Friends of O'Reilly camp (FooCamp), Organizing an Unconference Fry, Stephen, Read-mostly communities G gaming communities, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule GEdit, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow Geiser, Ian Reinhart, Enlightened Dictatorship GNOME project, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Bug reporting, Tool Access GNU General Public License, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership goals, Structuring the plan, Financially Supporting Your Community, Brainstorming Ideas, Donations, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose for measuring community, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose for obtaining donations, Donations for strategic plan, Structuring the plan, Financially Supporting Your Community, Brainstorming Ideas Gobby (text editor), Brainstorming Ideas, Reporting, Reporting Google AdSense, Online advertising, Online advertising, Handling Absence, Handling Absence Google+, Being Social, Being Social, Google+, Getting started with Google+, Getting started with Google+, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media challenges facing, Google+ getting started with, Getting started with Google+, Getting started with Google+ overview of, Being Social, Being Social use by Tim O'Reilly, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Google, event organizing at, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time governance, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Accountability, Accountability, Governance Does Not Suck, Governance Does Not Suck, The Case for Governance, The Case for Governance, Follow the Leader, Follow the Leader, Engage the People, Engage the People, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire, To Bring Peace, To Bring Peace, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship, Delegated Governance, Delegated Governance, Expanding Governance, Expanding Governance, Knowing When It Is Time, Knowing When It Is Time, Building the Subcouncil, Escalation, Escalation, Escalation, Communicating Between Councils, Communicating Between Councils (see also Community Council) (see also community managers) (see also councils) and accountability, Accountability, Accountability benefits of, Governance Does Not Suck, Governance Does Not Suck division of, Follow the Leader, Follow the Leader engagement with people, Engage the People, Engage the People expanding, Expanding Governance, Expanding Governance, Knowing When It Is Time, Knowing When It Is Time, Building the Subcouncil, Escalation, Escalation, Escalation, Communicating Between Councils, Communicating Between Councils clarifying issue escalation, Escalation, Escalation communication between councils, Communicating Between Councils, Communicating Between Councils forming subconcil, Building the Subcouncil, Escalation identifying when needed, Knowing When It Is Time, Knowing When It Is Time overview of, Expanding Governance, Expanding Governance indicators of need for, The Case for Governance, The Case for Governance inspiration from governing body, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire peace as goal of, To Bring Peace, To Bring Peace types of, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship, Delegated Governance, Delegated Governance delegated, Delegated Governance, Delegated Governance dictatorial charismatic leadership, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership enlightened dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship Graen, George B., Diversity graphs, Plugging your stats into graphs, Plugging your stats into graphs Gwibber tool, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose, Optimizing How You Post H hangouts, in Google+, Getting started with Google+ Hanifan, L.J., Building Belonging into the Social Economy hashtags, Getting more eyeballs, Where to look, Asking for feedback, The buildup, At the event Hawthorn, Leslie, Step 4: Make Time, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes health of community, tracking, Tracking Health, Tracking Health, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns by calls to team leaders, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals overview, Tracking Health, Tracking Health promoting feedback culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture responding to concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns hiring community manager, Risk, Risk Holbach, Daniel, Planning, Hooks ’n’ Data, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key hooks and data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you, Part 2: Get the facts, Part 2: Get the facts gathering general perceptions, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you in conflict resolution, Part 2: Get the facts, Part 2: Get the facts measuring mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics observational tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests overview, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data statistics and automated data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs surveys, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports hotels, for event accommodation, Accommodation, Accommodation Hudson, Paul, The Professional Press, The Professional Press Humble Indie Bundle, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle humor, Setting tone Hybrid Theory (album), Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park I identi.ca, Reporting, Reporting, Getting started with Facebook reporting with, Reporting, Reporting users of, Getting started with Facebook implementation plan, Structuring the plan incentives, for donations, Donations Innovate Developer Conference, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay inspiring others, Inspiring your community, Inspiring your community, Inspired Words, Inspired Words, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire as goal of governing body, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire through writing, Inspiring your community, Inspiring your community, Inspired Words, Inspired Words insurance, for physical events, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions Internet Relay Chat, The Art of Community (see IRC) interviews, building buzz with, Attracting Contributors IRC (Internet Relay Chat), IRC, IRC, Communications, Observational Tests, Privacy, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Preparing for a session, Running a session features and benefits of, IRC, IRC logging, Communications privacy issues, Privacy usability testing over, Observational Tests use with online events, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Preparing for a session, Running a session issues, communication between teams about, The Art of Community, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively (see also conflict) J Johnson & Johnson conflict resolution approach, Part 1: Calm and reassure, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 2: Get the facts, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 3: Discuss, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 4: Document, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 5: Reflect and maintain, The fantastical user group debacle calm and reassure, Part 1: Calm and reassure, The fantastical user group debacle discuss, Part 3: Discuss, The fantastical user group debacle document, Part 4: Document, The fantastical user group debacle get the facts, Part 2: Get the facts, The fantastical user group debacle reflect and maintain, Part 5: Reflect and maintain, The fantastical user group debacle Jokosher project, Planning Your Community, Planning Your Community, Communication fetishism, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Bug reporting, Regular Workflow Assessment, Regular Workflow Assessment bug tracking, Bug reporting communication channels used for, Communication fetishism contributions of Laszlo Pandy, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth workflow assessment during, Regular Workflow Assessment, Regular Workflow Assessment justice, lack of, Lack of Justice, Lack of Justice K KDE project, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship, Creating and Running Events, Creating and Running Events keynotes, at events, Opening keynotes, Opening keynotes KGRUBEditor, Observational Tests KHTML technology, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship KickStarter, Donations Kiss, Tom, James Spafford, Media Molecule L Langridge, Stuart (Aq), Planning Your Community Laporte, Leo, Foreword from the First Edition Launchpad (software collaboration platform), An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Getting to know the problem, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data leadership, The Art of Community, The Art of Community (see community managers) (see governance) Lessig, Lawrence, Untwisting the tail, Announcing Your Community licensing, Untwisting the tail, Untwisting the tail, Videos, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons Liebling, Alison, Gathering General Perceptions lightning talks, Lightning talks, Lightning talks Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Linksvayer, Mike, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons Linspire (formerly Lindows), Blog wars, Blog wars Linux community, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Write-centered communities, Diversity, Diversity, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux (see also Ubuntu community) (see also Xubuntu community) Linux Demo Day, Building Buzz, Building Buzz Linux Format magazine, The Professional Press, The Professional Press listening to others, The Value of Listening, The Value of Listening, Membership, Barriers to Input, Barriers to Input LittleBigPlanet community, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule live streaming, Videos, Videos LoCo (Ubuntu Local Community), Observational Tests, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Responsibilities, Team councils, Team councils LUGFests, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo LugRadio community, The Essence of Community, The Essence of Community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Becoming Yourself, Becoming Yourself, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism, Discussion forums, Podcasts, Podcasts, Location/venue, Cost, Setting expectations, Setting expectations belief in, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity effect of unedited productions, Becoming Yourself, Becoming Yourself events of, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Location/venue, Cost forums of, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism, Discussion forums origin of, The Essence of Community, The Essence of Community podcast, Podcasts, Podcasts response to rail strike, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity sponsorship of, Setting expectations, Setting expectations stories in, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication M MacQueue bulletion board, Foreword from the First Edition Macromedia Flash plug-in, Videos mailing lists, The Mediums, Mailing lists, Mailing lists, Netiquette, Netiquette, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Privacy, Communicating Between Councils effect on how people behave, The Mediums for communication between councils, Communicating Between Councils for gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback overview of, Mailing lists, Mailing lists privacy concerns, Privacy top posting to, Netiquette, Netiquette Major, John, Uniting Together managers, The Art of Community, The Art of Community (see community managers) (see governance) marketing, The Art of Community (see buzz, creating) maturing of members, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical McMillan, John, Building Belonging into the Social Economy measuring community, Measuring Community, Community Self-Reflection, The Foundations of Feedback, The Foundations of Feedback, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you, Anonymity, Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy anonymity and, Anonymity, Anonymity establishing goals of, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose meaning in measurements, The Foundations of Feedback, The Foundations of Feedback overview of, Measuring Community, Community Self-Reflection privacy issues, Privacy, Privacy use of hooks and data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you gathering general perceptions, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you measuring mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics observational tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests overview, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data statistics and automated data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs surveys, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports Measuring the Quality of Prison Life study, Gathering General Perceptions mechanics of collaboration, The Mechanics of Collaboration, The Mechanics of Collaboration, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule mediator, of conflict resolution, The Role of a Facilitator, Be clear meetings, The Art of Community, Attracting Contributors, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Management and Communications, Weekly engagements (see also events) between company and community manager, Management and Communications, Weekly engagements building buzz with, Attracting Contributors for organizing events, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help online discussion meetings, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting Mellor, Carolyn, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay members, The Art of Community, Responsibilities, Membership, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council (see also contributers) approval of, Responsibilities of Community Council, Membership, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council meritocracy, Meritocracy, Meritocracy, Enlightened Dictatorship Messina, Chris, Attracting Contributors, Organizing an Unconference, Organizing an Unconference, Organizing an Unconference, Organizing an Unconference Mickos, Mårten, The Role of a Community Manager in the Corporation, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus microphones, at events, Room Layout mindcasting, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media mindshare, Mindshare, The Mindshare Opportunity, Defining Purpose, Gathering General Perceptions mission statement, Designing Your Community, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, The Mission, The Mission and buzz, The Mission, The Mission for each team, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope overview of, Designing Your Community writing, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement money from sponsors, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Handling the Money, Handling the Money (see also costs) (see also finances) Mozilla, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla, Mary Colvig, Mozilla mrben (Ben Thorp), The Essence of Community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication multimedia, use when announcing community, Announcing Your Community music industry, and community, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park N negative energy, Honesty, Honesty netiquette, Netiquette, Netiquette news, on website, Staying Current, Staying Current Nielsen, Jakob, Announce, Announce Nielsen, Michael, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media nominating council members, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council North, Gail, Dealing with Burnout notetakers, at summits, Inside a session O O'Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media O'Reilly's Radar site, Staying Current O'Reilly, Tim, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Staying Current, Privacy, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Obama, Barack, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire as inspirational orator, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire election of, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity objectives, in strategic plan, Structuring the plan, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community objectivity, in conflict resolution, Be objective, Be objective, Be objective Ogg Theora, Videos Oliver, Jamie, The Mindshare Opportunity, The Mindshare Opportunity On Writing Well (Zinsser), Don’t write like an institution on-ramp, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos defined, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes determining contributions, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions identifying, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp showing appreciation, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos skills acquisition, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge steps in, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes one-on-one discussion, for gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback online events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Medium, Virtual worlds, Date/time, Date/time, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes date and time of, Date/time, Date/time discussion meetings, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting medium for hosting, Medium, Virtual worlds overview of, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events tutorials, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes open days, building buzz with, Attracting Contributors Open Source Conference (OSCON), Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations open source development, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Planning Your Community, Planning Your Community, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan, Tool Access, Tool Access, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux access to tools, Tool Access, Tool Access and community, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business differing motives for contributing to, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux fixed release cycles, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan in business, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy Jokosher audio editor example, Planning Your Community, Planning Your Community usability testing, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests OpenAdvantage, Becoming the Advocate, Becoming the Advocate openess, The Art of Community (see also transparency) openness, Barriers to Input, Be open, Be open OpenSuSE Board, Commercial sponsorship opportunities, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community and early days of Linux, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity and Obama election, Unwrapping Opportunity documenting, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community Oram, Andy, Preface, Simplicity is key Organizational Vision, Values and Mission (Scott), Building a Mission Statement OSCON (Open Source Conference), Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations outside the box thinking, Technique 2: Think outside the box, Technique 2: Think outside the box owner of goals, Structuring the plan P Packard, Keith, Transparency Pages, in Google+, Getting started with Google+ Pandy, Laszlo, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth patience, The Value of Listening patterns, in burndown charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns Paul, Celeste Lyn, Observational Tests, Observational Tests PayPal, Donations, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay peer review, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth performance reviews, Technique 1: Question assumptions personality issues, The Art of Community, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Poisonous people, Poisonous people (see also conflict) attributes causing conflict, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical maturity, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical poisonous people, Poisonous people, Poisonous people sharing feedback about, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues Persse, James, Building Great Processes phone calls, privacy during, Privacy physical events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Location/venue, Location/venue, Location/venue, Location/venue, Accommodation, Accommodation, Equipment, Equipment, Date/time, Date/time, Cost, Cost, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Catering, Catering, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Organizing a Summit, Inside a session, Inside a session, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes accommodations for, Accommodation, Accommodation catering for, Catering, Catering, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes conferences, Organizing Physical Events cost of, Cost, Cost, Additional notes, Event-specific notes date and time for, Date/time, Date/time, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes equipment at, Equipment, Equipment, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes insurance needs, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions location of, Location/venue, Location/venue registering attendance, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes remote participation in, Inside a session, Inside a session sprints, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes summits, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Summit, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes types of, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events unconferences, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes union requirements, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions venue, Location/venue, Location/venue piracy, Foreword, Foreword planets, Syndication planning phase, of buzz cycle, Planning, Planning, Planning, Applying the buzz cycle, Applying the buzz cycle plenaries, at events, Plenaries, Plenaries podcasts, Podcasts, Podcasts politics, creating buzz compared to, Uniting Together, Uniting Together Pope, Alan, Social Media, Social Media positiveness, in conflict resolution, Be positive, Be positive postmortems, Review, Review presentations at events, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo attracting presenters, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo delivering, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations long vs. short, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations promoting, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk slides in, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations submitting proposal for, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper press, as target of buzz campaign, The Professional Press, The Professional Press, The Amateur Press, The Amateur Press amateur, The Amateur Press, The Amateur Press professional, The Professional Press, The Professional Press pride, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You privacy, Privacy, Privacy, Privacy, Part 2: Get the facts, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media balancing with visibility, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media during conflict resolution, Part 2: Get the facts during phone calls, Privacy when gathering feedback, Privacy, Privacy Process Improvement Essentials (Persse), Building Great Processes processes, Building Great Processes, Building Great Processes, Breaking Up the Puzzle, Building a process, Building a process, Simplicity is key, Simplicity is key, Avoiding bureaucracy, Avoiding bureaucracy, Transparency, Transparency, Assessing Needs, Assessing Needs, Community Cycles, Leading by example: Ubuntu, The Gates of Your Community, The Gates of Your Community, Assessing Contributors, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Managing Feedback, Gathering feedback, Document Them, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find, Using Your Processes, Using Your Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Growing Kudos, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos, Process Reassessment, Building Regularity, Responsibilities and community cycles, Community Cycles, Leading by example: Ubuntu announcing, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find avoiding bureaucracy, Avoiding bureaucracy, Avoiding bureaucracy building, Building a process, Building a process categories of, Assessing Needs, Assessing Needs changes in, Responsibilities documentation of, Document Them, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find encouraging use of, Using Your Processes, Using Your Processes for assessing contributors, Assessing Contributors, Reviewing new developers: In depth for attracting contributors, The Gates of Your Community, The Gates of Your Community for managing feedback, Managing Feedback, Gathering feedback good vs. bad, Building Great Processes, Building Great Processes in getting participation (the on-ramp), The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Growing Kudos, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos defined, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes determining contributions, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions identifying, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp showing appreciation, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos skills acquisition, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge steps in, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes reassessing, Process Reassessment, Building Regularity simplicity as foundation of, Breaking Up the Puzzle, Simplicity is key, Simplicity is key transparency in, Transparency, Transparency product recalls, Building Great Processes, Building Great Processes professional press, as target of buzz campaign, The Professional Press, The Professional Press Project level, of projects, Tracking Projects projectors, using at events, The Ethos of the UDS, Room Layout, Room Layout, Room Layout projects, tracking, Tracking Projects, Tracking Projects, Structuring Your Projects, Structuring Your Projects, Managing Work Items, Documenting work items, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Generating additional information, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns, Building burndown charts into your workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow managing work items, Managing Work Items, Documenting work items providing different levels of visibility, Tracking Projects, Tracking Projects using blueprints, Structuring Your Projects, Structuring Your Projects using burndown charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Generating additional information, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns, Building burndown charts into your workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow benefits of, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts building into workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow generating charts, Using burndown charts, Generating additional information overview, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts patterns in charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns reading charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts Putnam, Robert, Building Belonging into the Social Economy Q quantity vs. quality, The risks of interpretation R Rabinovitch, Ilan, Location/venue, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo Raymond, Eric, Bug Tracking read-mostly communities, Read-mostly communities, Read-mostly communities Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, Syndication, Syndication recordMyDesktop, Videos Regional Membership Boards, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member Reinventing Discovery (Nielsen), Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Reinventing the Bazaar (McMillan), Building Belonging into the Social Economy release cycles, Ubuntu community, Leading by example: Ubuntu, Leading by example: Ubuntu release parties, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Online Events defined, Organizing Physical Events online, Organizing Online Events remote participation, in Ubuntu Developer Summit, Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Room Layout reporting, Bug reporting, Bug reporting, Reporting, Reporting, Reporting, Reporting, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics bugs, Bug reporting, Bug reporting, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics examples of, Reporting, Reporting making easy, Reporting, Reporting survey data, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports reputation of community manager, Internal reputation, Community reputation resources, and governance, The Case for Governance respect for others, in Ubuntu Code of Conduct, Diversity responsibility, problems with, Problems with Responsibility, Problems with Responsibility revenue opportunities, Revenue Opportunities, Donations ReverbNation, The preparation review phase, of buzz cycle, Review, Review, Applying the buzz cycle, Applying the buzz cycle roles, Roles, Roles room layout, at events, Room Layout, Room Layout Ross, Blake, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla routine, breaking, Events, Events, Events RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, Syndication, Syndication S SaaS (Software as a Service), Software As a Service, Software As a Service Safari® Books Online, Safari® Books Online salary of community manager, Salary, Salary Saxena, Deepak, Building Buzz, Building Buzz SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo), Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo Schaller, Christian, The Structure of Strife, The Structure of Strife scope of teams, Units of Belonging, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope Scott, Cynthia D., Building a Mission Statement screen-scraping, Plugging your stats into graphs Screencast-O-Matic, Videos search engine optimization (SEO), Syndication, Syndication Second Life, Virtual worlds, Virtual worlds selling items, to generate revenue, Selling, Selling SEO (search engine optimization), Syndication, Syndication seriousness, Setting tone sessions, at events, Sessions, Sessions Severed Fifth project, Donations, Donations Sheen, Martin, Inspiring your community Shigeru Miyamoto, Technique 2: Think outside the box Shinoda, Mike, A Community Manager: Becoming the Community, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Shuttleworth, Mark, Hooks ’n’ Data, Commercial sponsorship, In the Beginning..., In the Beginning..., Scheduling signs, using at events, Assets simplicity as foundation of processes, Breaking Up the Puzzle, Simplicity is key, Simplicity is key size of community, The Case for Governance skills, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Knowing When It Is Time acquisition of, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge and formation of additional councils, Knowing When It Is Time mapping to teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams required, documenting, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community Skype, Voice over IP (VoIP), Voice over IP (VoIP) slides in presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations Smanis, Konstantinos, Observational Tests social capital, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication building through storytelling, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication defined, Building Belonging into the Social Economy social economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication building belonging into, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy communication in, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication comparison with financial economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy social media, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Being Social, Being Social, Being Social, Being Social, Being Social, Harnessing Social Media, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, Avoiding social media overkill, Avoiding social media overkill, Feedback, Feedback, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback, Collaboration, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Events, Events, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose, Optimizing How You Post, Optimizing How You Post, Being Socially Responsible, Being Socially Responsible, Organizing a Community Event, At the event, Running a Campaign, The buildup, Providing Community Updates, Providing Community Updates, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media (see also Facebook) (see also Google+) (see also Twitter) broadcasting with, Being Social, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, Avoiding social media overkill, Avoiding social media overkill balanced use of, Avoiding social media overkill, Avoiding social media overkill content of broadcasts, Broadcasting, Broadcasting overview, Being Social using Twitter, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages collaboration using, Being Social, Collaboration, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Events, Events, Running a Campaign, The buildup coordinating events, Events, Events for campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness, Running a Campaign, The buildup overview of, Being Social party-planning example, Collaboration, Collaboration controlling time using, Harnessing Social Media, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose getting feedback using, Being Social, Feedback, Feedback, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback by asking for, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback overview, Being Social Ubuntu 11.04 release example, Feedback, Feedback using Twitter, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look via debates, Debates, Debates most common networks, Being Social, Being Social optimizing posts to, Optimizing How You Post, Optimizing How You Post organizing community event using, Organizing a Community Event, At the event providing community updates with, Providing Community Updates, Providing Community Updates realistic expectations of, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl responsible use of, Being Socially Responsible, Being Socially Responsible use by community leaders, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park), Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Tim O'Reilly, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Software as a Service (SaaS), Software As a Service, Software As a Service software cycles, fixed release, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan Somerville, Cody, Baking in Openness Sorkin, Aaron, Inspiring your community source control, Source Control, Source Control Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo Spafford, James, The Second Edition, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule spam, Getting It Right by Not Getting It Wrong, Getting It Right by Not Getting It Wrong speaking at events, The Art of Community (see presentations at events) Spencer, Rick, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts sponsored communities, The Case for Governance, Commercial sponsorship, Commercial sponsorship, Barriers to Input, Barriers to Input and governance, The Case for Governance conflict within, Barriers to Input, Barriers to Input councils of, Commercial sponsorship, Commercial sponsorship sponsors, Understanding Your Needs, Understanding Your Needs, Finding and Handling Sponsors, Finding and Handling Sponsors, Setting expectations, Setting expectations, The pitch, The pitch, Handling the Money, Handling the Money, Scheduling, Scheduling determining, Finding and Handling Sponsors, Finding and Handling Sponsors examining needs before approaching, Understanding Your Needs, Understanding Your Needs giving back to, Setting expectations, Setting expectations managing money from, Handling the Money, Handling the Money of Ubuntu Developer Summit, Scheduling, Scheduling pitching to, The pitch, The pitch Spread Firefox campaign, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla, Mary Colvig, Mozilla Spreadshirt, Selling sprints, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes Stallman, Richard, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership stories, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Delivering Presentations as mechanism behind communication, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication as viral marketing assets, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors building social capital through, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication in presentations, Delivering Presentations strategic planning, The Art of Community, Planning Your Community, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Brainstorming Ideas, Technique 3: Let’s make it suck, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community, Documenting Your Strategy, Documenting Your Strategy, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Revenue Opportunities, Sponsorship, Strategy, Strategy (see also teams) brainstorming, Brainstorming Ideas, Technique 3: Let’s make it suck building positive environment, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View contribute growth, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View difference from business strategic planning, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan documenting, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community, Documenting Your Strategy, Documenting Your Strategy defining objectives, Structuring the plan, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community ingredients of, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community mission statement, Designing Your Community, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement structure of documentation, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan transparency/openess when, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness finances, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Revenue Opportunities, Sponsorship required resources, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community revenue opportunities, Revenue Opportunities, Sponsorship for openess/transparency, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness need for, Planning Your Community of company, conveying to community managers, Strategy, Strategy streaming, live, Videos, Videos stress, The Art of Community (see burnout) subcouncils, Responsibilities success criteria, in strategic plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan summits, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Summit, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes surface-level diversity, Diversity, Diversity surveys, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Choosing questions, Choosing questions, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns choosing questions for, Choosing questions, Choosing questions for finding causes of bottlenecks, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes for gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback for learning about community concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns purpose of, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Surveys and Structured Feedback reports from, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports Sweet, Adam, Finding Your Place, Finding Your Place syndication of content, Syndication, Syndication T T-shirts, for events, Assets, Assets tales, The Basis of Communication tasks, communication between teams about, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively teams, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging, Write-centered communities, Write-centered communities, Diversity, Diversity, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Setting Up a Community Council, Setting Up a Community Council, Responsibilities and Community Council, Responsibilities as units of belonging, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging building, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View collaboration between, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams communication between, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively diversity within, Diversity, Diversity dividing community into, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams leaders of, tracking community health through, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals mission statement for, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope of Ubuntu community, Write-centered communities, Write-centered communities scope of, Units of Belonging, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope vs. councils, Setting Up a Community Council, Setting Up a Community Council Technical Board, of Ubuntu community, Technical Board, Technical Board Technorati, The Amateur Press testing usability, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests Texas Linux Fest, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo The Art of Community, community of, Social Media, Social Media The West Wing (TV program), Inspiring your community, Inspiring your community theory versus action, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins Thorp, Ben (mrben), The Essence of Community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication threats on community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity effect on sense of belonging, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication LugRadio response to rail strike, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity time zones, and online events, Date/time, Date/time tone, of writing, Avoiding bikeshedding, Setting tone tools, Building Great Infrastructure, Building Great Infrastructure, Software As a Service, Software As a Service, Avoiding Resource Fetishism, Avoiding Resource Fetishism, Tool Access, Tool Access, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose access to, Tool Access, Tool Access and workflow, Building Great Infrastructure, Building Great Infrastructure debates over, Avoiding Resource Fetishism, Avoiding Resource Fetishism for managing social media, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose social media as tool, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl Software as a Service (SaaS), Software As a Service, Software As a Service top posting, Netiquette, Netiquette Torvalds, Linus, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux Trac (software), Building Great Infrastructure tracking, The Art of Community, Bug Tracking, Bug triage, Bug reporting, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress, The Importance of Tracking Our Work, The Importance of Tracking Our Work, Tracking the Right Things, Tracking the Right Things, Within the Context of a Company, Communicating up and down, Tracking Growth and Decline, Using burndown charts, Tracking Growth and Decline, Tracking Growth and Decline, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes, Tracking Health, Tracking Health, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns (see also projects, tracking) bugs, Bug Tracking, Bug triage, Bug reporting, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics determining what to track, Tracking the Right Things, Tracking the Right Things effect on building credibility, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress growth and decline, Tracking Growth and Decline, Using burndown charts, Tracking Growth and Decline, Tracking Growth and Decline, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes areas of, Tracking Growth and Decline, Tracking Growth and Decline data visibility, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key finding causes of, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes overview, Tracking Growth and Decline, Using burndown charts health of community, Tracking Health, Tracking Health, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns by calls to team leaders, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals overview, Tracking Health, Tracking Health promoting feedback culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture responding to concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns importance of, The Importance of Tracking Our Work, The Importance of Tracking Our Work within a company, Within the Context of a Company, Communicating up and down transparency, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Striving for Clarity, Striving for Clarity, Transparency, Transparency, Bug Tracking, Bug Tracking, Building and Maintaining Transparency, Building and Maintaining Transparency, Communications, Communications, Perception of you, Perception of you, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership and dictatorial communities, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership in bug tracking, Bug Tracking, Bug Tracking in communication, Striving for Clarity, Striving for Clarity, Communications, Communications in personal feedback, Perception of you, Perception of you in processes, Transparency, Transparency in strategic plan, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness in workflow, Building and Maintaining Transparency, Building and Maintaining Transparency trend line, Using burndown charts trending topics, Getting more eyeballs triaging, Bug triage, Bug triage, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics Troy, Ryan, Codifying Your Council trust, Trust Is Everything, Trust Is Everything tutorials, online, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes Twitter, Reporting, Reporting, Being Social, Being Social, Twitter, Twitter, Getting started with Twitter, Getting started with Twitter, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, Tuning up your messages, Tuning up your messages, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, The buildup, At the event, At the event, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media broadcasting with, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, The buildup, At the event, At the event, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media about events, The buildup, At the event, At the event mindcasting, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media getting feedback using, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look getting started with, Getting started with Twitter, Getting started with Twitter history of, Twitter, Twitter overview of, Being Social, Being Social reporting with, Reporting, Reporting searching tweets, Where to look, Where to look use by Tim O'Reilly, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media writing messages, Tuning up your messages, Tuning up your messages U Ubuntu Code of Conduct, Diversity, Diversity Ubuntu community, Write-centered communities, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Striving for Clarity, Inspiring your community, Leading by example: Ubuntu, Leading by example: Ubuntu, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Process Reassessment, Process Reassessment, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Lessons learned, Feedback, Feedback, Providing Community Updates, Providing Community Updates, Videos, Videos, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Visibility Is Key, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes, In the Beginning..., In the Beginning..., Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Shuttleworth, Community Council, Community Council, Technical Board, Technical Board, Team councils, Team councils, Membership, Membership, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Developer, Developer, Council or Board Member, Council or Board Member, Escalation, Escalation bug workflow example, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Lessons learned bug-squashing parties, Plugging your stats into graphs contributor access to repositories, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth developer mentoring campaign, Visibility Is Key history of, In the Beginning..., In the Beginning...

Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Read-mostly communities Drupal community, Governance Does Not Suck, Dries Buytaert, Drupal and Acquia, Dries Buytaert, Drupal and Acquia DVCS (Distributed Version Control System), Source Control E East Bay and Tri-Valley SPCA, The Gates of Your Community, The Gates of Your Community Easterbrook, Gregg, Statistics and Automated Data eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay Ebron, Rafael, Mary Colvig, Mozilla economy, social, The Art of Community (see social economy) editing, collaborative, Collaborative Editing, Reporting, Reporting ego, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You Ekiga (SIP client), Voice over IP (VoIP), Voice over IP (VoIP) electing council members, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council electrical power, at events, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo elevator pitch, Assessing Contributors, Assessing Contributors email, about private topics, Privacy entitlement, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You environment, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging familiarity of, effect on confidence, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging positive, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View equipment, for events, Equipment, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Infrastructure, Infrastructure errata, If You Like (or Don’t Like) This Book escalation of issues, Escalation, Escalation, Escalation, Escalation clarifying when expanding governance, Escalation, Escalation in Ubuntu community, Escalation, Escalation Esguerra, Richard, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle ethos, collaboration-driven, Collaboration-Driven Ethos, Collaboration-Driven Ethos Ettrich, Matthias, Enlightened Dictatorship Eucalyptus open source cloud infrastructure, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus events, The Art of Community, Events, Events, Organizing a Community Event, At the event, Attracting Contributors, Events and Conferences, Events and Conferences, Choosing Events, Choosing Events, Choosing Events, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Building Family Values, Building Family Values, Events, Events, Events, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Location/venue, Location/venue, Accommodation, Accommodation, Equipment, Equipment, Date/time, Date/time, Cost, Cost, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Catering, Catering, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Organizing a Summit, Inside a session, Inside a session, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Medium, Virtual worlds, Date/time, Date/time, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo (see also Ubuntu Developer Summit) benefits of, Events, Events building buzz with, Attracting Contributors choosing, Choosing Events, Choosing Events, Choosing Events costs of, Events and Conferences, Events and Conferences family-building effects of, Building Family Values, Building Family Values, Events online events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Medium, Virtual worlds, Date/time, Date/time, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes date and time of, Date/time, Date/time discussion meetings, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting medium for hosting, Medium, Virtual worlds overview of, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events tutorials, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes organizing, Events, Events, Organizing a Community Event, At the event, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time allocating time for event, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time collaboration on, Events, Events deadlines for, Step 3: Set Deadlines, Step 3: Set Deadlines finding help, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help Google's experience with, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time meetings for, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help use of social media for, Organizing a Community Event, At the event physical events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Location/venue, Location/venue, Accommodation, Accommodation, Equipment, Equipment, Date/time, Date/time, Cost, Cost, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Catering, Catering, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Organizing a Summit, Inside a session, Inside a session, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo accommodations, Accommodation, Accommodation catering for, Catering, Catering, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes conferences, Organizing Physical Events cost of, Cost, Cost, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo date and time for, Date/time, Date/time, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes equipment at, Equipment, Equipment, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes insurance needs, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions location of, Location/venue, Location/venue registering attendance, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes remote participation in, Inside a session, Inside a session sprints, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes summits, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Summit, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes types of, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events unconferences, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes union requirements, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions presentations at, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo attracting presenters, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo delivering, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations long vs. short, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations promoting, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk slides in, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations submitting proposal for, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper excitement, The Art of Community (see buzz, creating) experience, vs. theory, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins F fables, The Basis of Communication Facebook, Being Social, Being Social, Facebook, Facebook, Getting started with Facebook, Getting started with Facebook, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness, Events, The buildup, The buildup collaboration via, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness, Events, The buildup, The buildup for campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness for event coordination, Collaboration, Events, The buildup, The buildup getting started with, Getting started with Facebook, Getting started with Facebook history of, Facebook, Facebook overview of, Being Social, Being Social facilitators, The Role of a Facilitator, Be clear, Inside a session, Inside a session of resolution conflict, The Role of a Facilitator, Be clear of summits, Inside a session, Inside a session family, vs. belonging, Building Family Values, Building Family Values FC (Ubuntu Forums Council), Codifying Your Council, Codifying Your Council, Escalation Fedora Board, Commercial sponsorship feedback, The Art of Community, Leading by Example, Leading by Example, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Being Social, Feedback, Feedback, Feedback, Feedback, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback, Perception of you, Perception of you, Perception of you, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Part 2: Get the facts, Community feedback, Community feedback (see also measuring community) about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues about quality of communication, Leading by Example, Leading by Example criticism, Gathering feedback for conflict resolution, Part 2: Get the facts gathering, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback about workflow, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback process of, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback messenger of, to company, Community feedback, Community feedback obtaining via social media, Being Social, Feedback, Feedback, Feedback, Feedback, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback by asking for, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback importance of, Feedback, Feedback overview, Being Social Ubuntu 11.04 release example, Feedback, Feedback via debates, Debates, Debates personal, Perception of you, Perception of you, Perception of you Field, Jason, Planning Your Community finances, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Revenue Opportunities, Donations (see also costs) (see also money from sponsors) required resources, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community revenue opportunities, Revenue Opportunities, Donations financial economy vs. social economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy Firefox, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla, Mary Colvig, Mozilla fixed release cycles, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan Flash plug-in, Videos focus, increasing with events, Events FooCamp (Friends of O'Reilly camp), Organizing an Unconference Ford, Henry, Working Together Is Success, Working Together Is Success Fort Minor, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park forums, Choices, Choices, Choices, Choices, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism, Discussion forums, Discussion forums of LugRadio, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism use by users vs. developers, Choices, Choices, Choices, Choices frankness, Setting tone Free Culture communities, Write-centered communities, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons Free Software community, Unwrapping Opportunity, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership Freenode network, IRC Freeware Summit, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Freudenberger, Herbert, Dealing with Burnout Friends of O'Reilly camp (FooCamp), Organizing an Unconference Fry, Stephen, Read-mostly communities G gaming communities, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule GEdit, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow Geiser, Ian Reinhart, Enlightened Dictatorship GNOME project, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Bug reporting, Tool Access GNU General Public License, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership goals, Structuring the plan, Financially Supporting Your Community, Brainstorming Ideas, Donations, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose for measuring community, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose for obtaining donations, Donations for strategic plan, Structuring the plan, Financially Supporting Your Community, Brainstorming Ideas Gobby (text editor), Brainstorming Ideas, Reporting, Reporting Google AdSense, Online advertising, Online advertising, Handling Absence, Handling Absence Google+, Being Social, Being Social, Google+, Getting started with Google+, Getting started with Google+, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media challenges facing, Google+ getting started with, Getting started with Google+, Getting started with Google+ overview of, Being Social, Being Social use by Tim O'Reilly, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Google, event organizing at, Step 4: Make Time, Step 4: Make Time governance, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Accountability, Accountability, Governance Does Not Suck, Governance Does Not Suck, The Case for Governance, The Case for Governance, Follow the Leader, Follow the Leader, Engage the People, Engage the People, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire, To Bring Peace, To Bring Peace, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship, Delegated Governance, Delegated Governance, Expanding Governance, Expanding Governance, Knowing When It Is Time, Knowing When It Is Time, Building the Subcouncil, Escalation, Escalation, Escalation, Communicating Between Councils, Communicating Between Councils (see also Community Council) (see also community managers) (see also councils) and accountability, Accountability, Accountability benefits of, Governance Does Not Suck, Governance Does Not Suck division of, Follow the Leader, Follow the Leader engagement with people, Engage the People, Engage the People expanding, Expanding Governance, Expanding Governance, Knowing When It Is Time, Knowing When It Is Time, Building the Subcouncil, Escalation, Escalation, Escalation, Communicating Between Councils, Communicating Between Councils clarifying issue escalation, Escalation, Escalation communication between councils, Communicating Between Councils, Communicating Between Councils forming subconcil, Building the Subcouncil, Escalation identifying when needed, Knowing When It Is Time, Knowing When It Is Time overview of, Expanding Governance, Expanding Governance indicators of need for, The Case for Governance, The Case for Governance inspiration from governing body, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire peace as goal of, To Bring Peace, To Bring Peace types of, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship, Delegated Governance, Delegated Governance delegated, Delegated Governance, Delegated Governance dictatorial charismatic leadership, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership enlightened dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship Graen, George B., Diversity graphs, Plugging your stats into graphs, Plugging your stats into graphs Gwibber tool, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose, Optimizing How You Post H hangouts, in Google+, Getting started with Google+ Hanifan, L.J., Building Belonging into the Social Economy hashtags, Getting more eyeballs, Where to look, Asking for feedback, The buildup, At the event Hawthorn, Leslie, Step 4: Make Time, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes health of community, tracking, Tracking Health, Tracking Health, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns by calls to team leaders, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals overview, Tracking Health, Tracking Health promoting feedback culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture responding to concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns hiring community manager, Risk, Risk Holbach, Daniel, Planning, Hooks ’n’ Data, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key hooks and data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you, Part 2: Get the facts, Part 2: Get the facts gathering general perceptions, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you in conflict resolution, Part 2: Get the facts, Part 2: Get the facts measuring mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics observational tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests overview, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data statistics and automated data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs surveys, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports hotels, for event accommodation, Accommodation, Accommodation Hudson, Paul, The Professional Press, The Professional Press Humble Indie Bundle, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle humor, Setting tone Hybrid Theory (album), Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park I identi.ca, Reporting, Reporting, Getting started with Facebook reporting with, Reporting, Reporting users of, Getting started with Facebook implementation plan, Structuring the plan incentives, for donations, Donations Innovate Developer Conference, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay inspiring others, Inspiring your community, Inspiring your community, Inspired Words, Inspired Words, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire as goal of governing body, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire through writing, Inspiring your community, Inspiring your community, Inspired Words, Inspired Words insurance, for physical events, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions Internet Relay Chat, The Art of Community (see IRC) interviews, building buzz with, Attracting Contributors IRC (Internet Relay Chat), IRC, IRC, Communications, Observational Tests, Privacy, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Preparing for a session, Running a session features and benefits of, IRC, IRC logging, Communications privacy issues, Privacy usability testing over, Observational Tests use with online events, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Preparing for a session, Running a session issues, communication between teams about, The Art of Community, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively (see also conflict) J Johnson & Johnson conflict resolution approach, Part 1: Calm and reassure, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 2: Get the facts, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 3: Discuss, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 4: Document, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 5: Reflect and maintain, The fantastical user group debacle calm and reassure, Part 1: Calm and reassure, The fantastical user group debacle discuss, Part 3: Discuss, The fantastical user group debacle document, Part 4: Document, The fantastical user group debacle get the facts, Part 2: Get the facts, The fantastical user group debacle reflect and maintain, Part 5: Reflect and maintain, The fantastical user group debacle Jokosher project, Planning Your Community, Planning Your Community, Communication fetishism, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Bug reporting, Regular Workflow Assessment, Regular Workflow Assessment bug tracking, Bug reporting communication channels used for, Communication fetishism contributions of Laszlo Pandy, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth workflow assessment during, Regular Workflow Assessment, Regular Workflow Assessment justice, lack of, Lack of Justice, Lack of Justice K KDE project, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship, Creating and Running Events, Creating and Running Events keynotes, at events, Opening keynotes, Opening keynotes KGRUBEditor, Observational Tests KHTML technology, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship KickStarter, Donations Kiss, Tom, James Spafford, Media Molecule L Langridge, Stuart (Aq), Planning Your Community Laporte, Leo, Foreword from the First Edition Launchpad (software collaboration platform), An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Getting to know the problem, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data leadership, The Art of Community, The Art of Community (see community managers) (see governance) Lessig, Lawrence, Untwisting the tail, Announcing Your Community licensing, Untwisting the tail, Untwisting the tail, Videos, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons Liebling, Alison, Gathering General Perceptions lightning talks, Lightning talks, Lightning talks Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Linksvayer, Mike, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons Linspire (formerly Lindows), Blog wars, Blog wars Linux community, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Write-centered communities, Diversity, Diversity, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux (see also Ubuntu community) (see also Xubuntu community) Linux Demo Day, Building Buzz, Building Buzz Linux Format magazine, The Professional Press, The Professional Press listening to others, The Value of Listening, The Value of Listening, Membership, Barriers to Input, Barriers to Input LittleBigPlanet community, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule live streaming, Videos, Videos LoCo (Ubuntu Local Community), Observational Tests, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Responsibilities, Team councils, Team councils LUGFests, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo LugRadio community, The Essence of Community, The Essence of Community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Becoming Yourself, Becoming Yourself, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism, Discussion forums, Podcasts, Podcasts, Location/venue, Cost, Setting expectations, Setting expectations belief in, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity effect of unedited productions, Becoming Yourself, Becoming Yourself events of, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Location/venue, Cost forums of, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism, Discussion forums origin of, The Essence of Community, The Essence of Community podcast, Podcasts, Podcasts response to rail strike, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity sponsorship of, Setting expectations, Setting expectations stories in, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication M MacQueue bulletion board, Foreword from the First Edition Macromedia Flash plug-in, Videos mailing lists, The Mediums, Mailing lists, Mailing lists, Netiquette, Netiquette, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Privacy, Communicating Between Councils effect on how people behave, The Mediums for communication between councils, Communicating Between Councils for gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback overview of, Mailing lists, Mailing lists privacy concerns, Privacy top posting to, Netiquette, Netiquette Major, John, Uniting Together managers, The Art of Community, The Art of Community (see community managers) (see governance) marketing, The Art of Community (see buzz, creating) maturing of members, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical McMillan, John, Building Belonging into the Social Economy measuring community, Measuring Community, Community Self-Reflection, The Foundations of Feedback, The Foundations of Feedback, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you, Anonymity, Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy anonymity and, Anonymity, Anonymity establishing goals of, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose meaning in measurements, The Foundations of Feedback, The Foundations of Feedback overview of, Measuring Community, Community Self-Reflection privacy issues, Privacy, Privacy use of hooks and data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you gathering general perceptions, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you measuring mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics observational tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests overview, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data statistics and automated data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs surveys, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports Measuring the Quality of Prison Life study, Gathering General Perceptions mechanics of collaboration, The Mechanics of Collaboration, The Mechanics of Collaboration, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule mediator, of conflict resolution, The Role of a Facilitator, Be clear meetings, The Art of Community, Attracting Contributors, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Management and Communications, Weekly engagements (see also events) between company and community manager, Management and Communications, Weekly engagements building buzz with, Attracting Contributors for organizing events, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help online discussion meetings, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting Mellor, Carolyn, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay members, The Art of Community, Responsibilities, Membership, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council (see also contributers) approval of, Responsibilities of Community Council, Membership, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council meritocracy, Meritocracy, Meritocracy, Enlightened Dictatorship Messina, Chris, Attracting Contributors, Organizing an Unconference, Organizing an Unconference, Organizing an Unconference, Organizing an Unconference Mickos, Mårten, The Role of a Community Manager in the Corporation, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus microphones, at events, Room Layout mindcasting, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media mindshare, Mindshare, The Mindshare Opportunity, Defining Purpose, Gathering General Perceptions mission statement, Designing Your Community, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, The Mission, The Mission and buzz, The Mission, The Mission for each team, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope overview of, Designing Your Community writing, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement money from sponsors, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Handling the Money, Handling the Money (see also costs) (see also finances) Mozilla, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla, Mary Colvig, Mozilla mrben (Ben Thorp), The Essence of Community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication multimedia, use when announcing community, Announcing Your Community music industry, and community, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park N negative energy, Honesty, Honesty netiquette, Netiquette, Netiquette news, on website, Staying Current, Staying Current Nielsen, Jakob, Announce, Announce Nielsen, Michael, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media nominating council members, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council North, Gail, Dealing with Burnout notetakers, at summits, Inside a session O O'Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media O'Reilly's Radar site, Staying Current O'Reilly, Tim, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Staying Current, Privacy, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Obama, Barack, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire as inspirational orator, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire election of, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity objectives, in strategic plan, Structuring the plan, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community objectivity, in conflict resolution, Be objective, Be objective, Be objective Ogg Theora, Videos Oliver, Jamie, The Mindshare Opportunity, The Mindshare Opportunity On Writing Well (Zinsser), Don’t write like an institution on-ramp, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos defined, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes determining contributions, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions identifying, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp showing appreciation, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos skills acquisition, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge steps in, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes one-on-one discussion, for gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback online events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Medium, Virtual worlds, Date/time, Date/time, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes date and time of, Date/time, Date/time discussion meetings, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting medium for hosting, Medium, Virtual worlds overview of, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events tutorials, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes open days, building buzz with, Attracting Contributors Open Source Conference (OSCON), Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations open source development, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Planning Your Community, Planning Your Community, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan, Tool Access, Tool Access, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux access to tools, Tool Access, Tool Access and community, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business differing motives for contributing to, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux fixed release cycles, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan in business, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy Jokosher audio editor example, Planning Your Community, Planning Your Community usability testing, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests OpenAdvantage, Becoming the Advocate, Becoming the Advocate openess, The Art of Community (see also transparency) openness, Barriers to Input, Be open, Be open OpenSuSE Board, Commercial sponsorship opportunities, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community and early days of Linux, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity and Obama election, Unwrapping Opportunity documenting, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community Oram, Andy, Preface, Simplicity is key Organizational Vision, Values and Mission (Scott), Building a Mission Statement OSCON (Open Source Conference), Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations outside the box thinking, Technique 2: Think outside the box, Technique 2: Think outside the box owner of goals, Structuring the plan P Packard, Keith, Transparency Pages, in Google+, Getting started with Google+ Pandy, Laszlo, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth patience, The Value of Listening patterns, in burndown charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns Paul, Celeste Lyn, Observational Tests, Observational Tests PayPal, Donations, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay peer review, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth performance reviews, Technique 1: Question assumptions personality issues, The Art of Community, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Poisonous people, Poisonous people (see also conflict) attributes causing conflict, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical maturity, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical poisonous people, Poisonous people, Poisonous people sharing feedback about, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues Persse, James, Building Great Processes phone calls, privacy during, Privacy physical events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Location/venue, Location/venue, Location/venue, Location/venue, Accommodation, Accommodation, Equipment, Equipment, Date/time, Date/time, Cost, Cost, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Catering, Catering, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Organizing a Summit, Inside a session, Inside a session, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes accommodations for, Accommodation, Accommodation catering for, Catering, Catering, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes conferences, Organizing Physical Events cost of, Cost, Cost, Additional notes, Event-specific notes date and time for, Date/time, Date/time, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes equipment at, Equipment, Equipment, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes insurance needs, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions location of, Location/venue, Location/venue registering attendance, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes remote participation in, Inside a session, Inside a session sprints, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes summits, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Summit, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes types of, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events unconferences, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes union requirements, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions venue, Location/venue, Location/venue piracy, Foreword, Foreword planets, Syndication planning phase, of buzz cycle, Planning, Planning, Planning, Applying the buzz cycle, Applying the buzz cycle plenaries, at events, Plenaries, Plenaries podcasts, Podcasts, Podcasts politics, creating buzz compared to, Uniting Together, Uniting Together Pope, Alan, Social Media, Social Media positiveness, in conflict resolution, Be positive, Be positive postmortems, Review, Review presentations at events, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo attracting presenters, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo delivering, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations long vs. short, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations promoting, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk slides in, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations submitting proposal for, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper press, as target of buzz campaign, The Professional Press, The Professional Press, The Amateur Press, The Amateur Press amateur, The Amateur Press, The Amateur Press professional, The Professional Press, The Professional Press pride, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You privacy, Privacy, Privacy, Privacy, Part 2: Get the facts, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media balancing with visibility, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media during conflict resolution, Part 2: Get the facts during phone calls, Privacy when gathering feedback, Privacy, Privacy Process Improvement Essentials (Persse), Building Great Processes processes, Building Great Processes, Building Great Processes, Breaking Up the Puzzle, Building a process, Building a process, Simplicity is key, Simplicity is key, Avoiding bureaucracy, Avoiding bureaucracy, Transparency, Transparency, Assessing Needs, Assessing Needs, Community Cycles, Leading by example: Ubuntu, The Gates of Your Community, The Gates of Your Community, Assessing Contributors, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Managing Feedback, Gathering feedback, Document Them, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find, Using Your Processes, Using Your Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Growing Kudos, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos, Process Reassessment, Building Regularity, Responsibilities and community cycles, Community Cycles, Leading by example: Ubuntu announcing, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find avoiding bureaucracy, Avoiding bureaucracy, Avoiding bureaucracy building, Building a process, Building a process categories of, Assessing Needs, Assessing Needs changes in, Responsibilities documentation of, Document Them, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find encouraging use of, Using Your Processes, Using Your Processes for assessing contributors, Assessing Contributors, Reviewing new developers: In depth for attracting contributors, The Gates of Your Community, The Gates of Your Community for managing feedback, Managing Feedback, Gathering feedback good vs. bad, Building Great Processes, Building Great Processes in getting participation (the on-ramp), The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Growing Kudos, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos defined, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes determining contributions, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions identifying, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp showing appreciation, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos skills acquisition, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge steps in, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes reassessing, Process Reassessment, Building Regularity simplicity as foundation of, Breaking Up the Puzzle, Simplicity is key, Simplicity is key transparency in, Transparency, Transparency product recalls, Building Great Processes, Building Great Processes professional press, as target of buzz campaign, The Professional Press, The Professional Press Project level, of projects, Tracking Projects projectors, using at events, The Ethos of the UDS, Room Layout, Room Layout, Room Layout projects, tracking, Tracking Projects, Tracking Projects, Structuring Your Projects, Structuring Your Projects, Managing Work Items, Documenting work items, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Generating additional information, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns, Building burndown charts into your workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow managing work items, Managing Work Items, Documenting work items providing different levels of visibility, Tracking Projects, Tracking Projects using blueprints, Structuring Your Projects, Structuring Your Projects using burndown charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Generating additional information, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns, Building burndown charts into your workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow benefits of, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts building into workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow generating charts, Using burndown charts, Generating additional information overview, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts patterns in charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns reading charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts Putnam, Robert, Building Belonging into the Social Economy Q quantity vs. quality, The risks of interpretation R Rabinovitch, Ilan, Location/venue, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo Raymond, Eric, Bug Tracking read-mostly communities, Read-mostly communities, Read-mostly communities Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, Syndication, Syndication recordMyDesktop, Videos Regional Membership Boards, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member Reinventing Discovery (Nielsen), Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Reinventing the Bazaar (McMillan), Building Belonging into the Social Economy release cycles, Ubuntu community, Leading by example: Ubuntu, Leading by example: Ubuntu release parties, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Online Events defined, Organizing Physical Events online, Organizing Online Events remote participation, in Ubuntu Developer Summit, Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Room Layout reporting, Bug reporting, Bug reporting, Reporting, Reporting, Reporting, Reporting, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics bugs, Bug reporting, Bug reporting, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics examples of, Reporting, Reporting making easy, Reporting, Reporting survey data, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports reputation of community manager, Internal reputation, Community reputation resources, and governance, The Case for Governance respect for others, in Ubuntu Code of Conduct, Diversity responsibility, problems with, Problems with Responsibility, Problems with Responsibility revenue opportunities, Revenue Opportunities, Donations ReverbNation, The preparation review phase, of buzz cycle, Review, Review, Applying the buzz cycle, Applying the buzz cycle roles, Roles, Roles room layout, at events, Room Layout, Room Layout Ross, Blake, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla routine, breaking, Events, Events, Events RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, Syndication, Syndication S SaaS (Software as a Service), Software As a Service, Software As a Service Safari® Books Online, Safari® Books Online salary of community manager, Salary, Salary Saxena, Deepak, Building Buzz, Building Buzz SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo), Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo Schaller, Christian, The Structure of Strife, The Structure of Strife scope of teams, Units of Belonging, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope Scott, Cynthia D., Building a Mission Statement screen-scraping, Plugging your stats into graphs Screencast-O-Matic, Videos search engine optimization (SEO), Syndication, Syndication Second Life, Virtual worlds, Virtual worlds selling items, to generate revenue, Selling, Selling SEO (search engine optimization), Syndication, Syndication seriousness, Setting tone sessions, at events, Sessions, Sessions Severed Fifth project, Donations, Donations Sheen, Martin, Inspiring your community Shigeru Miyamoto, Technique 2: Think outside the box Shinoda, Mike, A Community Manager: Becoming the Community, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Shuttleworth, Mark, Hooks ’n’ Data, Commercial sponsorship, In the Beginning..., In the Beginning..., Scheduling signs, using at events, Assets simplicity as foundation of processes, Breaking Up the Puzzle, Simplicity is key, Simplicity is key size of community, The Case for Governance skills, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Knowing When It Is Time acquisition of, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge and formation of additional councils, Knowing When It Is Time mapping to teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams required, documenting, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community Skype, Voice over IP (VoIP), Voice over IP (VoIP) slides in presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations Smanis, Konstantinos, Observational Tests social capital, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication building through storytelling, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication defined, Building Belonging into the Social Economy social economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication building belonging into, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy communication in, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication comparison with financial economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy social media, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Being Social, Being Social, Being Social, Being Social, Being Social, Harnessing Social Media, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, Avoiding social media overkill, Avoiding social media overkill, Feedback, Feedback, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback, Collaboration, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Events, Events, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose, Optimizing How You Post, Optimizing How You Post, Being Socially Responsible, Being Socially Responsible, Organizing a Community Event, At the event, Running a Campaign, The buildup, Providing Community Updates, Providing Community Updates, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media (see also Facebook) (see also Google+) (see also Twitter) broadcasting with, Being Social, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, Avoiding social media overkill, Avoiding social media overkill balanced use of, Avoiding social media overkill, Avoiding social media overkill content of broadcasts, Broadcasting, Broadcasting overview, Being Social using Twitter, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages collaboration using, Being Social, Collaboration, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Events, Events, Running a Campaign, The buildup coordinating events, Events, Events for campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness, Running a Campaign, The buildup overview of, Being Social party-planning example, Collaboration, Collaboration controlling time using, Harnessing Social Media, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose getting feedback using, Being Social, Feedback, Feedback, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback by asking for, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback overview, Being Social Ubuntu 11.04 release example, Feedback, Feedback using Twitter, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look via debates, Debates, Debates most common networks, Being Social, Being Social optimizing posts to, Optimizing How You Post, Optimizing How You Post organizing community event using, Organizing a Community Event, At the event providing community updates with, Providing Community Updates, Providing Community Updates realistic expectations of, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl responsible use of, Being Socially Responsible, Being Socially Responsible use by community leaders, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park), Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Tim O'Reilly, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Software as a Service (SaaS), Software As a Service, Software As a Service software cycles, fixed release, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan Somerville, Cody, Baking in Openness Sorkin, Aaron, Inspiring your community source control, Source Control, Source Control Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo Spafford, James, The Second Edition, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule spam, Getting It Right by Not Getting It Wrong, Getting It Right by Not Getting It Wrong speaking at events, The Art of Community (see presentations at events) Spencer, Rick, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts sponsored communities, The Case for Governance, Commercial sponsorship, Commercial sponsorship, Barriers to Input, Barriers to Input and governance, The Case for Governance conflict within, Barriers to Input, Barriers to Input councils of, Commercial sponsorship, Commercial sponsorship sponsors, Understanding Your Needs, Understanding Your Needs, Finding and Handling Sponsors, Finding and Handling Sponsors, Setting expectations, Setting expectations, The pitch, The pitch, Handling the Money, Handling the Money, Scheduling, Scheduling determining, Finding and Handling Sponsors, Finding and Handling Sponsors examining needs before approaching, Understanding Your Needs, Understanding Your Needs giving back to, Setting expectations, Setting expectations managing money from, Handling the Money, Handling the Money of Ubuntu Developer Summit, Scheduling, Scheduling pitching to, The pitch, The pitch Spread Firefox campaign, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla, Mary Colvig, Mozilla Spreadshirt, Selling sprints, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes Stallman, Richard, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership stories, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Delivering Presentations as mechanism behind communication, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication as viral marketing assets, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors building social capital through, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication in presentations, Delivering Presentations strategic planning, The Art of Community, Planning Your Community, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Brainstorming Ideas, Technique 3: Let’s make it suck, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community, Documenting Your Strategy, Documenting Your Strategy, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Revenue Opportunities, Sponsorship, Strategy, Strategy (see also teams) brainstorming, Brainstorming Ideas, Technique 3: Let’s make it suck building positive environment, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View contribute growth, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View difference from business strategic planning, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan documenting, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community, Documenting Your Strategy, Documenting Your Strategy defining objectives, Structuring the plan, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community ingredients of, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community mission statement, Designing Your Community, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement structure of documentation, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan transparency/openess when, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness finances, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Revenue Opportunities, Sponsorship required resources, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community revenue opportunities, Revenue Opportunities, Sponsorship for openess/transparency, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness need for, Planning Your Community of company, conveying to community managers, Strategy, Strategy streaming, live, Videos, Videos stress, The Art of Community (see burnout) subcouncils, Responsibilities success criteria, in strategic plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan summits, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Summit, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes surface-level diversity, Diversity, Diversity surveys, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Choosing questions, Choosing questions, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns choosing questions for, Choosing questions, Choosing questions for finding causes of bottlenecks, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes for gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback for learning about community concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns purpose of, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Surveys and Structured Feedback reports from, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports Sweet, Adam, Finding Your Place, Finding Your Place syndication of content, Syndication, Syndication T T-shirts, for events, Assets, Assets tales, The Basis of Communication tasks, communication between teams about, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively teams, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging, Write-centered communities, Write-centered communities, Diversity, Diversity, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Setting Up a Community Council, Setting Up a Community Council, Responsibilities and Community Council, Responsibilities as units of belonging, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging building, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View collaboration between, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams communication between, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively diversity within, Diversity, Diversity dividing community into, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams leaders of, tracking community health through, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals mission statement for, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope of Ubuntu community, Write-centered communities, Write-centered communities scope of, Units of Belonging, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope vs. councils, Setting Up a Community Council, Setting Up a Community Council Technical Board, of Ubuntu community, Technical Board, Technical Board Technorati, The Amateur Press testing usability, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests Texas Linux Fest, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo The Art of Community, community of, Social Media, Social Media The West Wing (TV program), Inspiring your community, Inspiring your community theory versus action, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins Thorp, Ben (mrben), The Essence of Community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication threats on community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity effect on sense of belonging, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication LugRadio response to rail strike, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity time zones, and online events, Date/time, Date/time tone, of writing, Avoiding bikeshedding, Setting tone tools, Building Great Infrastructure, Building Great Infrastructure, Software As a Service, Software As a Service, Avoiding Resource Fetishism, Avoiding Resource Fetishism, Tool Access, Tool Access, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose access to, Tool Access, Tool Access and workflow, Building Great Infrastructure, Building Great Infrastructure debates over, Avoiding Resource Fetishism, Avoiding Resource Fetishism for managing social media, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose social media as tool, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl Software as a Service (SaaS), Software As a Service, Software As a Service top posting, Netiquette, Netiquette Torvalds, Linus, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux Trac (software), Building Great Infrastructure tracking, The Art of Community, Bug Tracking, Bug triage, Bug reporting, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress, The Importance of Tracking Our Work, The Importance of Tracking Our Work, Tracking the Right Things, Tracking the Right Things, Within the Context of a Company, Communicating up and down, Tracking Growth and Decline, Using burndown charts, Tracking Growth and Decline, Tracking Growth and Decline, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes, Tracking Health, Tracking Health, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns (see also projects, tracking) bugs, Bug Tracking, Bug triage, Bug reporting, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics determining what to track, Tracking the Right Things, Tracking the Right Things effect on building credibility, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress growth and decline, Tracking Growth and Decline, Using burndown charts, Tracking Growth and Decline, Tracking Growth and Decline, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes areas of, Tracking Growth and Decline, Tracking Growth and Decline data visibility, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key finding causes of, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes overview, Tracking Growth and Decline, Using burndown charts health of community, Tracking Health, Tracking Health, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns by calls to team leaders, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals overview, Tracking Health, Tracking Health promoting feedback culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture responding to concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns importance of, The Importance of Tracking Our Work, The Importance of Tracking Our Work within a company, Within the Context of a Company, Communicating up and down transparency, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Striving for Clarity, Striving for Clarity, Transparency, Transparency, Bug Tracking, Bug Tracking, Building and Maintaining Transparency, Building and Maintaining Transparency, Communications, Communications, Perception of you, Perception of you, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership and dictatorial communities, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership in bug tracking, Bug Tracking, Bug Tracking in communication, Striving for Clarity, Striving for Clarity, Communications, Communications in personal feedback, Perception of you, Perception of you in processes, Transparency, Transparency in strategic plan, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness in workflow, Building and Maintaining Transparency, Building and Maintaining Transparency trend line, Using burndown charts trending topics, Getting more eyeballs triaging, Bug triage, Bug triage, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics Troy, Ryan, Codifying Your Council trust, Trust Is Everything, Trust Is Everything tutorials, online, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes Twitter, Reporting, Reporting, Being Social, Being Social, Twitter, Twitter, Getting started with Twitter, Getting started with Twitter, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, Tuning up your messages, Tuning up your messages, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, The buildup, At the event, At the event, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media broadcasting with, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, The buildup, At the event, At the event, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media about events, The buildup, At the event, At the event mindcasting, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media getting feedback using, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look getting started with, Getting started with Twitter, Getting started with Twitter history of, Twitter, Twitter overview of, Being Social, Being Social reporting with, Reporting, Reporting searching tweets, Where to look, Where to look use by Tim O'Reilly, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media writing messages, Tuning up your messages, Tuning up your messages U Ubuntu Code of Conduct, Diversity, Diversity Ubuntu community, Write-centered communities, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Striving for Clarity, Inspiring your community, Leading by example: Ubuntu, Leading by example: Ubuntu, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Process Reassessment, Process Reassessment, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Lessons learned, Feedback, Feedback, Providing Community Updates, Providing Community Updates, Videos, Videos, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Visibility Is Key, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes, In the Beginning..., In the Beginning..., Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Shuttleworth, Community Council, Community Council, Technical Board, Technical Board, Team councils, Team councils, Membership, Membership, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Developer, Developer, Council or Board Member, Council or Board Member, Escalation, Escalation bug workflow example, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Lessons learned bug-squashing parties, Plugging your stats into graphs contributor access to repositories, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth developer mentoring campaign, Visibility Is Key history of, In the Beginning..., In the Beginning...

., Building Belonging into the Social Economy hashtags, Getting more eyeballs, Where to look, Asking for feedback, The buildup, At the event Hawthorn, Leslie, Step 4: Make Time, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes health of community, tracking, Tracking Health, Tracking Health, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns by calls to team leaders, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals overview, Tracking Health, Tracking Health promoting feedback culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture responding to concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns hiring community manager, Risk, Risk Holbach, Daniel, Planning, Hooks ’n’ Data, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key hooks and data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you, Part 2: Get the facts, Part 2: Get the facts gathering general perceptions, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you in conflict resolution, Part 2: Get the facts, Part 2: Get the facts measuring mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics observational tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests overview, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data statistics and automated data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs surveys, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports hotels, for event accommodation, Accommodation, Accommodation Hudson, Paul, The Professional Press, The Professional Press Humble Indie Bundle, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle, Richard Esguerra, Humble Indie Bundle humor, Setting tone Hybrid Theory (album), Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park I identi.ca, Reporting, Reporting, Getting started with Facebook reporting with, Reporting, Reporting users of, Getting started with Facebook implementation plan, Structuring the plan incentives, for donations, Donations Innovate Developer Conference, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay inspiring others, Inspiring your community, Inspiring your community, Inspired Words, Inspired Words, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire as goal of governing body, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire through writing, Inspiring your community, Inspiring your community, Inspired Words, Inspired Words insurance, for physical events, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions Internet Relay Chat, The Art of Community (see IRC) interviews, building buzz with, Attracting Contributors IRC (Internet Relay Chat), IRC, IRC, Communications, Observational Tests, Privacy, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Preparing for a session, Running a session features and benefits of, IRC, IRC logging, Communications privacy issues, Privacy usability testing over, Observational Tests use with online events, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Preparing for a session, Running a session issues, communication between teams about, The Art of Community, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively (see also conflict) J Johnson & Johnson conflict resolution approach, Part 1: Calm and reassure, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 2: Get the facts, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 3: Discuss, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 4: Document, The fantastical user group debacle, Part 5: Reflect and maintain, The fantastical user group debacle calm and reassure, Part 1: Calm and reassure, The fantastical user group debacle discuss, Part 3: Discuss, The fantastical user group debacle document, Part 4: Document, The fantastical user group debacle get the facts, Part 2: Get the facts, The fantastical user group debacle reflect and maintain, Part 5: Reflect and maintain, The fantastical user group debacle Jokosher project, Planning Your Community, Planning Your Community, Communication fetishism, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Bug reporting, Regular Workflow Assessment, Regular Workflow Assessment bug tracking, Bug reporting communication channels used for, Communication fetishism contributions of Laszlo Pandy, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth workflow assessment during, Regular Workflow Assessment, Regular Workflow Assessment justice, lack of, Lack of Justice, Lack of Justice K KDE project, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship, Creating and Running Events, Creating and Running Events keynotes, at events, Opening keynotes, Opening keynotes KGRUBEditor, Observational Tests KHTML technology, Enlightened Dictatorship, Enlightened Dictatorship KickStarter, Donations Kiss, Tom, James Spafford, Media Molecule L Langridge, Stuart (Aq), Planning Your Community Laporte, Leo, Foreword from the First Edition Launchpad (software collaboration platform), An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Getting to know the problem, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data leadership, The Art of Community, The Art of Community (see community managers) (see governance) Lessig, Lawrence, Untwisting the tail, Announcing Your Community licensing, Untwisting the tail, Untwisting the tail, Videos, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons Liebling, Alison, Gathering General Perceptions lightning talks, Lightning talks, Lightning talks Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Linksvayer, Mike, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons Linspire (formerly Lindows), Blog wars, Blog wars Linux community, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Write-centered communities, Diversity, Diversity, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux (see also Ubuntu community) (see also Xubuntu community) Linux Demo Day, Building Buzz, Building Buzz Linux Format magazine, The Professional Press, The Professional Press listening to others, The Value of Listening, The Value of Listening, Membership, Barriers to Input, Barriers to Input LittleBigPlanet community, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule live streaming, Videos, Videos LoCo (Ubuntu Local Community), Observational Tests, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Responsibilities, Team councils, Team councils LUGFests, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo LugRadio community, The Essence of Community, The Essence of Community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Becoming Yourself, Becoming Yourself, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism, Discussion forums, Podcasts, Podcasts, Location/venue, Cost, Setting expectations, Setting expectations belief in, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity effect of unedited productions, Becoming Yourself, Becoming Yourself events of, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Location/venue, Cost forums of, Communication fetishism, Communication fetishism, Discussion forums origin of, The Essence of Community, The Essence of Community podcast, Podcasts, Podcasts response to rail strike, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity sponsorship of, Setting expectations, Setting expectations stories in, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication M MacQueue bulletion board, Foreword from the First Edition Macromedia Flash plug-in, Videos mailing lists, The Mediums, Mailing lists, Mailing lists, Netiquette, Netiquette, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Privacy, Communicating Between Councils effect on how people behave, The Mediums for communication between councils, Communicating Between Councils for gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback overview of, Mailing lists, Mailing lists privacy concerns, Privacy top posting to, Netiquette, Netiquette Major, John, Uniting Together managers, The Art of Community, The Art of Community (see community managers) (see governance) marketing, The Art of Community (see buzz, creating) maturing of members, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical McMillan, John, Building Belonging into the Social Economy measuring community, Measuring Community, Community Self-Reflection, The Foundations of Feedback, The Foundations of Feedback, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you, Anonymity, Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy anonymity and, Anonymity, Anonymity establishing goals of, Defining Purpose, Defining Purpose meaning in measurements, The Foundations of Feedback, The Foundations of Feedback overview of, Measuring Community, Community Self-Reflection privacy issues, Privacy, Privacy use of hooks and data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you gathering general perceptions, Gathering General Perceptions, Perception of you measuring mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics observational tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests overview, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data statistics and automated data, Statistics and Automated Data, Plugging your stats into graphs surveys, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Showing off your survey reports Measuring the Quality of Prison Life study, Gathering General Perceptions mechanics of collaboration, The Mechanics of Collaboration, The Mechanics of Collaboration, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule mediator, of conflict resolution, The Role of a Facilitator, Be clear meetings, The Art of Community, Attracting Contributors, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Management and Communications, Weekly engagements (see also events) between company and community manager, Management and Communications, Weekly engagements building buzz with, Attracting Contributors for organizing events, Step 2: Find Help, Step 2: Find Help online discussion meetings, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting Mellor, Carolyn, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay members, The Art of Community, Responsibilities, Membership, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council (see also contributers) approval of, Responsibilities of Community Council, Membership, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council meritocracy, Meritocracy, Meritocracy, Enlightened Dictatorship Messina, Chris, Attracting Contributors, Organizing an Unconference, Organizing an Unconference, Organizing an Unconference, Organizing an Unconference Mickos, Mårten, The Role of a Community Manager in the Corporation, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus, Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus microphones, at events, Room Layout mindcasting, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media mindshare, Mindshare, The Mindshare Opportunity, Defining Purpose, Gathering General Perceptions mission statement, Designing Your Community, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, The Mission, The Mission and buzz, The Mission, The Mission for each team, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope overview of, Designing Your Community writing, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement money from sponsors, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Handling the Money, Handling the Money (see also costs) (see also finances) Mozilla, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla, Mary Colvig, Mozilla mrben (Ben Thorp), The Essence of Community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication multimedia, use when announcing community, Announcing Your Community music industry, and community, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park N negative energy, Honesty, Honesty netiquette, Netiquette, Netiquette news, on website, Staying Current, Staying Current Nielsen, Jakob, Announce, Announce Nielsen, Michael, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media nominating council members, Nominating and Electing Council Members, Forming a new council North, Gail, Dealing with Burnout notetakers, at summits, Inside a session O O'Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media O'Reilly's Radar site, Staying Current O'Reilly, Tim, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Staying Current, Privacy, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Obama, Barack, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire as inspirational orator, Aspire to Inspire, Aspire to Inspire election of, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity objectives, in strategic plan, Structuring the plan, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community objectivity, in conflict resolution, Be objective, Be objective, Be objective Ogg Theora, Videos Oliver, Jamie, The Mindshare Opportunity, The Mindshare Opportunity On Writing Well (Zinsser), Don’t write like an institution on-ramp, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos defined, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes determining contributions, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions identifying, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp showing appreciation, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos skills acquisition, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge steps in, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes one-on-one discussion, for gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering feedback online events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events, Medium, Virtual worlds, Date/time, Date/time, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes date and time of, Date/time, Date/time discussion meetings, Online Discussion Meetings, Running the meeting medium for hosting, Medium, Virtual worlds overview of, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Events tutorials, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes open days, building buzz with, Attracting Contributors Open Source Conference (OSCON), Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations open source development, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Planning Your Community, Planning Your Community, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan, Tool Access, Tool Access, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux access to tools, Tool Access, Tool Access and community, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business, Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business differing motives for contributing to, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux fixed release cycles, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan in business, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy Jokosher audio editor example, Planning Your Community, Planning Your Community usability testing, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests OpenAdvantage, Becoming the Advocate, Becoming the Advocate openess, The Art of Community (see also transparency) openness, Barriers to Input, Be open, Be open OpenSuSE Board, Commercial sponsorship opportunities, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community and early days of Linux, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity and Obama election, Unwrapping Opportunity documenting, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community Oram, Andy, Preface, Simplicity is key Organizational Vision, Values and Mission (Scott), Building a Mission Statement OSCON (Open Source Conference), Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations outside the box thinking, Technique 2: Think outside the box, Technique 2: Think outside the box owner of goals, Structuring the plan P Packard, Keith, Transparency Pages, in Google+, Getting started with Google+ Pandy, Laszlo, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth patience, The Value of Listening patterns, in burndown charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns Paul, Celeste Lyn, Observational Tests, Observational Tests PayPal, Donations, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay, Carolyn Mellor, X.commerce, PayPal, and eBay peer review, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth performance reviews, Technique 1: Question assumptions personality issues, The Art of Community, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Poisonous people, Poisonous people (see also conflict) attributes causing conflict, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical maturity, Profiling the polemical, Profiling the polemical poisonous people, Poisonous people, Poisonous people sharing feedback about, Sharing feedback about personality issues, Sharing feedback about personality issues Persse, James, Building Great Processes phone calls, privacy during, Privacy physical events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events, Location/venue, Location/venue, Location/venue, Location/venue, Accommodation, Accommodation, Equipment, Equipment, Date/time, Date/time, Cost, Cost, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Catering, Catering, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Additional notes, Organizing a Summit, Inside a session, Inside a session, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes accommodations for, Accommodation, Accommodation catering for, Catering, Catering, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes conferences, Organizing Physical Events cost of, Cost, Cost, Additional notes, Event-specific notes date and time for, Date/time, Date/time, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes equipment at, Equipment, Equipment, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes insurance needs, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions location of, Location/venue, Location/venue registering attendance, Registering attendance, Registering attendance, Additional notes, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes remote participation in, Inside a session, Inside a session sprints, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes summits, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Summit, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes types of, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Physical Events unconferences, Organizing an Unconference, Event-specific notes union requirements, Insurance/unions, Insurance/unions venue, Location/venue, Location/venue piracy, Foreword, Foreword planets, Syndication planning phase, of buzz cycle, Planning, Planning, Planning, Applying the buzz cycle, Applying the buzz cycle plenaries, at events, Plenaries, Plenaries podcasts, Podcasts, Podcasts politics, creating buzz compared to, Uniting Together, Uniting Together Pope, Alan, Social Media, Social Media positiveness, in conflict resolution, Be positive, Be positive postmortems, Review, Review presentations at events, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo attracting presenters, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo delivering, Delivering Presentations, Long versus short presentations long vs. short, Long versus short presentations, Long versus short presentations promoting, Promoting your talk, Promoting your talk slides in, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations submitting proposal for, Submitting your paper, Submitting your paper press, as target of buzz campaign, The Professional Press, The Professional Press, The Amateur Press, The Amateur Press amateur, The Amateur Press, The Amateur Press professional, The Professional Press, The Professional Press pride, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You, Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You privacy, Privacy, Privacy, Privacy, Part 2: Get the facts, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media balancing with visibility, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media during conflict resolution, Part 2: Get the facts during phone calls, Privacy when gathering feedback, Privacy, Privacy Process Improvement Essentials (Persse), Building Great Processes processes, Building Great Processes, Building Great Processes, Breaking Up the Puzzle, Building a process, Building a process, Simplicity is key, Simplicity is key, Avoiding bureaucracy, Avoiding bureaucracy, Transparency, Transparency, Assessing Needs, Assessing Needs, Community Cycles, Leading by example: Ubuntu, The Gates of Your Community, The Gates of Your Community, Assessing Contributors, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Managing Feedback, Gathering feedback, Document Them, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find, Using Your Processes, Using Your Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Growing Kudos, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos, Process Reassessment, Building Regularity, Responsibilities and community cycles, Community Cycles, Leading by example: Ubuntu announcing, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find avoiding bureaucracy, Avoiding bureaucracy, Avoiding bureaucracy building, Building a process, Building a process categories of, Assessing Needs, Assessing Needs changes in, Responsibilities documentation of, Document Them, Make Them Easy to Find, Make Them Easy to Find encouraging use of, Using Your Processes, Using Your Processes for assessing contributors, Assessing Contributors, Reviewing new developers: In depth for attracting contributors, The Gates of Your Community, The Gates of Your Community for managing feedback, Managing Feedback, Gathering feedback good vs. bad, Building Great Processes, Building Great Processes in getting participation (the on-ramp), The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Growing Kudos, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos defined, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes determining contributions, Determining Contributions, Determining Contributions identifying, Identifying the On-Ramp, Identifying the On-Ramp showing appreciation, Growing Kudos, Growing Kudos skills acquisition, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge steps in, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes, The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes reassessing, Process Reassessment, Building Regularity simplicity as foundation of, Breaking Up the Puzzle, Simplicity is key, Simplicity is key transparency in, Transparency, Transparency product recalls, Building Great Processes, Building Great Processes professional press, as target of buzz campaign, The Professional Press, The Professional Press Project level, of projects, Tracking Projects projectors, using at events, The Ethos of the UDS, Room Layout, Room Layout, Room Layout projects, tracking, Tracking Projects, Tracking Projects, Structuring Your Projects, Structuring Your Projects, Managing Work Items, Documenting work items, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Generating additional information, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns, Building burndown charts into your workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow managing work items, Managing Work Items, Documenting work items providing different levels of visibility, Tracking Projects, Tracking Projects using blueprints, Structuring Your Projects, Structuring Your Projects using burndown charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Generating additional information, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns, Building burndown charts into your workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow benefits of, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts building into workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow, Building burndown charts into your workflow generating charts, Using burndown charts, Generating additional information overview, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts patterns in charts, Observing burndown patterns, Observing burndown patterns reading charts, Using burndown charts, Using burndown charts Putnam, Robert, Building Belonging into the Social Economy Q quantity vs. quality, The risks of interpretation R Rabinovitch, Ilan, Location/venue, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo Raymond, Eric, Bug Tracking read-mostly communities, Read-mostly communities, Read-mostly communities Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, Syndication, Syndication recordMyDesktop, Videos Regional Membership Boards, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member Reinventing Discovery (Nielsen), Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Reinventing the Bazaar (McMillan), Building Belonging into the Social Economy release cycles, Ubuntu community, Leading by example: Ubuntu, Leading by example: Ubuntu release parties, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing Online Events defined, Organizing Physical Events online, Organizing Online Events remote participation, in Ubuntu Developer Summit, Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Room Layout reporting, Bug reporting, Bug reporting, Reporting, Reporting, Reporting, Reporting, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics bugs, Bug reporting, Bug reporting, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics examples of, Reporting, Reporting making easy, Reporting, Reporting survey data, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports reputation of community manager, Internal reputation, Community reputation resources, and governance, The Case for Governance respect for others, in Ubuntu Code of Conduct, Diversity responsibility, problems with, Problems with Responsibility, Problems with Responsibility revenue opportunities, Revenue Opportunities, Donations ReverbNation, The preparation review phase, of buzz cycle, Review, Review, Applying the buzz cycle, Applying the buzz cycle roles, Roles, Roles room layout, at events, Room Layout, Room Layout Ross, Blake, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla routine, breaking, Events, Events, Events RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, Syndication, Syndication S SaaS (Software as a Service), Software As a Service, Software As a Service Safari® Books Online, Safari® Books Online salary of community manager, Salary, Salary Saxena, Deepak, Building Buzz, Building Buzz SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo), Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo Schaller, Christian, The Structure of Strife, The Structure of Strife scope of teams, Units of Belonging, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope Scott, Cynthia D., Building a Mission Statement screen-scraping, Plugging your stats into graphs Screencast-O-Matic, Videos search engine optimization (SEO), Syndication, Syndication Second Life, Virtual worlds, Virtual worlds selling items, to generate revenue, Selling, Selling SEO (search engine optimization), Syndication, Syndication seriousness, Setting tone sessions, at events, Sessions, Sessions Severed Fifth project, Donations, Donations Sheen, Martin, Inspiring your community Shigeru Miyamoto, Technique 2: Think outside the box Shinoda, Mike, A Community Manager: Becoming the Community, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Shuttleworth, Mark, Hooks ’n’ Data, Commercial sponsorship, In the Beginning..., In the Beginning..., Scheduling signs, using at events, Assets simplicity as foundation of processes, Breaking Up the Puzzle, Simplicity is key, Simplicity is key size of community, The Case for Governance skills, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Knowing When It Is Time acquisition of, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge and formation of additional councils, Knowing When It Is Time mapping to teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams required, documenting, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community Skype, Voice over IP (VoIP), Voice over IP (VoIP) slides in presentations, Creating attractive slides, Long versus short presentations Smanis, Konstantinos, Observational Tests social capital, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication building through storytelling, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication defined, Building Belonging into the Social Economy social economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication building belonging into, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy communication in, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication comparison with financial economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy, Building Belonging into the Social Economy social media, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, The Art of Community, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Being Social, Being Social, Being Social, Being Social, Being Social, Harnessing Social Media, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, Avoiding social media overkill, Avoiding social media overkill, Feedback, Feedback, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback, Collaboration, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Events, Events, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose, Optimizing How You Post, Optimizing How You Post, Being Socially Responsible, Being Socially Responsible, Organizing a Community Event, At the event, Running a Campaign, The buildup, Providing Community Updates, Providing Community Updates, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media (see also Facebook) (see also Google+) (see also Twitter) broadcasting with, Being Social, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, Avoiding social media overkill, Avoiding social media overkill balanced use of, Avoiding social media overkill, Avoiding social media overkill content of broadcasts, Broadcasting, Broadcasting overview, Being Social using Twitter, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages collaboration using, Being Social, Collaboration, Collaboration, Campaigns and awareness, Events, Events, Running a Campaign, The buildup coordinating events, Events, Events for campaigns and awareness, Campaigns and awareness, Running a Campaign, The buildup overview of, Being Social party-planning example, Collaboration, Collaboration controlling time using, Harnessing Social Media, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose getting feedback using, Being Social, Feedback, Feedback, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Debates, Debates, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback by asking for, Asking for feedback, Asking for feedback overview, Being Social Ubuntu 11.04 release example, Feedback, Feedback using Twitter, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look via debates, Debates, Debates most common networks, Being Social, Being Social optimizing posts to, Optimizing How You Post, Optimizing How You Post organizing community event using, Organizing a Community Event, At the event providing community updates with, Providing Community Updates, Providing Community Updates realistic expectations of, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl responsible use of, Being Socially Responsible, Being Socially Responsible use by community leaders, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park), Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Tim O'Reilly, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Software as a Service (SaaS), Software As a Service, Software As a Service software cycles, fixed release, Building a Strategic Plan, Building a Strategic Plan Somerville, Cody, Baking in Openness Sorkin, Aaron, Inspiring your community source control, Source Control, Source Control Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo Spafford, James, The Second Edition, James Spafford, Media Molecule, James Spafford, Media Molecule spam, Getting It Right by Not Getting It Wrong, Getting It Right by Not Getting It Wrong speaking at events, The Art of Community (see presentations at events) Spencer, Rick, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts, Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts sponsored communities, The Case for Governance, Commercial sponsorship, Commercial sponsorship, Barriers to Input, Barriers to Input and governance, The Case for Governance conflict within, Barriers to Input, Barriers to Input councils of, Commercial sponsorship, Commercial sponsorship sponsors, Understanding Your Needs, Understanding Your Needs, Finding and Handling Sponsors, Finding and Handling Sponsors, Setting expectations, Setting expectations, The pitch, The pitch, Handling the Money, Handling the Money, Scheduling, Scheduling determining, Finding and Handling Sponsors, Finding and Handling Sponsors examining needs before approaching, Understanding Your Needs, Understanding Your Needs giving back to, Setting expectations, Setting expectations managing money from, Handling the Money, Handling the Money of Ubuntu Developer Summit, Scheduling, Scheduling pitching to, The pitch, The pitch Spread Firefox campaign, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Mary Colvig, Mozilla, Mary Colvig, Mozilla Spreadshirt, Selling sprints, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Sprint, Additional notes Stallman, Richard, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership stories, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors, Delivering Presentations as mechanism behind communication, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication as viral marketing assets, Attracting Contributors, Attracting Contributors building social capital through, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication in presentations, Delivering Presentations strategic planning, The Art of Community, Planning Your Community, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Brainstorming Ideas, Technique 3: Let’s make it suck, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community, Documenting Your Strategy, Documenting Your Strategy, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Revenue Opportunities, Sponsorship, Strategy, Strategy (see also teams) brainstorming, Brainstorming Ideas, Technique 3: Let’s make it suck building positive environment, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View contribute growth, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View difference from business strategic planning, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan documenting, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community, Documenting Your Strategy, Documenting Your Strategy defining objectives, Structuring the plan, Pulling Together the Threads, Financially Supporting Your Community ingredients of, Designing Your Community, Designing Your Community mission statement, Designing Your Community, Building a Mission Statement, Building a Mission Statement structure of documentation, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan transparency/openess when, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness finances, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community, Revenue Opportunities, Sponsorship required resources, Financially Supporting Your Community, Financially Supporting Your Community revenue opportunities, Revenue Opportunities, Sponsorship for openess/transparency, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness need for, Planning Your Community of company, conveying to community managers, Strategy, Strategy streaming, live, Videos, Videos stress, The Art of Community (see burnout) subcouncils, Responsibilities success criteria, in strategic plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan, Structuring the plan summits, Organizing Physical Events, Organizing a Summit, Event-specific notes, Event-specific notes surface-level diversity, Diversity, Diversity surveys, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Choosing questions, Choosing questions, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns choosing questions for, Choosing questions, Choosing questions for finding causes of bottlenecks, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes for gathering feedback, Gathering feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback, Gathering Structured Feedback for learning about community concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns purpose of, Surveys and Structured Feedback, Surveys and Structured Feedback reports from, Showing off your survey reports, Showing off your survey reports Sweet, Adam, Finding Your Place, Finding Your Place syndication of content, Syndication, Syndication T T-shirts, for events, Assets, Assets tales, The Basis of Communication tasks, communication between teams about, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively teams, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging, Write-centered communities, Write-centered communities, Diversity, Diversity, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Setting Up a Community Council, Setting Up a Community Council, Responsibilities and Community Council, Responsibilities as units of belonging, Units of Belonging, Units of Belonging building, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View collaboration between, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams communication between, Community: The Bird’s-Eye View, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively, Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively diversity within, Diversity, Diversity dividing community into, Identify how we can divide our community into teams, Identify how we can divide our community into teams leaders of, tracking community health through, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals mission statement for, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope of Ubuntu community, Write-centered communities, Write-centered communities scope of, Units of Belonging, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope, Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope vs. councils, Setting Up a Community Council, Setting Up a Community Council Technical Board, of Ubuntu community, Technical Board, Technical Board Technorati, The Amateur Press testing usability, Observational Tests, Observational Tests, Observational Tests Texas Linux Fest, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo, Ilan Rabinovitch, Southern California Linux Expo The Art of Community, community of, Social Media, Social Media The West Wing (TV program), Inspiring your community, Inspiring your community theory versus action, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins, Theory Versus Action: Action Wins Thorp, Ben (mrben), The Essence of Community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication threats on community, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity effect on sense of belonging, The Basis of Communication, The Basis of Communication LugRadio response to rail strike, Unwrapping Opportunity, Unwrapping Opportunity time zones, and online events, Date/time, Date/time tone, of writing, Avoiding bikeshedding, Setting tone tools, Building Great Infrastructure, Building Great Infrastructure, Software As a Service, Software As a Service, Avoiding Resource Fetishism, Avoiding Resource Fetishism, Tool Access, Tool Access, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose access to, Tool Access, Tool Access and workflow, Building Great Infrastructure, Building Great Infrastructure debates over, Avoiding Resource Fetishism, Avoiding Resource Fetishism for managing social media, Controlling the Fire Hose, Controlling the Fire Hose social media as tool, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl, Don’t Be That Guy/Girl Software as a Service (SaaS), Software As a Service, Software As a Service top posting, Netiquette, Netiquette Torvalds, Linus, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linus Torvalds, Linux Trac (software), Building Great Infrastructure tracking, The Art of Community, Bug Tracking, Bug triage, Bug reporting, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress, The Importance of Tracking Our Work, The Importance of Tracking Our Work, Tracking the Right Things, Tracking the Right Things, Within the Context of a Company, Communicating up and down, Tracking Growth and Decline, Using burndown charts, Tracking Growth and Decline, Tracking Growth and Decline, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes, Tracking Health, Tracking Health, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns (see also projects, tracking) bugs, Bug Tracking, Bug triage, Bug reporting, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics determining what to track, Tracking the Right Things, Tracking the Right Things effect on building credibility, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress, Credibility and the Need to Track Progress growth and decline, Tracking Growth and Decline, Using burndown charts, Tracking Growth and Decline, Tracking Growth and Decline, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes areas of, Tracking Growth and Decline, Tracking Growth and Decline data visibility, Visibility Is Key, Visibility Is Key finding causes of, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes overview, Tracking Growth and Decline, Using burndown charts health of community, Tracking Health, Tracking Health, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns by calls to team leaders, Building a Set of Generals, Building a Set of Generals overview, Tracking Health, Tracking Health promoting feedback culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture, Promoting a Feedback Culture responding to concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns, Reacting to Community Concerns importance of, The Importance of Tracking Our Work, The Importance of Tracking Our Work within a company, Within the Context of a Company, Communicating up and down transparency, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Striving for Clarity, Striving for Clarity, Transparency, Transparency, Bug Tracking, Bug Tracking, Building and Maintaining Transparency, Building and Maintaining Transparency, Communications, Communications, Perception of you, Perception of you, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership and dictatorial communities, Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership in bug tracking, Bug Tracking, Bug Tracking in communication, Striving for Clarity, Striving for Clarity, Communications, Communications in personal feedback, Perception of you, Perception of you in processes, Transparency, Transparency in strategic plan, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness in workflow, Building and Maintaining Transparency, Building and Maintaining Transparency trend line, Using burndown charts trending topics, Getting more eyeballs triaging, Bug triage, Bug triage, Measuring Mechanics, Measuring Mechanics Troy, Ryan, Codifying Your Council trust, Trust Is Everything, Trust Is Everything tutorials, online, Organizing Online Events, Organizing Online Tutorials, Event-specific notes Twitter, Reporting, Reporting, Being Social, Being Social, Twitter, Twitter, Getting started with Twitter, Getting started with Twitter, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, Tuning up your messages, Tuning up your messages, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look, The buildup, At the event, At the event, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media broadcasting with, Broadcasting, Tuning up your messages, The buildup, At the event, At the event, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media about events, The buildup, At the event, At the event mindcasting, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media getting feedback using, Where to look, Where to look, Where to look getting started with, Getting started with Twitter, Getting started with Twitter history of, Twitter, Twitter overview of, Being Social, Being Social reporting with, Reporting, Reporting searching tweets, Where to look, Where to look use by Tim O'Reilly, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media writing messages, Tuning up your messages, Tuning up your messages U Ubuntu Code of Conduct, Diversity, Diversity Ubuntu community, Write-centered communities, Baking in Openness, Baking in Openness, Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams, Striving for Clarity, Inspiring your community, Leading by example: Ubuntu, Leading by example: Ubuntu, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Developing Knowledge, Developing Knowledge, Process Reassessment, Process Reassessment, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Lessons learned, Feedback, Feedback, Providing Community Updates, Providing Community Updates, Videos, Videos, Hooks ’n’ Data, Hooks ’n’ Data, Plugging your stats into graphs, Visibility Is Key, Ensuring Effective Processes, Ensuring Effective Processes, In the Beginning..., In the Beginning..., Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Shuttleworth, Community Council, Community Council, Technical Board, Technical Board, Team councils, Team councils, Membership, Membership, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Ubuntu Member, Developer, Developer, Council or Board Member, Council or Board Member, Escalation, Escalation bug workflow example, An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow, Lessons learned bug-squashing parties, Plugging your stats into graphs contributor access to repositories, Reviewing new developers: In depth, Reviewing new developers: In depth developer mentoring campaign, Visibility Is Key history of, In the Beginning..., In the Beginning...


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

DAVID BERDISH IS A DEVOUT Catholic and a third-generation autoworker at Ford Motor Company. He worked at the company for thirty-one years before recently retiring. His grandfather, a prominent labor organizer and founding member of UAW Local 600, a union that represented the largest Ford plants, was at the infamous Battle of the Overpass, where United Auto Worker union organizers were beaten by Ford henchmen. Like his grandfather, David Berdish is a misfit. “I get in trouble a lot [at Ford]. I push the boundaries of what I’m allowed to do,” he told us. Berdish was originally hired to work at Ford Aerospace but couldn’t get security clearance because of his grandfather’s labor history.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Poso became an election liability for Hoover when rumors spread that a sign posted at the farm stated NO WHITE NEED APPLY. Farm management quickly replaced black, Filipino, and Mexican workers with downwardly mobile white Okies, and Hoover denied the whole thing, as was his wont. American trade union organizers weren’t particularly interested in working with California’s harvest laborers for a number of reasons. The workers were precariously employed migrants, spoke a lot of different languages, and didn’t make enough money to contribute substantial dues. The bosses were vicious and intolerant of organizers, and out in the country they made their own law.

In 1945 he represented the NMU as part of a delegation to Congress in support of anti-discrimination rules and led a sound-truck campaign to tell the public about the union’s wage drive.26 Stories about Kaufman organizing in the Deep South line up with the CIO’s Operation Dixie, during which union organizers (including those from the NMU) went to sign up shops in the low-wage nonunion South at great personal risk.27 But white reactionaries took control of the NMU in the late 1940s. Its vice president, Ferdinand Smith, the highest-ranking black labor leader in New York City, was expelled from the union and deported to Jamaica.28 Was Bob Kaufman a communist?

The lack of support from national unions was one of many challenges the South Bay semiconductor labor organizers faced, including a multilingual workforce; an industry that—because it had to rebuild its quickly antiquated systems every decade or so—had a lot of opportunities to relocate production; high employee turnover; and workers who expected to advance on employers’ terms within a skyrocketing industry. It was also a bad time to be an American union organizer in general: Between 1970 and 1988 the percentage of California workers represented by unions fell from 36 to 22, a nearly 40 percent drop.13 Perhaps the greatest challenge was well-organized employers, who shared information about union efforts among themselves and, under the auspices of the Packard-founded American Electronics Association (AeA, or the Western Electronic Manufacturers Association, before 1977), split the costs of anti-union campaigns, just as the Associated Farmers before them did.


On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, land reform, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

He ended police repression and took steps to educate workers and peasants for democratic participation, thus instituting a “crisis of democracy,” from the U.S. perspective. He also initiated an economic revival, geared to domestic needs and concerns. Obviously, we had to “let him go,” in Ambassador Martin’s phrase. The inevitable military coup took place in 1963, recognized shortly after by the U.S. government, which offered it full support. CONATRAL, the union organized by the U.S. labor leadership which operates with funding provided by the U.S. government and in close coordination with private capital, praised the “patriotic gesture” of the armed forces in overthrowing Bosch. Earlier, CONATRAL had “called on the armed forces to defend the country against what it viewed as the communist menace,” Jan Knippers Black observes in her recent study of the Dominican Republic.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Its leadership has been very concerned with how quickly wages are growing, what unions are doing and how the balance of power is shifting within workplaces—what socialists would call “the state of class struggle.” Often in very explicit terms, the Federal Reserve has taken great interest in the relationship between workers and bosses, labor and capital, as much as any union organizer. The archives of meeting minutes dating back to the 1950s reveal central bankers talking frankly and knowledge-ably about which unions are currently in bargaining and their relative strength. The auto and steel sectors received particular attention; the governors of the Fed might have been even more interested in the strategy of the United Steelworkers (USW) or United Auto Workers (UAW) than would the average shop steward.


pages: 190 words: 61,970

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, Cass Sunstein, clean water, do well by doing good, end world poverty, experimental economics, Garrett Hardin, illegal immigration, Larry Ellison, Martin Wolf, microcredit, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Peter Singer: altruism, pre–internet, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, union organizing

I was lucky enough to know Henry Spira, a man who spent his life campaigning for the downtrodden, the poor, and the oppressed. Since he never had much money, his form of philanthropy was to give his time, energy, and intelligence to making a difference. In the 1950s, he marched in the civil rights movement in the South. Sailing around the world as a merchant seaman, he worked for a rebel union organization fighting corrupt union bosses. The 1960s saw him teaching in some of New York City’s toughest public high schools. In the 1970s, he became an extraordinarily effective advocate for animals; among his many achievements was persuading cosmetics companies to find alternatives to testing their products on animals.24 When he was around seventy, Spira developed cancer and knew he did not have long to live.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

As Jason Prado, a software developer, wrote in an article published in Notes from Below: “Service workers on my company’s campuses have organized and won union contracts, and workers further up the hierarchy have actively supported these efforts.” Through circulating petitions, going to meetings, and taking part in actions, the groups are forming a reciprocal relationship. The “service workers and professional union organizers,” Prado said, “are happy to leverage support from high-prestige tech employees, and tech employees gain firsthand experience working on an organizing campaign.” This kind of connection has been rare in the past. But “workers from different roles quickly come to identify together when engaged in struggle.


pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

We needed to dress in business attire because one, what do you know, we were a business, and two, we had exponentially more investors visiting the office and expecting a sartorially respectable workforce. The partners sent out a memo to this effect, causing widespread consternation among the young employees. A team of analysts delegated me to negotiate, which pleased me enormously. I felt rather like Lech Wałęsa, the Polish union organizer who fought against a totalitarian regime and won the Nobel Peace Prize in the ’80s. To back up a moment, truthfully, I did not wear jeans much. I love fashion and I enjoyed dressing up for the office. I often lamented that I lacked a discerning audience, however. The first time I tucked my pants into thigh-high boots on a winter day in 2005—years ahead of the legendary 2011 Hermes gaucho collection, you understand—a colleague asked where I had parked my horse.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

Competing French Labor Unions By contrast, in France, the labor movement was split both before and after World War II into communist and noncommunist unions. For most of the time, by far the strongest and most organized of the union federations was the CGT, which was close to the Communist Party. The different unions competed against each other: in particular, the noncommunist unions organized in the CFDT, and the Force Ouvrière needed to demonstrate that they were not just patsies of the bosses. They generally saw their interests as fundamentally opposed to those of the factory owners, not aligned with them. In the words of the famous French workers’ anthem, Eugène Pottier’s “The Internationale,” written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871, No saviour from on high delivers, No faith have we in prince or peer.

As a result, rhetoric escalated, and there is a substantially more antagonistic history of labor relations. It is filled with symbolic actions to demonstrate the principle of noncooperation: radicalized workers, for instance, liked to demolish statues of business pioneers (the result is that there are hardly any such monuments left in France). The way the unions organized and negotiated affected economic and monetary policy. The German government, especially after the 1960s, saw the setting of guidelines for pay settlements as part of its responsibility. From 1974, when the Bundesbank moved to monetary targeting, its representatives also insisted that a major part of setting the monetary target was to give employer and worker representatives a sense of how the economy was developing and, consequently, of what would be an appropriate wage settlement.


The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, business climate, colonial rule, death from overwork, declining real wages, deliberate practice, disinformation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Gini coefficient, guns versus butter model, income inequality, income per capita, land bank, land reform, land tenure, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, new economy, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, systematic bias, union organizing

While the soldiers kept order, the contractors fired 32 allegedly leftist leaders...The strike was broken in eight days.” Matters had not changed much in the mid-70s. An ad hoc human rights group that visited the Dominican Republic in 1975 reported that “working people have been prevented by nearly every conceivable means from forming and joining trade union organizations.”169 A union organizing effort in the G&W free trade zone in the mid-1970s was broken with the help of the police in arresting, jailing, and deporting labor organizers, and with the use of “troops in full combat gear armed with submachine guns” to break up organizing meetings. Flannery states that Officials of the Dominican labor ministry told organizers that—contrary to the paper guarantees of the republic’s laws—workers would not be allowed to form a union in the industrial free zone.170 On the matter of labor unions, the 1977 State Department Human Rights Report has the following “information”: “Labor unions are permitted to function and numerous labor unions exist, including some associated with opposition parties, but under some government controls.”


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

The public turned sharply against labor organizers, making it relatively easy to convict and execute four anarchists. The Knights of Labor plummeted from a membership of close to a million to just a hundred thousand in the last fifteen years of the century. In the wake of this decline, Samuel Gompers, an English immigrant cigar maker, formed the American Federation of Labor in 1886. The most successful union organization in the United States, the AFL recognized the autonomy of its participating craft unions. Gompers, who remained at the head of the AFL until his death in 1924, actually saw the potential benefit for workers in capitalism. Stressing “pure and simple unionism,” the AFL grew steadily as it worked for the immediate improvement of workers’ wages and conditions.

Organized labor backs the Employee Free Choice Act, which Republicans blocked with a filibuster in the Senate in 2007. EFCA would protect workers’ right to organize their plant once a majority of them had signed cards expressing their intent to form a union. Statistics indicate that one-quarter of all employers have illegally fired at least one person for union organizing, so unions consider EFCA essential to organizing new plants. Reports of flat wages coupled with escalating incomes in the top tenth of the top 1 percent of American earners have brought much of the public back to the union side. The disgrace into which laissez-faire economic theory fell during the fancy-free years that opened the twenty-first century bodes well for organized labor too, but it will have to contend with the countervailing force of shuttered shops and the monolithic opposition of American business.11 Missing warning signs of disaster apparently is a human trait found in capitalist and noncapitalist countries alike.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

“If you’re not treating your employees well enough so that they feel like they have to join the union and have somebody represent them to management, then management has failed.”11 There was never even a union organizing drive at ROLM. As Alvarez puts it, “We had good chairs, good lighting. We could go to the bathroom without raising our hands. We had dignity. What could we get from a union that we didn’t already have?”12 Even at Silicon Valley companies with less generous benefits or less comfortable working conditions, unions were rare. In 1974, the United Electrical Workers created an organizing committee specifically to target Silicon Valley production workers who performed highly repetitive tasks for relatively low wages, but the effort had little effect. Union organizers made significant inroads only at defense contractors, and even with those numbers factored in, fewer than 5 percent of electronics workers in the Valley were represented by a union in the 1970s.13 Union membership throughout the country dropped by 36 percent between 1972 and 1982, and organizing in Silicon Valley was further complicated by a number of local factors.


pages: 519 words: 160,846

One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution by Nancy Stout

back-to-the-land, disinformation, land reform, Mason jar, union organizing, urban planning

Once back in Pilón, she set her sights completely on January 6, when the toys were distributed. Truck drivers who worked for the mill would load all the gift-wrapped packages and distribute them to the various settlements that dotted the landscape and edged the sugar plantations. That year, due to the union-organized strike that had involved the cane-cutters, many families had no income, so Celia had purchased wholesale hundreds of pairs of shoes to give out as well—and because her census was so up to date, she could match recipients to sizes. Her colleagues grumbled. Berta Llópiz says she protested when Celia announced that they were going to be giving out shoes to the cane-cutters’ children in addition to the toys.

He may have felt the same about her; Juan León would have filled him in on her background: that she was the daughter of the doctor, of a man who had spoken out against Machado, and would have told him about her political background, her support of the Orthodox Party, of Eduardo Chibás and Emilio Ochoa. León might have described what he knew, or had heard, about the men in her life, her love affairs. Celia found out from Crescencio that Ignácio Pérez, his favorite son, was already eagerly conspiring with the union-organized cane-cutters in their strike against mill owners, and she could see that this worked to her advantage, that the old man was eager to be dealt in, handed a role. Several things jelled, and Crescencio needed little encouragement to act. Guillermo García and Crescencio Pérez, in a completely natural way, began traveling in their own regions, saving Celia from exposing herself unnecessarily.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Target #2—Organized Labor Having beaten President Carter and Ralph Nader on their first big showdown, the business forces were ready for a test of strength against a politically more organized and more formidable foe, organized labor. Since the early 1960s, the AFL-CIO labor federation had been itching to roll back the tough anti-union provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, with little success, and to win more favorable conditions for union organizing. With a Democrat in the White House for the first time in eight years, the union movement saw a chance finally to achieve victory on three top union priorities—“labor law reform,” to make it easier for unions to organize and to curb the most aggressive anti-union activities of business; “common situs picketing,” to allow multiple unions to picket a construction site on a grievance from a single union; and legislation to generate automatic increases in the minimum wage, tied to inflation and rising wage scales generally.

The nation’s most powerful unions in the auto, steel, electrical, and rubber industries saw hundreds of thousands of their jobs exported overseas, massively shrinking their rolls. “Right to work” states in the Sun Belt lured industrial plants to move from the pro-union North and Midwest to the anti-union South, with the promise of laws, regulations, and regional attitudes that were often hostile to union organizing. Some corporate leaders became aggressive union busters, fighting to weaken and decertify unions, sometimes illegally harassing labor organizers. The number of illegally fired workers ordered reinstated by the National Labor Relations Board more than tripled from 1970 to 1980. Unions were hurt, too, by determined anti-union campaigns of big employers like Wal-Mart.


Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, land reform, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, remote working, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing, work culture

Gerlinde Böhnisch-Metzmacher, a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl, walked through the historic Bachstraße in the centre of one of Germany’s oldest university cities. Wading ankle-deep through the paper that angry protesters had thrown out of the windows of the FDGB-Haus, the local headquarters of the state-controlled trade union organization, she allowed herself to be pulled along by the throngs of people moving in the direction of the Holzmarkt, the old city centre. The crowd’s ire was aimed at the SED district administration. When Gerlinde arrived, she saw how people had already broken into local offices and were throwing ‘beautiful old typewriters’ out on to the square, alongside a flurry of paper and files.

The concert at St Nicholas Church hit the GDR authorities at a point where the tensions and fear over the Brüsewitz case had reached its pinnacle. The timing of the event and his explicit politicization of the pastor’s death were enough to seal Biermann’s fate. When he applied to be allowed to go on a concert tour in West Germany, which he had been invited to by the trade union organization IG Metall, Honecker is said to have intervened to allow him to leave. During the tour, he repeatedly criticized the GDR, which was then used by the state to rid itself of a vocal critic forever. On 16 November 1976, the politburo tabled a motion for the ‘Expatriation of Wolf Biermann’ and announced this decision in the afternoon.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

But it could be useful to the latter; it can enable a sense of the individual’s worth to a network (“I matter to my community”), and thereby feed solidarity and mobilization around issues of concern to low-income neighborhoods, families, and workers. NEW CHALLENGES THAT CALL FOR NEIGHBORHOOD COLLECTIVE ACTION Neighborhoods are important spaces for low-wage workers. In the past they often enabled union organizing and the formation of mutual-assistance organizations. Much of this is lost today. There is work to be done to strengthen this neighborhood function. But this can only happen if the neighborhood is a space for connecting, collaborating, and mutually recognizing each other. Given the development of apps geared to low-wage workers, platform cooperativism could enable significant scale-ups in the deployment of such apps and in their spread.


pages: 261 words: 64,977

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Unemployment insurance will be extended, and extended again. There will be massive investment in public works. Commissions will be named to investigate the causes of the crisis. Agencies will be set up to keep people from losing their houses to foreclosure. Those hurt by the downturn will start to take action themselves. Union organizing and a wave of strikes will sweep the country in response to the complete breakdown of capitalism’s promise. The people will protest, of course, voicing their discontent in public places and maybe descending on Washington like the “Bonus Army” of unemployed World War I vets who took to the road in 1932.


Great American Railroad Journeys by Michael Portillo

Alistair Cooke, California gold rush, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, invention of the telephone, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, railway mania, short selling, the High Line, transcontinental railway, union organizing

And, after the Panic of 1893, when Pullman cut jobs and wages, he continued to charge the same rents to his workers, despite curbing their income. On 11 May 1894, 4,000 workers went on strike under the banner of the American Railway Union. More than 30 people died as a result of sabotage and riots as the union organized a boycott of Pullman coaches nationwide. On 4 July, Federal troops took control of Pullman. The union leaders were jailed and Pullman’s workers went back to the factory although they never forgave him for his treatment of them. After his death from a heart attack, Pullman was buried in a lead-lined coffin that was concreted into the grave for fear of his body being dug up by disgruntled employees.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

All of this was illegal, but that didn’t seem to give Walton any pause. The Teamsters lost the election, much to his delight. “Our good associates at our Searcy distribution center rejected the union by an overwhelming margin of three to one,” Walton wrote in Wal-Mart World. “Bless them all.” For union organizers, attempting to penetrate Walmart was perpetually frustrating. When Mr. Sam was around, many hourly employees were persuaded that the company took sufficiently good care of them, particularly with profit sharing and the ability to purchase Walmart stock. “They felt they were going to be wealthy,” said Pat O’Neill, who endeavored to organize Walmart workers in the upper Midwest for the United Food and Commercial Workers from the mid-1980s through the early ’90s before later becoming a top union official.


pages: 233 words: 75,712

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

Effort to Add Labor Standards to Agenda Fails,’’ New York Times, December 3, 1999. Adherents eagerly point out that the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions favors social clauses, but it does so in spite of vociferous opposition from its members in the South. The other international union organization, the World Federation of Trade Unions, with 110 million members in 130 different countries, has argued against the inclusion of social clauses in WTO trade agreements. 3. Lukas, p. 11. 4. Carol Bellamy, The State of the World’s Children 1997 (New York: UNICEF, 1997), p. 23, http://www.unicef.org/sowc97. 5.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

So too in the office, cameras watch from the ceiling while last year's DoD software silendy tracks and analyzes employee output, work patterns and communications. Under such conditions a whole slew of working-class survival tactics are being smashed. The super-wired corporation will not permit: unauthorized break time, excessive fraternizing, fake invoices, on the job theft, pot smoking in the utiUty room, or for that matter union organizing. The net effect of all this has been to keep American workers on their toes.When the boss is nearly omniscient everyone is open to new types of discipUne. Likewise, transparency facilitates new forms ofTaylorism. As bugged computers, barcode-tracked packages and sateUite-tagged vehicles proUferate, redundant procedures and jobs can be eUminated and the extra work shifted to a core of intimidated and intensely supervised employees.


pages: 249 words: 77,027

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun by Paul M. Barrett

airport security, forensic accounting, hiring and firing, interchangeable parts, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

Accepting this reality, we give the police and the military weapons to do the job of protection. The Glock, though not without imperfections, gets the job done. “It is the gun you want to have if you get in trouble,” Eamon Clifford, a former Washington, DC, cop told me. Clifford was in two shootouts in the early 1990s; in both cases, his conduct was deemed justified. Now a trade union organizer, he acknowledged that the Glock’s light trigger pull can lead to accidents: “You can fire a Glock pretty easy if you’re not real careful.” Then he added: “Being careful is what you should be with guns, you know what I mean?” In the law enforcement context, the issues of caliber and ease of concealment that so concern gun-control advocates seem, on close inspection, mostly theoretical.


pages: 276 words: 71,950

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Cass Sunstein, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fixed income, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, Oklahoma City bombing, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Yours, DEL Dear Oxford Students: Jeremy Corbyn’s record in politics is not only far more extensive than Trump’s, it’s also more deeply rooted in firmly held ideological beliefs. As the Brits among you well know, Corbyn has been part of Britain’s labor and trade-union movement since the beginning of his political career. In the 1970s he worked as a trade-union organizer and was active in the antiapartheid movement in South Africa. During the years of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, he showed great sympathy for the Irish Republican Army, which was waging active opposition—many called it terrorism—against the British presence in Northern Ireland. Consistently on the far-left end of the Labour Party, Corbyn became the unexpected head of the party, due in some measure to an internal political and electoral surprise, in 2015.


pages: 268 words: 75,490

The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, balance sheet recession, business cycle, collective bargaining, commoditize, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, global value chain, information asymmetry, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, means of production, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, savings glut, secular stagnation, side project, tacit knowledge, total factor productivity, transaction costs, union organizing, wealth creators

A critic of its work may object that such regularities—for example, those of the Phillips curve charting a supposedly law-like relation between unemployment and inflation—depend on a wide range of detailed institutional arrangements. It suffices to change any element of this background to alter the supposed regularities. For the Phillips curve, the formative institutional arrangements may include, for example, those that have to do with the labor-law regime and the type of union organization that it sustains, the nature and level of unemployment insurance, and the assignment and scope of the power to set monetary policy. To play a role in such explanations, the institutional regime of economic life must be defined with the detail that remains missing from abstractions like capitalism or the market economy.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

This is her story, which elucidates in a very personal way how algorithmic oppression works and is affecting her very quality of life as a small business owner who runs the only local African American hair salon within a predominantly White neighborhood, located near a prestigious college town in the United States: When I first came and opened up my shop here, there was a strong African American community. There were Black sororities and fraternities, and they had step shows, which no loner exist anymore! The Black Student Union organization was very strong; it was the ’80s. Everyone felt like family, and everyone knew each other. Even though I only worked in this part of town, it was almost like I went to school there too. We all knew each other, and everyone celebrated each other’s success. I often get invited to participate in the major events and celebrations—from marriages to their parents’ funerals.


pages: 243 words: 76,686

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Discharging and loading vessels is subject to the variables of uncertain arrival of ships, diverse cargoes, good, bad, and ordinary equipment, regrouping of men and different employers; and is at the mercy of the elements of time, tide, and weather…Hiring is by the hour, not the day, and never steadily.47 Before the unions, the longshoremen’s experience of time was completely beholden to the ups and downs of capital. While the 1932 law enabled union organizing, the tides had already begun to turn against organized labor with the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, which among other things prohibited the coordination of strike efforts among different unions. Today, subjection to a ruthless capitalist framework seems almost natural. In his 2006 book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Jacob S.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

But knowledgeable comparativists will notice a familiar clustering of countries in figure 4.12.51 One group, in the lower-right corner, includes Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. These countries, along with Austria, have several features that might contribute to low employment hours. One is strong unions. Organized labor has been the principal force pushing for a shorter work week, more holiday and vacation time, and earlier retirement. These nations are also characterized by a preference for traditional family roles—breadwinner husband, homemaker wife. This preference, often associated with Catholicism and Christian Democratic political parties, is likely to influence women’s employment rates and work hours.


pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

Trying to recover from his very public fall from grace, Sir Henry and his wife embarked on several months of travels through the Maritimes and the southern United States before settling in New York. At sixty-two, after having achieved what D’Arcy Marsh calls “the most spectacular success in Canada’s commercial history,”12 Sir Henry was wasting away, increasingly weak, depressed, and in failing health. The following March, the CNR unions organized a dinner in his honour in New York, to be attended by prominent U.S. labour leaders. But Sir Henry didn’t make it to the dinner; he died that evening in a New York hospital. Although his name is not widely known in Canada today, his legacy has lived on in the highly successful railway he created and the foundation it laid for a national public broadcaster.


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

Be courteous of others when in public and keep the feral careerism of your collegial banter on mute. Rents rose. Cafés went cashless. The roads were choked with ride-shares. Taquerias shuttered and reopened as upscale, organic taco shops. Tenement buildings burned, and were replaced with empty condominiums. On the side of San Francisco where streets were named after union organizers and Mexican anti-imperialists, speculators snapped up vinyl-sided starter homes and flipped them. Amid tidy rows of pastel Edwardians, the flipped houses looked like dead teeth, muted and ominous in freshly painted, staid shades of gray. Newly flush twentysomethings became meek, baby-faced landlords, apologetically invoking arcane housing law to evict inherited long-term tenants and clear the way for condo conversions.


pages: 302 words: 74,350

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

They were both in Los Angeles. He was asked by the editor of an ephemeral magazine to conduct an interview with the artist responsible for the original graphic novel. They met in a house that was once owned by Walt Disney’s Uncle. Walt Disney was America’s most beloved Anti-Semite and racist. He hated labor strikes, unions, organized labor and Communists. He named the names of troublesome employees before the House Un-American Activities Committee, saying that they were probably Communists. In 1938, Disney granted a private audience to Adolf Hitler’s favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl. After World War Two, Disney hired Werhner von Braun.


pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

By the early 1970s, Joe Flom had been plying his trade, hostile takeovers involving smaller companies, for twenty years. He eventually built the small law firm he joined after law school in the 1950s into the largest and one of the most respected in the world. Flom was born in 1923 and raised in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants. “My father was a union organizer,” he said. “He couldn’t provide for the family.” His parents wanted him to be a “professional.” “To them being a professional was a great thing,” Flom said. “That meant either a doctor or lawyer.” Flom qualified for admission to Townsend Harris, one of New York City’s fast-track high schools.

Sirower and Sumit Sahni, “Avoiding the Synergy Trap: Practical Guidance on M&A Decisions for CEOs and Boards,” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 18, no. 3 (2006): 83–95. 5 “SUDDENLY, EVERY CEO”: Walter Kiechel III, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2010), pp. 207–8. 6 “MY FATHER WAS A UNION ORGANIZER”: Author interview, Joe Flom, September 2004. Also see Jeff Madrick, Taking America (New York: Bantam, 1987). 7 THE TRADITIONAL EQUITY BUSINESS WAS FOUNDERING: Barrie A. Wigmore, Securities Markets in the 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 80. 8 THE AVERAGE P-E MULTIPLE: Companies issue shares to investors, which vary in quantity by company.


pages: 273 words: 85,195

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

Soon medics from AmCare, the in-house medical service, were hovering over him. They said he didn’t have a concussion, so he could return to his job in the receiving department, walking fifteen miles a day. (Chuck, Barb, and I later reconnected at a Buffalo Wild Wings between shifts. They said that, before I arrived in Texas, union organizers had been campaigning in the warehouse parking lot. For about two weeks, managers gave twice-daily lectures warning workers to stay away from them and, above all, not to sign anything. Information about employees who engaged with organizers would end up in the union’s database and be used to “track” and contact them, Chuck remembered the managers saying.)


pages: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

(Since half-baked ideas are easy for lay people to understand and require little intellectual effort, they tend to drive out truths that require more sophisticated reasoning and historical understanding.) Another of these best-selling anticapitalist tomes is Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Ph.D. biologist Barbara Ehrenreich.32 The author, who informs readers that she “married a Teamster Union organizer,” claims to have written the book out of concern for the plight of people who were being phased out of welfare. Although she is an affluent author (she has written several books and is a contributor to Time, Harper’s, the New Republic, the Nation, and the New York Times Magazine), she pretended to be an entry-level restaurant and hotel worker so she could write a book about her experiences.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

We also need to recognize that blueprints for social change don’t go anywhere without social changers, without organized pressure from below. In America’s first great triumph over plutocracy, that pressure came mainly from a resurgent labor movement. To repeat that success, labor once again needs to be surging, one big reason initiatives that aim to help unions organize—like the Employee Free Choice Act campaign—have a key role to play in any plutocracy-busting offensive. Can such an offensive succeed? Why not? Our forebears faced a plutocracy more entrenched than ours. They beat that plutocracy back. Our turn. Trust but Verify J A M E S K . G A L B R A I T H A N D W I L L I A M K .


pages: 250 words: 83,367

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

Alfred Russel Wallace, call centre, crack epidemic, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Multics, trade route, union organizing

He had to build a foundation of decent economic growth, and he had to do it ASAP. Businesses like the call center could afford to be choosy—every hard-luck town in the United States was courting them. In fact, Murphy believed that most companies were looking for a certain modicum of poverty as a fail-safe against union organizing. If people were desperate, they’d concede this essential ground to the company. Murphy understood the game. As he once put it to me in an e-mail, he was “enough of a student of economic trends in the last two decades to understand [he had to] play on the edges for wage and benefit rates.” The trick was to look like something in between a union town and a town that was downright criminally dangerous.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The letter was much discussed during the NAFTA debate. My quote from it is drawn from David Lauter, “283 Top Economists Back Trade Pact, Letter Shows,” the Los Angeles Times, September 4, 1993.   9. See the 1997 study by Kate Bronfenbrenner, “We’ll Close! Plant Closings, Plant-Closing Threats, Union Organizing and NAFTA,” posted online at http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=cbpubs. The 2010 study is summarized by Robert Scott in “Heading South: U.S.-Mexico trade and job displacement after NAFTA,” an Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper dated May 3, 2011. 10. 


pages: 279 words: 87,910

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Mao is said to have shrugged off the millions of deaths caused by his Great Leap Forward with the callous remark, “Death is indeed to be rejoiced over … We believe in dialectics, and so we can’t not be in favor of death.”42 The Failed Payoff: From Marx to Marcuse In the hundred years following the publication of Das Kapital in 1867, revolutionary socialism was vanquished in countries supposedly ripe for it, and victorious in countries that Marx did not think ready for it. By the late 1950s it was capitalism, not socialism, that seemed to have cracked the economic problem in the West: not, to be sure, the capitalism red in tooth and claw analyzed by Marx, but a capitalism so modified by state management, social security and trade-union organization that some doubted whether it was the same animal at all. If this was capitalism, there was no need for socialism.43 In 1956, John Kenneth Galbraith switched attention to the diseases of wealth. His best-selling work, The Affluent Society, argued that the citizens of Western countries were now so well off that the economic problem was no longer pressing.


pages: 252 words: 80,636

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

But the focus eventually shifted to France, where the uprising of May 1968 had produced an efflorescence of extremely creative social theory—in France it was just called “ ’68 thought”—that was simultaneously radical in temperament, and hostile to almost every traditional manifestation of leftist politics, from union organizing to insurrection.47 Different theorists shifted in and out of fashion, but over the course of the eighties, Foucault managed to establish himself in a way no one—even, really, Weber—has before or since. Or, at least, he did so within those disciplines that considered themselves in any way oppositional.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

When foreign auto companies—Honda, Toyota, Nissan, BMW—established their production facilities in the United States beginning in the 1980s, they, too, were virtually all located in southern states along interstate highway exits.14 The southern states had “right-to-work laws” designed to impede or prohibit union organizing. In the South, global companies found a more complacent white rural workforce ready to accept low wages and less than enthusiastic about organizing unions. The Interstate Highway System connecting the country meant that companies could locate in anti-union southern states and still have access to supply chains and distribution routes across the entire country, freeing their businesses from reliance on the hub-to-hub rail system connecting major metropolitan regions across the northern and midwestern sections of the country.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

* * * Some of the responses to the phrase “mutual aid” were from people expressing how deeply into these informal networks they were. “Everyone is discovering what some of us have always understood,” advocate Sen wrote, her sentences taking on an almost liturgical feel. “The social ties cultivated by mutual aid are the same ties needed to fuel a historic boycott, a union organizing drive . . .” There were also social media mutual aid-ites who felt the need to express their passion for this kind of organizing and how much better they found it than traditional nonprofits. I wrote to one of these zealous fans who went by the name “Nena,” apparently a college student, who tweeted pro–mutual aid and anti-nonprofit sentiments, and asked her, “Why do you feel this way?”


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

This is an important consideration to keep in mind when thinking about hacking and power. The powerful are also better at stopping hacks by the less powerful. Union tactics like work-to-rule are much less prevalent today, primarily because the powerful have steadily eroded the power of unions. Management in general is increasingly hostile towards union organizing and has pushed for anti-union laws and court decisions. As a result, many employees can be fired without cause. Because work-to-rule methods require union membership or just-cause termination protections, these tactics have become less prevalent over time. Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen wrote that “power interprets regulation as damage and routes around it.”


pages: 726 words: 210,048

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

Bryan of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, would not be rushed. Bryan delighted in resisting authority. A short, square-shouldered man with a pug face not unlike Edward G. Robinson’s, Bryan in a way suffered from Frank Borman’s disease: he too had a need to be in charge. Bryan drew his power from a local union organization 13,000 strong, representing nearly everyone who touched an Eastern airplane without flying in it, from the lowliest cabin cleaners to the most skilled engine mechanics. At issue between the men was the control of the company that carried more passengers than any other airline in America. Like United, which began life as an affiliate of Boeing, Eastern came into the world as the progeny of an aircraft manufacturer.

Burr couldn’t believe his complacency. He had allowed Frank Lorenzo to creep up on him. Worst of all, Burr was dying at the thought that the mystique shrouding People Express was now evaporating. The red ink forced him to withhold profit sharing. The stock price was plunging. Soon there were union organizers at his doorstep. Burr imagined his employees turning on him, the pilots in particular. He heard that they were referring to the Precepts as “Kool-Aid,” the poison-spiked beverage that the demonic cult leader Jim Jones had used to conduct a mass suicide a few years earlier in the jungles of Guyana.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

But I remember when I would go into the apartment of my cousins—you know, broken family, no job, twenty people living in a tiny apartment—somehow it was hopeful. It was intellectually alive, it was exciting, it was just very different from today somehow. WOMAN: Do you attribute that to the raised political consciousness of that era as compared to now? It’s possible: there was a lot of union organizing back then, and the struggles were very brutal. I remember it well. Like, one of my earliest childhood memories is of taking a trolley car with my mother and seeing the police wade into a strike of women pickets outside a Philadelphia textile mill, and beating them up—that’s a searing memory.

However, that party’s ability to enter the political system in Canada wasn’t a result of having proportional representation, it was due to the same thing that would be necessary to get any kind of change like proportional representation in the first place: a lot of serious popular organizing. Look, if you have a political movement that’s strong enough that the power structure has to accommodate it, it’ll get accommodated in some fashion—as in the case of union organizing rights here, the Wagner Act. But when that movement stops being active and challenging, those rights just aren’t going to matter very much anymore. So I think that pushing for something like proportional representation could be worth doing if it’s part of a wider organizing campaign. But if it’s just an effort to try to put some people into Congress and that’s it, then it’s pretty much a waste of your time.


pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

He responded by helping to create TOOR. Co-chair of TOOR was Peter Mendelsohn, for forty years a merchant seaman who lived on the same South of Market block when he returned from the sea. Although sixty-five years old, Mendelsohn had more energy than most people thirty years younger. Like George Woolf, Mendelsohn was a union organizer and also organized for the Communist Party in the 1930s.* When Mendelsohn returned from his final voyage in the summer of 1970, he discovered that the Redevelopment Agency had taken over his hotel. He briefly visited relatives and on his return found that his room had been broken into and robbed of all his valuables, which were quite substantial, as he had been a coin collector for years.

But their architectural standards have been incomparably higher than those of the Marriott Corporation, builders of those giant theme parks paradoxically called ‘Great America,’ as well as some of the ugliest hotel architecture in the world.”10 The Marriott chain’s blatant anti-union record (only one of its 130 hotels at the time was unionized—and that only because it was unionized when Marriott purchased it)11 became an issue, particularly with Redevelopment Agency commissioner Leroy King from the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. In this union-conscious town, Marriott prudently changed its stance and agreed not to oppose unionization in its new Central Blocks hotel. But once the hotel opened in 1989, Marriott went back on its word, putting roadblocks into the union organizing drive. (See below for the denouement of this issue.) An added bit of political juiciness was the revelation that Marriott’s chief financial officer, Gary L. Wilson, was a social and business associate of the mayor’s new husband, Richard Blum. Wilson, it turned out, was a 15 percent investor (a share worth sixty-five thousand dollars) in URS Corporation, an architecture/engineering firm of which Blum was vice president12 (the firm also had prepared the 1973 environmental impact report on YBC for the Redevelopment Agency).


pages: 309 words: 95,495

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

Not until his life was being torn apart by the crisis did he realize he was in the middle of what he had spent his career studying. Gorton took a circuitous route to economics. He went to the University of Michigan intending to pursue a PhD in Chinese literature, then dropped out, unable to see the purpose in such a degree. He worked as a union organizer, started law school then dropped out, worked as a machinist’s apprentice at an auto assembly plant for a few months, and drove a taxi at night. Then one day in a bookstore he picked up a microeconomics textbook, became engrossed in the mathematics, and decided to apply to graduate school for economics.


pages: 293 words: 91,412

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

Meanwhile the revenues of these units of government, in contrast with those of the federal government, are relatively inelastic. In consequence of the heavy dependence on the property tax, when prices rise, the revenues of these units of government lag behind. The problem of financing services thus becomes increasingly acute as and when inflation proceeds. In very recent times in the larger cities, stronger union organization among municipal employees has arrested and in some communities reversed the tendency for wages of public workers to lag. So the competitive position of the public services does not, with inflation, automatically become adverse. But the inelasticity of the revenues remains. And with high labor costs, the constraints on services—cuts, on occasion, instead of urgent expansion—have become more severe.


pages: 338 words: 92,465

Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century by Katherine S. Newman, Hella Winston

active measures, blue-collar work, business cycle, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, desegregation, factory automation, high-speed rail, information security, intentional community, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, performance metric, proprietary trading, reshoring, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

Moreover, it draws upon a different kind of prejudice: biases against careers that utilize the kind of intelligence and skill it takes to program a huge high-speed precision lathe, determine the cause of a plumbing problem, or spot a mistake in a drug dose in a hospital ward. This kind of talent built a booming nation and was once the bedrock of a proud blue-collar working class, whose unions organized for good wages. As a country, we stood in collective admiration of their achievements written in stone, glass, and metal. The United States was a mighty industrial power in the past and could be one again, but not until we find it in ourselves to respect what workers produce as much as we admire lawyers, doctors, or Silicon Valley computer wizards


pages: 273 words: 93,419

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

For example, until they faced strong international competition that forced them to change, the American auto industry was criticized for “planned obsolescence”. The poor quality of some American cars was finally exposed by books like Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965). Marx (1976: 358). Read any good history of trade union organizing for many examples. Many of the welfare state gains and gains of trade unions in the 1950s and 1960s were later rolled back. For an interesting discussion of temporality and capitalism see Postone (1996). Marx (1976: Part V). The average sleep time in the United States went down 20 percent in the twentieth century, while work time is increasing, with Americans now working on average 350 hours more per year than Europeans (Worldwatch 2004: 168).


pages: 277 words: 88,539

Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue by Danielle Ofri

if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, medical residency, placebo effect, rent stabilization, union organizing

His apartment had no heat and it was freezing inside the ancient stone walls. We rigged up a strategic system with the single electric heater, two summer blankets, and his electric teapot so we could stay warm while playing an all-night backgammon tournament. Was Josh thinking about his IHSS then? I thought about when Josh had worked as a union organizer, traipsing through factories in the Midwest, talking with the workers. Was he thinking about his IHSS then? People shared stories—some touching, others hilarious. At times I laughed so hard that I choked on my tears. Open caskets are generally not part of Jewish funerals, but there was a viewing before the service.


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

She had started to train as a speech-language pathologist a few years earlier—her son had needed speech therapy since birth—but the further along she got in her studies the more despondent she became, she said, and she eventually dropped out: her experiences with her own son were traumatic enough without having to consider other kids with similar struggles. In 2015, she had been looking into work as a campus union organizer, to capitalize on her interest in improving adjuncts’ lot, but that hadn’t really panned out either. Bolin’s situation was not just the result of too few hours in the day. As social psychologists who study what’s known as “decision fatigue” have found, being poor takes a huge amount of mental work.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In March 2017, for example, faith and civil rights communities joined labor advocates to show support for workers at a Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, the majority of whom were African American.53 They carried signs with slogans like “Labor rights are civil rights” to demonstrate for safer working conditions, to protest intimidation tactics used against union organizers, and to push for a reduction in the use of permatemps (who qualify for inferior benefits compared to regular employees). The multiplying numbers who hold a stake in Uber’s future can create paradoxical clashes between civil rights and labor rights efforts when they might otherwise be aligned, because organization in favor of or in resistance to Uber is not uniform.


pages: 326 words: 88,905

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

By the time the five days of shooting ended, perhaps one hundred miners were dead. The state of West Virginia indicted 1,217 miners for complicity in the rebellion, including charges of murder and treason. Many miners spent several years in prison. The union was effectively broken. It was not reconstituted until 1935, when the Roosevelt administration legalized union organizing.62 The physical eradication of Blair Mountain, part of the methodical destruction of southern West Virginia, will obliterate not only a peak, but also one of the most important physical memorials to the long struggle for justice. The battle marked a moment when miners came close to breaking the stranglehold of the coal companies.


pages: 408 words: 94,311

The Great Depression: A Diary by Benjamin Roth, James Ledbetter, Daniel B. Roth

bank run, banking crisis, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, financial independence, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, short selling, statistical model, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration

The only cloud in the picture is the possibility of a nationwide strike in the automobile business. I also think we are beginning to see a reversal of trend against those policies of Roosevelt that smack of socialism. EDITOR’S NOTE Empowered by section 7(a) of the National Industry Recovery Act, union organizers signed up thousands of workers at plants and mills across the country. In 1934 alone more than eighteen hundred strikes ensued involving almost 1.5 million workers demanding better wages and an improved working environment. Their actions met with much violence at times, as the National Guard or local police were deployed to break up the strikes.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Tesla built two entirely new Model 3 general assembly (GA) lines: with the original GA line paralyzed by more automation than the company could make work, a second, less-automated line was built inside Fremont, followed by a third built in a giant tentlike structure just outside the plant using scrap from its other lines. Battered by reports of worker injuries, targeted by union organizers, and roiled by executive turnover, the wave of momentum that Tesla enjoyed after the Model 3’s “iPhone moment” all but dissipated over the course of the first year of production. Quality problems showed up from the very beginning, with owners of early cars reporting service bulletins for problems with cracking suspension ball joints, a “battery breather,” front window regulators, touchscreen replacement, and the high voltage controller.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 22 Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works. 23 “Google Trends Interest in ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Climate Crisis’ 2004–2020,” Google Trends, 2020; Barclay, “How Big Was the Global Climate Strike?” 24 Hahrie Han, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Engler and Engler, This Is an Uprising; Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2020). 25 Julie Battilana et al., “Problem, Person, and Pathway: A Framework for Social Innovators,” in Handbook of Inclusive Innovation, ed. Gerard George et al. (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019), 61–74. 26 Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici, The Systems Work of Social Change (forthcoming); Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair, Innovation and Scaling for Impact: How Effective Social Enterprises Do It (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). 27 Steve Lydenberg, Jean Rogers, and David Wood, “From Transparency to Performance: Industry-Based Sustainability Reporting on Key Issues,” Initiative for Responsible Investment, Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University, 2010. 28 Julie Battilana and Michael Norris, “The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board,” Harvard Business School Case 414-078, 2015. 29 Jean Rogers in discussion with the authors, December 2018, December 2020, and January 2021. 30 María Rachid, in discussion with the authors, August 2020. 31 Hector Tobar and Chris Kraul, “Millions of Bank Accounts Are Frozen in Beleaguered Argentina,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2002, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-11-mn-21962-story.html. 32 For more on political opportunity, see William A.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

Carnegie was perceived in the media as labour’s friend, more sympathetic to their concerns than, say, Tom Scott, a friend of both Carnegie and Rockefeller who thought the 1877 railway strikers should be given a ‘rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.’25 Carnegie took an opposite stance in public, repeatedly telling media that he supported his workers’ right to improve their pay and work conditions. ‘Labor is all that the working man has to sell,’ Carnegie suggested to media in 1885, ‘and he cannot be expected to take kindly to reductions of wages, even when such are necessary in order that he may have any work at all.’26 Quietly, though, he suppressed all union organizing. One of his approaches, widely hailed in the media, was to introduce a ‘sliding scale’ system for his workforce, the idea being that pay would rise when the price of steel rose, and fall when it fell. In 1885–1886, steel prices rose by almost 40 per cent, and Carnegie proudly proclaimed he had increased his workers’ remuneration by 10 per cent ‘before they asked for it.’


pages: 277 words: 91,698

SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build by Jonathan Waldman

Burning Man, computer vision, Ford paid five dollars a day, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Hyperloop, industrial robot, information security, James Webb Space Telescope, job automation, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, off grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing, Yogi Berra

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was rebuilding much of what had been destroyed in Confederate raids and, in need of bricklayers, was hiring recent army discharges. Union members objected. Upon tying up work, the union got the B&O to concede. A labor newspaper in Philadelphia covered the strike, and the publisher suggested it was time for the various local bricklaying unions to form a national union. Organizations of bricklayers had survived the Civil War in New York, Providence, Pittsburgh, Boston, St. Louis, and Jersey City. Baltimore and Philadelphia liked the idea and agreed to meet. So on October 16, 1865, in a skinny brick building a few blocks from Independence Hall, nine men gathered. Five were from Baltimore, and four were from Philadelphia.


pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

To make sure that discipline was maintained in the absence of supervisors, workers were encouraged to spy on one another and warned that they would be disciplined if they did not report “misconduct or negligence.”10 This system of management worked only to the extent that all power remained lodged in the company, with no unions interceding on behalf of aggrieved workers. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the first effective trade union organization among railroad workers, would not come into being until the mid-1860s. As late as 1873, Herbert Gutman has written, “most railroad workers were without unions of any kind.” Any hint of agitation, attempt at organization, or protest was met with swift disciplinary action.11 Carnegie, son of a weaver and nephew of activists, was quickly socialized into the authoritarian ways of railway management.

Wages were higher in America, but so were the costs of living.5 The new immigrants kept largely to themselves, lived in boardinghouses with their own people, ate their own foods, drank in their own taverns, read foreign-language newspapers, shopped in stores owned by their landsmen. But they also made accommodation to the new world they now inhabited by learning a bit of the language and joining or cooperating with unions organized and led by English-speaking skilled laborers. They were willing to work long hours for pennies an hour, but when pushed too hard, shoved back. Even without a union to represent them, the furnace men at Edgar Thomson had decided that they were not going to accede to the firm’s ultimatum, even when it came sugarcoated with lengthy explanations as to why wages could not be raised or the workday reduced to eight hours.

Net profits were not only climbing, they were climbing exponentially, from $3 million in 1893, the first year of the depression, to $7 million in 1897, to $16 million in 1898.27 WHILE WE CANNOT discount the effect of the iron mine acquisitions and railroad building ventures on Carnegie Steel’s newfound profitability, the foundation for the company’s extraordinary growth had been laid a decade earlier with the expulsion of the Knights from E.T., the Amalgamated from Homestead, and potential union organizers from Duquesne. With organized labor banished, Frick and Schwab had been able to cut wages and increase hours with brutal efficiency. In January of 1895, when the 1892 Homestead contract expired, Schwab reduced wages by a further 15 percent. In the spring of that same year, in the midst of a boom in production, Schwab recommended that the pay scale—which he had cut in January—be raised to keep workers from moving to other plants.


pages: 740 words: 227,963

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, card file, cotton gin, desegregation, Ford Model T, Gunnar Myrdal, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, labor-force participation, Mason jar, mass immigration, medical residency, Rosa Parks, strikebreaker, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Local whites got wind of it and began plotting mob action because they saw her as “stirring up trouble for the sheriff and the county” by talking to the FBI. Neighbors warned the wife, and upon the picker’s release, the Fryars fled to Harlem, “leaving all their possessions, except some money from the sale of her chickens.”108 George, now an unintended union organizer, somehow managed to stay under the radar screen for months, or so it appeared, in the eleven hundred square miles of citrus land being policed by Sheriff McCall. But that could not go on forever. The orange groves had become a battlefield over more than just fruit but over the rights of the people lowest down in the citrus world and the caste system itself, and the only thing that couldn’t be known was how far George, Mud, and Sam could push it.

Decades earlier, colored migrants, unaccustomed to unions and not understanding labor politics, had been brought in by northern industrialists specifically to break up strikes. White union members resented the migrants and beat them for breaching the picket lines they had unwittingly been brought in to cross. Ida Mae was not schooled in the protocols of union organizing, but she knew she couldn’t afford to lose her job and couldn’t see how not working was going to help her keep it. She was under more pressure than ever. She and George had just bought their first house, the three-flat in South Shore, and had new and different bills coming at them than ever before—from the mortgage to the utilities to property taxes and hazard insurance.


pages: 784 words: 229,648

O Jerusalem by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, land bank, lateral thinking, Mount Scopus, union organizing

One of their fundamental concepts was the idea of a kind of redemption of the Jewish race through a return to manual labor, a flushing out of the mentality of the ghetto in the sweat of tasks long unperformed by Jews. Ditch-diggers were as important to their idea of a Jewish state as were philosophers. Determined to build a Jewish working class with a wide variety of skills, they called for Jewish labor for Jewish enterprises. The Histadrut, the Jewish trade-union organization, compelled Jewish firms to limit their hiring to Jewish workers. As the Zionists acquired land, much of it from absentee Arab landlords in Beirut, they evicted the Arab tenant farmers living on it, to make way for Jewish settlers. Those peasants displaced by one Zionist policy drifted to the cities, where they found that another Zionist policy, Histadrut's, prevented them from working in the predominantly Jewish-owned commerce and industry.

.: After retiring from active service, the last commander of the British forces in Palestine lived in Scotland until his death. ISRAELIS ALLON, Yigal: The commander of the Palmach in 1948 embarked on to a political career and eventually served as deputy prime minister in Golda Meir's government. AVIDAR, Joseph: The man who ran the Haganah's supply efforts in 1948 became a director of the nation's trade-union organization, Histadrut. AVRIEL, Ehud: Until his death, the man who was responsible for the purchase of so many arms served as Israel's ambassador to Rome and was a member of the International Zionist Action Committee. CHARNY, Carmi: The man who helped stop the Legion's armor at Sheikh Jarrah became one of Israel's outstanding Hebrew poets.


Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

. • The police are beating up and arresting strikers and escorting scab workers into plants, thus taking the side of the employer, as the police have done virtually without exception during 150 years of industrial conflict in the United States. Corporations are using many of the more than 10,000 private security firms, which employ some 1.5 million guards, to suppress strike action and intimidate union organizers. • Law enforcement officers in northern California, taking the side of logging interests once again, are pressing cotton swabs saturated with pepper spray (600 times hotter than cayenne pepper) into the eyes of non-violent people chained to each other, who are protesting the felling of ancient redwoods; protestors are shrieking and writhing in pain as the solution takes effect.


Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, clean water, David Brooks, disinformation, failed state, Farzad Bazoft, guns versus butter model, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

Rather, in each country the U.S. has organized and directs a terrorist force that must use violence to achieve the ends of the foreign master and the local elites that rely on external power, unable to enter into a political struggle since they have nothing to offer the population beyond a renewal of misery and subordination. We can begin to speak of “symmetry,” of “the East-West conflict,” and of “U.S. security concerns,” when the Soviet Union organizes a mercenary force to attack El Salvador from Nicaraguan bases and to terrorize the population, supplying them with sophisticated modern equipment in daily air drops, while the KGB runs sabotage programs in El Salvador with its own “assets” and forces a state of mobilization there by a constant and credible threat to invade outright, constructs a permanent Soviet military base in Nicaragua, runs military exercises there involving tens of thousands of Soviet troops, maintains threatening naval forces off the coast, floods the Salvadoran airwaves with hostile propaganda, conducts regular overflights to gather intelligence on Salvadoran army operations to be dispatched to “the sons of Gorbachev” marauding in the countryside, coordinates military attacks by its proxy forces in El Salvador, and so on.


pages: 309 words: 65,118

Ruby by example: concepts and code by Kevin C. Baird

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, digital map, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fudge factor, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, MVC pattern, Paul Graham, Perl 6, premature optimization, union organizing, web application

In both cases, the specifics are completely determined by the block. Conceptually, that’s all a callback is. Let’s see a specific useful example that uses Procs instead of blocks to describe callbacks. #37 Overnight DJ (radio_player1.rb) One of my friends has had a very colorful employment history. He’s been a DJ and general manager of a radio station, a union organizer, a journalist and translator in Japan, and a professional nightclub musician.1 Back when he was running a jazz radio station, he had a problem: His station relied heavily on volunteers and automation, as many jazz stations do, and the station operators would set up an automated computer system to play sound files overnight.


pages: 337 words: 103,273

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

Relatively small groups could now mobilize public opinion on a large scale with the clever use of the increasingly globalized media. The Rainbow Warrior bombing and the broader public debate on the prospects for a nuclear war led me to reengage in activism from my then role as a serving member of the Australian military. I had joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1983. Prior to that, I had worked as labor union organizer for a Communist-led trade union, the Builders Labourers Federation, in Sydney. While I felt I was making a contribution to society by protecting workers’ rights and safe working conditions, in what was at that stage a pretty shoddy industry, I soon became disaffected with the ideological obsession of the leadership and their blind support of their political beliefs.


pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Carole Turbin (1994) argues that these unions were able to succeed in part because the twin industries of the city, iron manufacturing and shirt-collar and cuff stitching and laundering, required a gender-differentiated and skilled workforce, which meant that men could work when the women in their families were on strike, and vice versa. Union organization in Troy was truly a family affair. 6. For more on the Charles Nalle story, see Christianson (2010). There is even a persistent but probably apocryphal folk story in Troy that when John Brown’s body was being moved by train after his execution in Virginia (for attacking the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in an attempt to incite slaves to open rebellion) to his final resting place in North Elba, New York, his wife tried to have his body laid out in state in each major city they passed.


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

Indeed, by attempting to speak universally, Occupy has at times drawn charges that it may be silencing minority voices. Groups such as Occupy the Hood have made the struggles of people of color their primary focus. Furthermore, because economic inequality has been so central to Occupy’s political imagination, unions and union organizers have been more visible than have their counterparts in Spain, and both sides have shown greater receptivity to dialogue, though not without ambivalence. In spite of the strict ban on special-interest promotion, the indignados are not suggesting that unions or other groups have no place in a radically democratic movement.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

Satisfying the wage demands of only a few workers is not so expensive in any case. If, in contrast, production is labor-intensive, the situation is reversed. It is much more expensive to satisfy all workers’ wage demands, while a strike is relatively less expensive. This difference in the negotiation position is amplified further because it influences the chances of unions organizing the workers in a company. If production is labor-intensive, unions have trouble showing tangible results and thus have difficulty convincing workers that it pays to organize. The opposite is true in capital-intensive firms. This is a prime reason that large, capital-intensive firms like automobile producers have always been the ones with the strongest unions (Bhaskar, Manning and To 2002).


pages: 311 words: 94,732

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, Drosophila, epigenetics, Extropian, financial engineering, Future Shock, gravity well, greed is good, haute couture, heat death of the universe, hive mind, margin call, mirror neurons, negative equity, phenotype, plutocrats, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, telepresence, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing

And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone who relies on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If the big entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright's mission, they couldn't do any better than they're doing now. So, basically, screw that. Or, as the singer, Wobbly and union organizer Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Employers responded eagerly by stiffening resistance across the collective bargaining table, daring unions to strike, and creating sophisticated defenses against attempts to unionize. A new industry of consultants arose to run antiunion campaigns, teaching management how to threaten, bribe, and harass workers when union organizers showed up. Many of these tactics were illegal, but Reagan appointed antiunion hard-liners to the National Labor Relations Board, where they blocked, delayed, and denied complaints. Newspaper corporations—including the “liberal” New York Times and Washington Post—broke their printing unions and joined the chorus of business pundits who were assuring the public that unions were both an obstacle to progress and no longer necessary in an era of enlightened and compassionate management.


pages: 320 words: 96,006

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

The manufacturing plants at least? I paid a visit to Briggs & Stratton, a plant that produces generators and small engines for lawn mowers and snowblowers. The factory is only a few miles away from where Norma Rae was filmed, the movie that won Sally Field her memorable Academy Award for her portrayal of a union organizer in a textile factory. It’s not far from the workplace of Lilly Ledbetter, for whom an equal pay law is named. But the view from the ground gave an impression of a world Norma Rae could only have dreamed of. I expected to find the last bastion of male dominance, where men with their sleeves rolled up barked orders over the loud machines.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Many might feel akin to the nineteenth-century skilled workers whom the distinguished historian David Montgomery discusses in his Workers’ Control in America (1979). As Montgomery details, skilled workers in pre-assembly-line, pre-automated industries once controlled the pace of work and in turn the output because they understood more about the machinery than their managers and owners and thus could not easily be replaced. As the radical union organizer whom Montgomery quotes put it so well, “The manager’s brains [were] under the workman’s cap.”49 Similarly, traditional faculty once controlled curriculum and instruction because they knew more about these than deans, provosts, and presidents and thus commanded considerable respect and deference.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Joan Tilouine and Ghalia Kadiri, “In Addis Ababa, the Seat of the African Union Spied On by Beijing” (in French), Le Monde, January 27, 2018, https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2018/01/26/a-addis-abeba-le-siege-de-l-union-africaine-espionne-par-les-chinois_5247521_3212.html. 72. World Bank, Project Appraisal Document on a Proposed Regional IDA Grant in the Amount of SDR 16.5 Million (US$25 Million Equivalent) to the African Union Commission for the Support for Capacity Development of the African Union Commission and Other African Union Organs Project (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014), http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/205721468194353464/pdf/816180PAD0P126010Box385177B00OUO090.pdf. 73. Huawei, “Desktop Cloud Draws Praise in Africa,” July 25, 2013, https://e.huawei.com/en/case-studies/global/older/hw_201214. 74. Danielle Cave, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, was among the first to make these connections.


pages: 370 words: 99,312

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

The idea, which originated with Adbusters, an anti-advertising Canadian print magazine (run, naturally, by veterans of the advertising industry), was popularized on social media by the hacker collective Anonymous, whose followers fetishized the wearing of Guy Fawkes masks as shown in the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta. In the event, only a few dozen seasoned activists showed up, from a variety of political backgrounds. Some were students, others were union organizers. There were socialists, but a surprising number were libertarians committed to “leaderless resistance” and also allied with Ron Paul, who had been a maverick Republican candidate for president in 2008. But still more were partisans of direct-democratic public assemblies, who in some cases considered themselves anarchists.


pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

As David Roediger and Philip Foner observe in their history of US labor and the working day, “reduction of hours became an explosive demand partly because of its unique capacity to unify workers across the lines of craft, race, sex, skill, age, and ethnicity” (1989, vii). Today it has the potential to bring together a broad coalition of feminists, gay and lesbian activists, welfare rights advocates, union organizations, and campaigners for economic justice. Hochschild claims that a focus on expanding family time in order to meet children’s needs could serve as a cause around which to organize a broad coalition of time activists; certainly, she suggests, we can agree on the importance of that (1997, 258). But such a demand can easily slide into and reinforce the kinds of traditional norms and assumptions about the nature of family life that still dominate discussions about and representations of intimacy and sociality.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Hacker and Pierson point to 1978 as the pivotal year when the American political landscape began to shift under a sustained and organized assault from conservative business interests. In the decades that followed, industries were deregulated, top marginal tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations were cut to historic lows, and workplaces were made increasingly inhospitable to union organization. Much of this was driven not by electoral politics but, rather, by continuous lobbying on the part of business interests. As the power of organized labor withered, and as the number of lobbyists in Washington exploded, the day-to-day political warfare in the capital became increasingly asymmetric.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

His preface to the first UK edition recognized this, and stands both as a brilliant insight into capitalism’s adaptive nature and as an act of self-delusion about the sources of moderation among workers. In Britain, after radical republicanism had fizzled out in 1848, the stable form of working-class organization was trade unions organized by skilled workers. Wherever the factory system was rolled out – particularly in metalwork and engineering – the autonomous skilled worker became the norm. Radicalism and utopian socialism were sidelined. Engels rationalized this first through economics. After 1848, with new markets, new technologies and an expanded money supply, Engels recognized the takeoff of ‘a new industrial era’ – what Kondratieff would dub the second long cycle – which would run until the 1890s.


pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Predictably enough the bureaucracy responded with a set of requirements spelled out in a memo that was intended to kill the idea. Luckily, Earnest found help from an unexpected quarter. A newly hired construction worker had recently been relocated to “Siberia”—the D. C. Power building—by the university in response to his union-organizing activities, and he volunteered to do the framing and plumbing. Despite the fact that the population of the D. C. Power building was overwhelmingly male, the sauna was coed from day one. Girlfriends were frequently invited on weekends and evenings, and one of them happened to be a nanny for the university provost, Bill Miller.


Discover Kaua'i Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

carbon footprint, Easter island, G4S, haute couture, land reform, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, profit motive, union organizing, white picket fence

Swinging Bridge, Hanapepe River ANN CECIL/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © History Hanapepe was not a plantation town, but was built by entrepreneurial immigrants, largely from Asia. The architectural style of false fronts and porches came from them, as it did in the Old West. Many who retired from the sugar plantations or disliked their working conditions came here to begin small farms or businesses. This included labor union organizers in the early 1900s who were not allowed to reside at plantation camps. In 1924 a pitched battle between Filipino strikers and police, known as the Hanapepe Massacre ( Click here ), left 20 dead. Hanapepe was the island’s commercial center until overtaken by Lihu‘e in the 1930s. It then morphed into a military R&R town.


pages: 353 words: 110,919

The Road to Character by David Brooks

Cass Sunstein, coherent worldview, David Brooks, desegregation, digital rights, Donald Trump, follow your passion, George Santayana, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, New Journalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, you are the product

People got dressed up in their finest clothes—gaiters, canes, boutonnieres, spats, and fancy hats—and strolled down Lenox Avenue or 135th Street, exchanging greetings and pleasantries with neighbors along the way. By the early 1920s, Randolph had begun to move into labor organizing. He helped start a half dozen small trade unions, organizing waiters, waitresses, and other disaffected groups. In June 1925, Randolph was approached by a few Pullman car porters who were looking for a charismatic, educated leader who could build a union for them. The Pullman Company provided luxury railway sleeping cars that were leased to railroads.


The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, feminist movement, full employment, Future Shock, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, impulse control, Induced demand, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Marshall McLuhan, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, means of production, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, road to serfdom, scientific management, Scientific racism, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, yellow journalism

sidered part of the " inseparable element of education culture, health, defense happiness and the development of people and a new society. In 1925, the central committee of the Soviet Com, , " munist party declared that sport should be consciously used "as a means of rallying the broad masses of workers and peasants around the various Party Soviet and Trade Union organizations through which the masses of workers and peasants are to be drawn into social and political activity Fortunately, people of all " . nations intuitively tend to resist such exhortations They know that games remain gloriously pointless and that watching an ex. citing athletic contest moreover, can be emotionally almost as exhausting as participation itself-hardly the "passive" experi, ence it is made out to be by the guardians of public health and virtue.


Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

He didn’t make a speech or hold a conference after the fact. “It is regrettable that I cannot rejoice from my heart over the prize,” he finally wrote in a statement to the press, “because of the deeply sad events taking place in the world.” He was referring to the American war in Iraq. Progressive causes were intertwined with his art; he had been a union organizer at Toei from almost the very earliest days of his career. Later, in the wake of the meltdowns of the nuclear reactors caused by the great Tohoku earthquake of 2011, he ordered his company, Studio Ghibli, to fly banners declaring their opposition to nuclear power, and he remains a vocal critic of the American military presence in his country.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

“[This conclusion] raises questions about capitalist institutions,” they write. “In particular it raises issues about the extent to which corporations should be run solely for the benefit of their shareholders. This would suggest that policy should tip the balance more in the direction of supporting union organizing activities and empowering unions.” The effect of this shapes more than just economic systems—it shapes culture and politics. If you work hard at your job but are falling further behind, and you hear the urban elites telling you that the answer is to get a college degree, you begin to feel like you’re being told by the winners of the meritocracy that you are unworthy, that your contribution to society is less valuable than theirs, regardless of whether their high-income work is parasitic or humanitarian.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

In the 1980s, conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Republican President Ronald Reagan in the US embraced a neoliberal agenda that proved anathema to public investment in fields like education and the power of unions. Under this ideology, collective bargaining by unions was a barrier to establishing free markets, and the state with its taxes and services was a drag on high economic growth. In the US, President Reagan famously fired all air traffic controllers who participated in a union-organized strike, thereby breaking the back of unions in the US. And in the UK, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher broke a major miners’ strike, ending the dominance of unions in her country. Both leaders also significantly lowered top tax rates. This was supposed to free up money for investment by companies and high net worth individuals and realize a trickle-down economy.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

In the 1980s, conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Republican President Ronald Reagan in the US embraced a neoliberal agenda that proved anathema to public investment in fields like education and the power of unions. Under this ideology, collective bargaining by unions was a barrier to establishing free markets, and the state with its taxes and services was a drag on high economic growth. In the US, President Reagan famously fired all air traffic controllers who participated in a union-organized strike, thereby breaking the back of unions in the US. And in the UK, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher broke a major miners’ strike, ending the dominance of unions in her country. Both leaders also significantly lowered top tax rates. This was supposed to free up money for investment by companies and high net worth individuals and realize a trickle-down economy.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

He determined that it could become rich by becoming one of the most attractive places in the world for business. His actions were intensely coherent and, by developed Western standards, draconian. There would be no homeless squatters, no labor unions, no unrest. There would be strong private property law and a stable economic climate. Drug peddlers were executed. Dissenters and union organizers were jailed. Foreign money began to pour in, and employment boomed, creating a trained labor force. Today, more than three thousand multinational firms operate there, unemployment is very low, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is $58,000, and life expectancy is eighty-four years. • In 2003 Jason Fried was struggling to use email to handle the growing collection of contractors, consultants, and designers connected to his Web-design company’s expanding client base.


pages: 768 words: 291,079

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, full employment, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, wage slave, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Smith & Son, this book can be procured through the Socialist and Labour xxxii Introduction organisations of the country’. There follows a list that includes The Reformers’ Bookstalls in Bradford, Swansea, Paisley and Glasgow, Henderson’s (‘The Bomb Shop’) in the Charing Cross Road and various Socialist, Co-operative, and trade union organizations. The ‘NOTE’ changed through the book’s printings. The 1926 issue, for example, added the Independent Labour Party Publications and Labour Literature Department in Great George Street and Driffield and Hudson’s in Glasgow. Beyond such traces of the book’s distinctive modes of distri- bution, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has in reception also come to mean an ever-expanding history––one might even say a living community––of personal testimony to the book that only marginally overlaps with the academic concept and forms of a ‘critical heritage’.

In 1916 Sir Edward Melanby identified the cause of the disease as poor nutrition and further showed the beneficial function of cod-liver oil in its prevention. 485 to keep the Labour Members: MPs received no salary until 1911; repre- sentation of labour in the British Parliament was the result of trade union organization and the creation of a Labour Representation Committee (1900); the first Labour MPs were consequently ‘sponsored’, i.e. financially supported, by trade unions. The Osborne Judgement of prohibited trade unions from using a ‘political levy’ on their members for such purposes. Although moderated by new legislation in 1913, and despite the circumstances of the founding of the Labour party, political levies and sponsorship of MPs by trade unions have been attacked by the right ever since.


Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall

active measures, air freight, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, union organizing

Humberto Regalado Hernandez, former armed forces chief o f Honduras. 21“ Honduras: Challenging Castle & Cooke,” N A C L A Report, M arch/ April 1978, 4 3 -4 4 ; Lernoux, Cry of the People, 1 1 8 -1 9 . Another patron o f the Contras in the region, Gen. Manuel Noriega, got his start in military intelligence spying on unions organized by banana workers at United Fruit’s plantations in Panama. See Wall Street Journal, October 18, 1989; Frederick Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator (New York: Putnam, 1990), 57. 22Matta was later “ absolved through the Honduran legal system” (Mark Rosenberg, “Narcos and Politicos,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, XXX, [Summer/Fall 1988], 148). 23Latin America Political Report, April 28, 1978; June 9, 1978; June 21, 1978; August 11, 1978; Honduras Update, M arch/April 1988; May 1988. 24Mills, Underground Empire, 944. 25Government sentencing memorandum, December 21, 1989, in United States of America v.


pages: 376 words: 118,542

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, bank run, banking crisis, business cycle, Corn Laws, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, invisible hand, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The same principle is reflected in the strength of the U.S. postal unions. Given that members of strong unions are highly paid, the obvious question is: are they highly paid because their unions are strong, or are their unions strong because they are highly paid? Defenders of the unions claim that the high pay of their members is a tribute to the strength of union organization, and that if only all workers were members of unions, all workers would be highly paid. The situation is, however, much more complex. Unions of highly skilled workers have unquestionably been able to raise the wages of their members; however, people who would in any event be highly paid are in a favorable position to form strong unions.


pages: 361 words: 111,500

Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Exxon Valdez, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, indoor plumbing, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, tech worker, Transnistria, union organizing

“Even the tiniest rail station has a clean toilet,” he says proudly. We continue our conversation as Andreas drives me to the train station. We arrive early, and it’s raining outside. The air smells sweet. We sit in his musty old Saab and talk awhile longer. He tells me how he once met an aging American activist, an old-timer, a 1960s diehard, a union organizer who went to Nicaragua and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Sandinistas. The old-timer was impressed with Andreas’s idealism and complained that American youth have lost their rebellious spark. Nothing anyone does seems to make a difference in the United States. “Why don’t you fight for proportional representation?”


pages: 637 words: 117,453

Empire Lost: Britain, the Dominions and the Second World War by Andrew Stewart

British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, Monroe Doctrine, union organizing

How it had conducted itself since the outbreak of war, however, meant that the DO had some concerns about the new government's calibre.35 Cranborne himself lamented, earlier in 1941, that these were 'men who were entirely isolationist in their view and thought of nothing but the protection of Australia'.36 Curtin, the former journalist and trade union organizer, who had been jailed briefly for anti-conscription activity during the First World War, had been quoted in the British press back in August 1939 as being entirely opposed to Australia's involvement in another European war.37 By the time he took power, he had been Australia's opposition leader for five years but he had never held any high office and only two of his ministers had had any previous government experience.


pages: 397 words: 114,841

High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline by Jim Rasenberger

AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, East Village, Ford Model T, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, MITM: man-in-the-middle, scientific management, strikebreaker, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, young professional

Steel Corporation (USX) unit stress Van Alen, William Verrazano-Narrows Bridge vertical integration vestibular-ocular reflex Victoria Bridge Vietnam War, Bloody Friday and violence Christmas fight at Time Warner Center dynamite conspiracy hard-hat riots midair murder union organizing and unions and Viollet-le-Duc wages bridgemen bridgemen, on Quebec Bridge ironworker workers compensation and Wagner Act walking boss job Walking Delegate, The (book) walking delegate job. See also Parks, Sam walking steel Walsh, Agnes Walsh, Eddie Walters, Barbara Ward, Joseph warriors, Mohawk ironworkers as.


pages: 831 words: 110,299

Lonely Planet Kauai by Lonely Planet, Adam Karlin, Greg Benchwick

call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Easter island, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Paradox of Choice, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, union organizing

History Hanapepe was not a plantation town, but was built by entrepreneurial immigrants, largely from Asia. The architectural style of false fronts and porches came from them, as it did in the Old West. Many who retired from the sugar plantations or disliked their working conditions came here to begin small farms or businesses. This included labor union organizers in the early 1900s who were not allowed to reside at plantation camps. In 1924 a pitched battle between Filipino strikers and police, known as the Hanapepe Massacre, left 20 dead. Hanapepe was the island’s commercial center until overtaken by Lihuʻe in the 1930s. It then morphed into a military R&R town.


pages: 398 words: 112,350

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South by Beth Macy

affirmative action, Charles Lindbergh, company town, desegregation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, market bubble, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, New Journalism, strikebreaker, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

They were building levees in Arkansas, gathering turpentine in Georgia, and mining coal in West Virginia and Tennessee—making far less than their white counterparts and sometimes, if their company-store debts were large, earning nothing at all. Cabell and scores of other young men from Truevine ventured to Rock, West Virginia, looking to earn the first cash money of their lives. They were, in the words of a prominent union organizer, “seeking a man’s chance in the world… looking for true American citizenship.” Most were tasked with hard labor, digging out coal, hammering metal into spikes, and building track to carry the coal using pickaxes, shovels, tie tongs, and mallets. In a posed photo from the Norfolk and Western archives, fourteen black men (and one white laborer) clutch shovels while four white bosses loom large in the foreground, one with his hand on hip and another leaning authoritatively on his leg, his foot perched atop a handcar.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Rahwan’s argument is that programmers, designers, and executives shouldn’t be the only ones balancing competing values, lest society’s trust in the advance of artificial intelligence be permanently eroded. This is a powerful idea in principle. But what might it mean concretely as we try to shape a new future of work? At a high level, it means empowering and amplifying the voices of workers. The long-run erosion of worker power and union organizations has meant that corporate executives are largely free to set priorities, cut costs, and invest in new technologies without due consideration of the potential impacts on their workforces. And in an environment in which more open international trade creates a race to the bottom on standards and worker protections, those who are most susceptible to job loss are even more isolated.


pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Our worker forebears faced violence from thugs working for their bosses: Pinkerton skull-breakers and their mercenary competitors tormented and murdered workers and their families for having the temerity to demand decent working conditions. The Pinkertons are still around, staffed up with ex-NSA, CIA, and FBI creeps, and they’re working for Amazon and other Big Tech firms to spy on and neutralize union organizers. Today’s worker-organizers don’t have to worry (much) about skull-breaking, but the Pinkertons and their digital mercenary competitors will hound them through cyberspace. That’s yet another reason that every artist—and every worker—needs to be concerned about how the internet looks: a centralized internet, instrumented for total surveillance, is a death knell for all justice struggles.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

Ryan, more charitable, calls him “an anarchist in the best sense … With somebody that brilliant, when their brain goes haywire, it goes haywire in a big way.” * * * Like Gillespie, Popp was a midwesterner from a less-than-privileged background. His paternal grandfather, Joseph P. Popp, a Hungarian immigrant, was a coal miner and union organizer in West Virginia; he fought with strikebreakers and reinforced his windows with chicken wire to protect against Molotov cocktails. After he was injured in a mine explosion, the family moved to Ohio. His son’s and grandson’s middle name, Lewis, was a tribute to longtime United Mine Workers president John L.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

“Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations,” Senate Documents, Vol. 26, 64th Cong., 1st Sess., 7627–28; W. J. Cunningham, “J8”: A Chronicle of the Neglected Truth About Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company 38–40 (1931). 36. “Ford Men Beat and Rout Lewis Union Organizers,” New York Times, May 27, 1937. 37. Henry Ford, “Why I Favor Five Days’ Work with Six Days’ Pay,” World’s Work, Oct. 1926, 613–16; Ford, My Life and Work 154. 38. Henry Ford, “When Is a Business Worthwhile?,” Magazine of Business, Aug. 1928. 39. Bruce Barton, “‘It Would Be Fun to Start Over Again,’ Said Henry Ford,” American Magazine, Apr. 1921, 7; Norval A.


pages: 468 words: 123,823

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

We also saw groups like the Communists and other militants putting furniture back after the city marshal would evict people.... The Communists were more active than any other group. It seemed to me they meant business when they put furniture back and led demonstrations around the relief bureaus.... As far as I was concerned, it was the only game in town.47 A Detroit auto worker, janitor, and union organizer: What we want here is a revolutionary movement geared into the peculiar needs of American workers, and I’ll say quite frankly that if it isn’t the Communist party, I don’t see any other elements in the country who will supply it. The Communists have done a lot—they’ve practically stopped evictions.


Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

bread and circuses, Cepheid variable, Charles Lindbergh, double helix, gravity well, index card, indoor plumbing, job automation, phenotype, union organizing

But most of Kevin’s work is for international clients who aren’t necessarily, or even usually, Sleepless but who—” “—are rich enough to afford him,” Hawke said, coming up behind them. “Ms. Camden, you haven’t spoken to me all night.” “Was I supposed to?” He laughed. “Certainly not. Why would Leisha Camden have anything to say to a union organizer of underclass morons who waste a third of their life in zombie nonproductivity?” She said evenly, “I have never thought of Sleepers that way.” “Really? Do you think of them as equals? Do you know what Abraham Lincoln said about equality, Ms. Camden? You published a book about Lincoln’s view of the Constitution, didn’t you, under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kaminsky?”


pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

He got out just in time because the brave resistance that Western leftists thought it Islamophobic to criticize was showing what it thought of Iraqi leftists in the most graphic manner. In the twentieth century, Hadi Saleh would have been recognized as a socialist hero for dedicating and risking his life for the welfare of humanity. Saleh was a printer and trade union organizer whom the Baathists arrested as soon as they came to power in 1968. He sat on death row for five years. They let him go, and he fled to Sweden with his wife. Like many in the Iraqi Communist Party he lost his faith in Moscow after it cut deals with Saddam and started a long journey towards constitutional politics.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Business owners, however, have an interest in promoting the cycle of workand-spend. As the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously put it: ‘Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.’ In the European Union, where social democratic parties have long been strong and unions organize a large part of the labour force, people are entitled to a minimum of four weeks of paid leave per year, although some countries legislate five or six weeks (European Union 1993). In the United States, in contrast, where unions are weak and the very wealthy have disproportionate power, people are entitled to no weeks of paid leave, and about a quarter of the workforce has no paid holidays of any kind (Ray and Schmitt 2007).


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

It proved a disastrous turning point for the entire trade-union movement, coming not long after the calamitous defeat of the Miners’ Strike; crucially, too, it saw a dramatic change in the newsroom, where the balance of power shifted markedly in favour of bosses. ‘I think it’s obvious that in places where we haven’t got any union organization and particularly in those workplaces where the employer is incredibly hostile to trade unions generally, to the National Union of Journalists in particular, the fear factor of being seen to be in a union as an individual or to turn to them is incredible,’ says Michelle Stanistreet, General Secretary of the NUJ and former Daily Express journalist.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

“It is for the employer’s interest as well as the employee’s,” said Filene, “because instead of having his workmen harassed by loan agents, he gets workmen, who if they have to borrow in some emergency, borrow among the men with whom they are working and who will help them get on their feet and keep steady.”18 Carving out this space allowed the credit union to gain the support of the wealthy industrialists—support that was needed to defeat the movement’s political opponents. Before 1920, the credit union movement had stalled, with only sixty-four branches nationwide. But now Filene had joined forces with Roy Bergengren, an evangelical believer in the mission of the credit union, and the new director of the Massachusetts credit union organization. Filene and Bergengren set off on a nationwide campaign to convince more states to pass credit union legislation, organize individual credit unions, and form a national association to promote the industry. Their message was that credit unions would promote self-help and teach “the principles of banking to a class of people in whose lives, heretofore, banking has meant less than nothing.”19 For its early advocates, the movement was bigger than just providing banking services to the poor.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

Harlan County sits in the extreme southeast corner of Kentucky and is perhaps the most infamous coal community in the country. For most of the last century, Harlan County was an outpost of industrial America. Ford, U.S. Steel, and International Harvester all had mines there. In the 1930s, "Bloody Harlan" became the center of union organizing efforts by both the Communist Party and the United Mine Workers of America. And in the 1970s, it was the scene of another mine strike chronicled in the Academy Award-winning film Harlan County U.S.A. Fortune, however, has not accompanied fame. Close to 80,000 people lived there in the 1940s.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

The alliance the liar strikes with untruth is one of convenience, to be abandoned the moment it ceases to serve this goal. The porousness of Frankfurt’s theoretical boundary between lies and bullshit is apparent in Laura Penny’s 2005 book, Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit. The author, a young Canadian college teacher and former union organizer, begins by saluting Frankfurt’s “subtle and useful” distinction: “The liar still cares about the truth. The bullshitter is unburdened by such concerns.” She then proceeds to apply the term “bullshit” to every kind of trickery by which powerful, moneyed interests attempt to gull the public. “Most of what passes for news,” Penny submits, “is bullshit”; so is the language employed by lawyers and insurance men; so is the use of rock songs in ads.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Explaining it is the central scientific task of economics and economic history, and it matters for any other sort of social science or recent history. In this third volume I try to show that the massively better ideas in much of technology, such as textiles and food preparation, and in some institutions, such as universities and forward markets, not capital accumulation or government policies or union organizing, provide the explanation. As a wise man put it, humans recently have “invented the method of invention.” How so? The ideas for the inventions, I claim here, were released for the first time by a new liberty and dignity for commoners, expressed as the “equality” of the book’s title—that is, by the ideology of European liberalism.

A few years later she found the same stratification in her prison camp.”15 The comparison shows again that the one reliable good for the poor and powerless over the long run since 1800, or since 1980, has been the startlingly larger pie arising directly from the liberating and honoring of trade-tested betterment—as the economist-poet Robert Frost put it, “the trial by market everything must come to.”16 Well, not everything—not love, for example—though certainly such a trial by trade must come for New Hampshire apples and Christmas trees grown for profit. Private charity and public works, intergovernmental aid and union organization, all sound good in the first act of the political drama, in the run-up to the next election. Often the advocates for such policies have pure motives (though regularly the policies enrich corruptly selected groups, such as road contractors and members of the dominant political party). But good intentions alone do not serve to uplift the poor.


pages: 1,037 words: 294,916

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business climate, card file, collective bargaining, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ending welfare as we know it, George Gilder, haute couture, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herman Kahn, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Joan Didion, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, Project Plowshare, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

The next year the mining company staged a dawn raid in which gun-toting agents herded union miners and “any suspicious-looking person” onto manure-laden cattle cars, hauled them across the state line, and dropped them off in the middle of the desert. Forced migrations were not unheard of in American industrial history. This one was the worst ever. It ended with two dead. Not much had changed in Bisbee by the time Kitchel arrived in the 1930s. Another union-organizing drive began, and Phelps Dodge responded by firing the union members. But in Washington, everything had changed. The new Wagner Act had chartered the National Labor Relations Board, which ordered Phelps to hire the union workers back—and give them back pay. The company appealed all the way to the Supreme Court in 1941.

He had to pretend it didn’t matter that the previous fall, Denison Kitchel had moved to Washington—into Goldwater’s building—to take over contingency plans for the possible presidential bid. White was singularly unimpressed by this short, introverted man whose manner was as bristly as his flat-top haircut. It was said that no one was better at beating a union organizing drive. Could anyone be worse at organizing a political campaign? When Kitchel asked him how national conventions worked, White had to pitch the explanation at a kindergarten level. At first there was just Kitchel and a secretary. Then Dick Kleindienst began working in the field. Then came an administrative assistant, Dean Burch, a Tucson lawyer and former Goldwater Senate staffer.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

In the 1860s, shipyard workers, priced out of tenements by speculation, founded their own building society and hired an architect to build five hundred identical row houses in an area that had once been potato fields. It was a story that reminded me of Vauban’s Baugruppen, in which the people of Freiburg banded together to build their own subdivision without the help of a developer. (Scholars have traced the birth of the Scandinavian welfare state back to such union-organized co-housing initiatives.) The results were similarly idyllic. Though a dozen cars were parked at either end of the narrow streets, a several-hundred-yard stretch of the center of each block was entirely car-free. What normally would have been space taken up by street parking was filled with swings, planters filled with flowering shrubs, and picnic tables.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Chapter 2 emphasized the important role that communities play in successful development; by weakening communities, corporations may, in the long run, even weaken development.8 Some of Wal-Mart’s success is based on greater efficiency (better inventory management and logistics), but much is based simply on its market power, its ability to squeeze its suppliers and its workers. Its strict policy against union organizing means that its workers are often low-paid, and their low wages force down wages at Wal-Mart’s competitors, so not only Wal-Mart workers are affected. Only about half of its 1.4 million employees are covered by health-care benefits. The U.S. state of Georgia’s public program providing coverage for children who would otherwise be uninsured found that more than 10,000 of the 166,000 children it covers had a parent working for Wal-Mart—more than any other employer.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

All of these developments led O’Rourke to call this the “mean lean” system. And that’s only the half of the new leanness. The other half is lean retail. Like lean manufacturing, lean retail also seeks to cut costs at every turn. The ways to do this include all the obvious: lower workers’ salaries in stores and refuse to provide health care benefits; stifle union organizing; and build gigantic stores in the suburbs where real estate is cheap, rather than in city centers where shoppers could access the store via public transportation. But the biggest way to cut costs associated with retail is to eliminate inventory. In the lean retail model, inventory is the ultimate waste.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Other formal memberships that serve as reputation substitutes include academic degrees, bar associations for lawyers, the Better Business Bureau, food products' labels of origin—appellation d'origine contrôlée in France, and U.S. counterparts like “Wisconsin cheese” and “Made in Vermont”—USDA Organic certification, consumer credit ratings and reports, bonding, accreditation of educational institutions. Negative reputation can also be institutionalized: public sex-offender registries, the DHS terrorist “no fly” list, blacklists for union organizers or suspected Communists, and designations on driver's licenses of a felony conviction. The scarlet letter is an older example, and the yellow star the Nazis required Jews to wear is a particularly despicable one. Laws also formalize commitment. Legal contracts are probably the best example.


Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

But simply looking at the research results, one must conclude that people's first emotional responses about what's wrong, who is to blame, or how to proceed, particularly in relation to complex issues, must always—always—be considered suspect.20 There is no simple algorithm for teasing rationality from emotion. An ardent Democrat or Republican, a dyed-in-the-wool communist union organizer, a young devotee of Scientology, a Palestinian suicide bomber, or a KKK grand kleagle could each read the above paragraphs and think, I'm not irrational—it's those other idiots who can't see the obvious. But we all have pockets of irrationality, some large, some small, no matter if we are mathematicians who make our living doing proofs, wealthy philanthropists, or stay-at-home housewives.


pages: 469 words: 146,487

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

Hughes, who discerned that his country would gain nothing if a narrow definition of reparations were adopted. A bombastic Welshman who had emigrated to Australia in his early twenties, Hughes brought to the peace-making process all the refinement of the Sydney waterfront, where he had won his political spurs as a trade union organizer. The Kaiser, he declared, might have led Germany, but she followed not only willingly, but eagerly. Upon the shoulders of all classes and all sections lies the guilt. They were drunk with bestial passion, with the hope of world conquest – Junker, merchant, and workman, all hoped to share in the loot.


pages: 460 words: 130,053

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, El Camino Real, Gordon Gekko, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, index card, off-the-grid, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, transfer pricing, union organizing

If you heard me speaking right now, you would probably ask, “How did this guy with an American accent and a British passport become the largest foreign investor in Russia only to get kicked out?” It’s a long story, and one that indeed started in America, in an unusual American family. My grandfather, Earl Browder, was a labor union organizer from Wichita, Kansas. He was so good at his job that he was spotted by the Communists and invited to come to the Soviet Union in 1926. Not long after he got there, he did what most red-blooded American men do in Moscow: he met a good-looking Russian girl. Her name was Raisa Berkman. They fell in love and got married.


pages: 407 words: 136,138

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

always be closing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, classic study, David Brooks, full employment, illegal immigration, late fees, low skilled workers, payday loans, profit motive, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, working poor

They are not Americans, but they are an essential part of America. They sustain not only the garment industry, but also the restaurants, farms, parking garages, landscapers, painting contractors, builders, and other key contributors to American well-being. “They treat ’em like shit,” said Roxie Herbekian, a gangly, fast-talking union organizer and president of the Parking and Service Workers Union in Washington, D.C. She represented parking garage attendants in Washington, northern Virginia, and suburban Maryland, most of whom were Ethiopian immigrants, plus some West Africans, Latinos, and African-Americans. “People are routinely fired without good reason,” she contended, “and there’s a lot of racist division of work.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Cubberley modeled our public schools after “factories, in which the raw product [the children] are to be shaped and fashioned …according to the specifications laid down.” Still, a public school system alone didn’t guarantee a compliant population—not when intellectuals, artists, philosophers, and labor-union organizers still seemed to emerge from its ranks and so easily foment dissidence wherever they went. Henry Ford, in particular, identified this ability to breed discontent with the Jews—not the real Jews people might know as neighbors, but the more abstract Jews and Jewish ideology thought to be running and ruining the world.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

Some were nothing more than brief items about union meetings or workers’ grievances, such as those of members of the Bakers’ Union, who were required to work fifteen to eighteen hours per day, including Sundays25; the “sewing women,” who earned twenty-five cents per dozen shirts made, leaving them continually impoverished despite working until 2:00 A.M. most nights26; and labor leaders who opposed the hiring of convict labor in the belief that “convicts should not be allowed to compete with skilled workmen [but should be] restricted to work of a menial kind.”27 However, the framing of newspaper articles about the working class at the end of the nineteenth century typically did not tell the stories of individual workers or give voice to their concerns; rather, they focused on “organized labor,” leaving the workers as faceless employees controlled by their bosses and union leaders. Although Labor Day was not officially designated a holiday until 1884, the first celebration took place on September 5, 1882, in New York City, when the Central Labor Union organized about ten thousand men to participate in a parade that was “conducted in an orderly and pleasant manner.”28 The headline of a New York Times article about that city’s celebration of this holiday in 1902 was typical of media coverage at the time: “Big Labor Day Parade: Thirty Building Trade Unions to Be Represented.


pages: 493 words: 145,326

Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain by Christian Wolmar

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Beeching cuts, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, financial independence, hiring and firing, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, low cost airline, railway mania, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, strikebreaker, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, union organizing, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, working poor, yield management

Gooch quickly found 178 replacements from other railways or from the pool of labour that seemed ever available at most times in the nineteenth century. There were other small local and mostly totally unsuccessful strikes in the first three decades of the railways but the power and obduracy of the employers managed to see off any lasting trade union organization until the creation of the Railway Clerks Association in 1865. While it may seem surprising that the white-collar workers should be the first to organize rather than their blue-collar colleagues for whom the daily toil was far harder, the clerks were viewed as less of a threat by the owners and consequently given an easier passage.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Some scholars, for example, Karl Popper, Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda, and Wilhelm Reich, joined socialist student groups. Young liberals like Herbert von Furth and Friedrich von Hayek created societies for the defense of democratic and republican ideals. Upon returning to the university for the winter semester of 1918–19, they helped found the German Democratic Students’ Union, organized as a counterbalance to leftist and rightist student organizations. Although their involvement was short-lived, the teenagers developed a lifelong friendship. They carried their activism to new organizations, and they had a formative influence on the reconfiguration of the Austrian School. As vital as the mentorship of Wieser and Mises was, the friend network around Furth and Hayek played an even more significant role.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Hales took the call in an office in City Hall, joined by Steve Novick, his transportation commissioner. If Hales was a nice guy, Novick was his enforcer. Standing four feet, nine inches tall, with thick glasses and a voice that pitched steadily higher as he got angry, Novick was a bulldog. The son of a waitress and a New Jersey union organizer, Novick was born without a left hand and missing fibula bones in both of his legs, disabilities that enhanced his pugilistic spirit. After graduating from the University of Oregon with his bachelor’s degree at eighteen years old, he went on to earn a Harvard law degree by the age of twenty-one.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

As the world’s preeminent superpower for most of the past seventy years and more, the United States has long held the capacity to shape events and institutional developments at various levels throughout the world. And one significant consequence of its global sway was to reinforce a “hub and spokes” of alliance relations that arguably inhibited the evolution of competing intra-Eurasian ties. Over the past forty years an America beset by globalization has begun to change in historic ways. Labor unions organize a smaller and smaller share of the American work force, with that share declining from 20 percent in 1983 to less than 11 percent in 2017.77 Income inequality is also rising sharply— in 1980 the top 1 percent of Americans earned on average 27 times more than the bottom 50 percent. By 2014, however, they were earning 81 times more.78 And the foreign-born share of the US population has risen from under 5 percent in 1970 to 14 percent in 2016.79 In responding to these sweeping social changes, the resources at Washington’s command, however, are not infinite and its intentions are not immutable.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

That means early developers, today’s rich nations, should do everything they can to help poor nations industrialize. Instead, as we will see, many of them are doing something closer to the opposite: seeking to make poverty sustainable rather than to make poverty history. Before we left, I asked Suparti what she felt she had accomplished as a labor union organizer. “My proudest accomplishment was to win menstrual leave,” she said, “so that when you are on your period you can have two days off. This was good because we had coworkers who were in so much pain from their periods that they cried and one even fainted.” I asked her whether she was lonely, and thought about returning to the village.


pages: 476 words: 138,420

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, Transnistria, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game, éminence grise

They soon managed to find an infrastructure and organizational base in the Russian Orthodox Church, which was engaged in an ongoing struggle with its Catholic competitor, as well as in numerous nationalist organizations established in the region with church and government support. The most popular Russian nationalist organization to come into existence during the Revolution of 1905 was the Union of the Russian People. The first rally the Union organized in Moscow attracted close to 20,000 people. In December 1905, Nicholas received a delegation of leaders of the Union and gave his blessing to its activities. Backed by the authorities, the Union played a key role in mobilizing support for the monarchy under the banner of modern nationalism. According to the Union’s statute, “the good of the motherland lies in the firm preservation of Orthodoxy, unlimited Russian autocracy, and the national way of life.”


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

The city came to fully fund the health and welfare benefits of its employees, allowing the unions to administer these funds and hire small armies for that purpose. By 1977, the city was paying the salaries but releasing 126 employees for full-time union activity; another 96 were released with the union paying their salary and the city their pension, health and welfare contributions; still another 41 union organizers were released on a part-time basis. The union’s growing strength is gauged by glancing at the budget of the Office of Labor Relations, the city agency responsible for representing 7.5 million taxpayers in contract negotiations. In the last year of the Beame administration, this office had fifty employees and a puny budget of $800,000.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

If our situation seems uniquely challenging (and on bad days, borderline hopeless), it likely has to do with how much we have come to expect from our individual selves combined with the brokenness of structures—trade unions, close-knit neighborhoods, functioning local media, and so on—that once made it easier to do things together. It’s our fragmentation that daunts us, as much as the challenges themselves. And yet even in these unstable times, I do think it’s possible to overcome some of that fragmentation, and to weave ourselves together in new ways. The wave of unconventional union organizing at corporations like Amazon and Starbucks shows that many young workers are already figuring out those new ways. Same goes for the movements organizing debtors into quasi-unions, like the Debt Collective, as well as the unions for tenants and unhoused people that have formed in many gentrified cities that have allowed rents to soar to impossible heights.


pages: 1,061 words: 341,217

The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal by William D. Cohan

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, David Brooks, fixed income, medical malpractice, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, union organizing

All this to save approximately $20,000 per year.” In July 1995, Brodhead wrote a letter of “recommendation” about the graduate student for her “dossier” in which he was critical of her and her union-organizing activities. At first, he praised the papers she had written for him as a student, but when it came to her involvement with GESO, he was far less satisfied. She was “a poor listener on the subject” of the union organizing and “has on at least one occasion . . . shown poor judgment in the choice of means.” He concluded that the graduate student and GESO leader “will bring civic intelligence and concern about communal life to her future job.”


pages: 495 words: 154,046

The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler

affirmative action, airport security, computer age, disinformation, facts on the ground, fudge factor, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, Mikhail Gorbachev, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, RFID, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, working poor, zero-sum game

He was hounded the rest of his life; his barn was burned down by a mob, and his county’s local newspaper recommended that those who schemed against America be awarded “a nice little plot of their own, about seven feet long, three feet wide and four deep.” Residents of his Texas town of Brandenburg changed its German name to Old Glory, as it is still called today, a monument to xenophobia.31 World War I’s conclusion segued smoothly into the Red Scare of 1919–20, an ideological war with Lenin’s Russia: American union organizers were branded Bolsheviks, leftist foreigners were deported, and state laws were generated to prosecute people for displaying the red flag of worker internationalism. At least 1,400 flag-flyers were arrested, and 300 received sentences of up to twenty years.32 Some 6,000 people, mostly immigrants, were swept up as alleged anarchists in the 1919 Palmer Raids after a series of bombings was punctuated by an explosion on the porch of Attorney General A.


pages: 570 words: 158,139

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

Meyer of the Convention Authority said that by signing a five-year union contract, Steve Wynn set the standard for solid management-labor relations. “Labor knows what’s going on in the hotels. All of our major brands are based here—Caesar’s, MGM, Wynn—it is still the case that labor unions work well in Las Vegas and that management values the training and engagement of union workers.” The labor movement agrees. John Wilhelm is a former union organizer in Las Vegas who is now president of the powerful Unite Here labor group, the parent union of workers in the hotel, airport, restaurant, gaming, food-service and textile industries. The backbone of the success of labor in Las Vegas is the Culinary Workers Union, which picketed for years until it won accreditation and helped raise wages in Las Vegas.


Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs, Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Alistair Cooke, American ideology, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, declining real wages, endowment effect, fiat currency, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, manufacturing employment, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, plutocrats, post-industrial society, power law, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Sometimes workers could be intimidated into staying on the job-once the President threatened to blacklist striking machinists to deny them war-related work and promised that "the draft boards will be instructed to reject any claim of exemption based on your alleged usefulness on war production"-but usually the government correctly perceived that such heavy-handedness would only prove counterproductive. 61 The prevailing policy was the more conciliatory one of supporting union organization and compulsory collective bargaining, the eight-hour day, and union work rules. Employers could be indemnified by cost-plus contracts with governmental procurement agencies. To help resolve some of the larger and more threatening labor-management disputes, Wilson in September 191 7 created the President's Mediation Commission, whose secretary and legal counsel was Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor destined to exert a great influence on public affairs for a long time to come. 62 As the government's involvement in labor relations expanded, it grew more and more confused, finally prompting a reorganization in January 1918 that featured the creation by executive order of a War Labor Administration to be headed by the Secretary of Labor, William B.


Turning the Tide by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, failed state, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, land reform, launch on warning, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

Francisco Acosta, US-Canadian representative of The National Federation of Salvadoran Workers, reports that peasants are denied the legal right to organize and that the government raises numerous barriers to the (technically legal) organization of urban workers, making it “very difficult to legalize a union.” One difficulty is that “union organizers are immediately accused of being communists,” which means that they are fair game for the security forces. “Since the labor movement started to become more active in the urban areas [in 1985], there have been many kidnappings, and murders of trade unionists, but there has been no international press coverage,” he adds; media outrage (and extensive coverage) is restricted to suppression of civil liberties in Nicaragua, under attack by the United States.


The death and life of great American cities by Jane Jacobs

book value, company town, Golden Gate Park, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, work culture

Nor is there necessity for district self-containment. In Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards, most of the breadwinners used to work, until the 1940’s, at the slaughterhouses within the district. This did have a bearing on district formation in this case, because district organization here was a sequel to labor union organization. But as these residents and their children have graduated from the slaughterhouse jobs, they have moved into the working life and public life of the greater city. Most, other than teen-agers with after-school jobs, now work outside the district. This movement has not weakened the district; coincident with it, the district has grown stronger.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

, the former Labour cabinet member Douglas Jay demanded, instead of concocting what a Liberal, Russell Johnson, described as ‘shameful schemes for getting rid of these islands’.6 South America at that time was a playground for military dictators, and of all the murderous and unstable regimes in the continent, Argentina’s was one of the worst. The country had been under direct military rule since March 1976, when President Isabel Perón, third wife and widow of Juan Perón, was bundled off to exile in Spain. Even before that coup, Marxist revolutionaries, union organizers and other left-wing activists had begun ‘disappearing’ without trace. In 1979, Amnesty International calculated that the number of ‘desaparecidos’ abducted, tortured and possibly killed by government agents in four years could be as high as 15,000. This grisly operation seems to have begun with the tacit approval of Washington, where the Republican administration certainly believed that a military takeover was preferable to a Marxist revolution; but Democrat President Jimmy Carter, who took office in 1977, was more particular about human rights.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Given the rigidity of monetary and fiscal policy, member countries have been encouraged to apply pressure on labour wages and conditions in order to generate competitiveness in the internal eurozone market. FIG. 6 Eurozone current account balances as percentage of GDP The ‘race to the bottom’ has been won by German capitalists who have succeeded in keeping wage growth low as well as creating entire areas devoid of trade union organization in both the old East and West Germany. The diverging paths of nominal unit labour costs in figure 5 show the gains in competitiveness made by Germany compared to peripheral countries. The roots of the disturbance in the eurozone as well as the particular form taken by the crisis of financialization in Europe are evident in figure 5.


pages: 495 words: 144,101

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Hoiles and Mullendore were emblematic of this new militancy, both taking a hard line when strikes hit the companies they managed. Read, Mullendore, and Hoiles rightly recognized Rand as a writer whose work supported their antiunion stance. It had not escaped their notice that The Fountainhead’s villain Ellsworth Toohey is a union organizer, head of the Union of Wynand Employees. Read and Mullendore also suspected that Rand’s more abstract formulations would resonate with businessmen. The two had a small side business, Pamphleteers, Inc., devoted to publishing material that supported individualism and free competitive enterprise.


pages: 391 words: 22,799

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

But different concerns crosscut many Â�women’s experience of waged labor over two centuries: constant exposure to sexual humiliation, coercion, and even violence from their male supervisors; the excessive hours that ignored their second shift at home; the pressure to incorporate their children into the factory. Many Â�unions structured around men’s priorities wrote off Â�women workers as inÂ�sufÂ�fiÂ�ciently militant, even unorganizable. Yet in the 1990s, the only consistent bright spots in Â�union organizing were in serÂ�vice industries and the public sector, where Â�women and men of color, immigrants, and white Â�women predominate.36 73 TO SERVE GOD AND WAL - Â�M ART The work of serÂ�vice introduces a unique element that finds no parallel in production: the direct relationship of the front-Â�line serÂ�vice provider with the customer, or, in white-Â�collar serÂ�vice, with the client.


pages: 434 words: 150,773

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

A visitor entering the Mars factory passes a big clocking-on desk where all 2,400 employees, including the managing director, must punch a card; every employee is on first-name terms with every other employee – again including the managing director; there are no reserved parking spaces for senior staff; in a vast open-plan office even the directors sit out on the floor at desks indistinguishable from those of secretaries; there is naturally only one cafeteria, in which everyone helps himself and then clears away his own place. When I was there, a committee was investigating whether there were any previously undetected differentials, apart from pay, that could be eradicated. I suspect they had their work cut out. There are no unions, but even a local union organizer, who had been complaining to me that Thatcherism had unleashed a ruthless attitude amongst employers, found no fault with this company. His own wife had been kept on full pay by Mars throughout a serious illness, and had been encouraged to take her time before returning to work. Pay rises and bonuses are triggered by a formula which everyone understands: pension and insurance are non-contributory.


pages: 438 words: 146,246

Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky by Oleg Gordievsky

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing, urban sprawl, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, working poor

(It was fitting that he should live close to the cemetery in which Karl Marx is buried. As late as 1989 he was still proclaiming ‘Communism will come’, and he died, unrepentant, in 1994, aged ninety-five.) Among my own contacts, none gave me more trouble than Ron Brown, Labour MP for Edinburgh Leith and former trade union organizer, famous for such scandals as smashing the mace in the House of Commons, and being caught stealing his mistress’s knickers. By the time I arrived in London, contact had already been made with him, and it fell to me to continue whatever relationship there was. The trouble was that Brown had a Scottish accent so thick that I, still struggling with my English, could scarcely understand a word he said.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

., “Programmable RNA Recognition and Cleavage by CRISPR/Cas9,” Nature 516, no. 7530 (December 11, 2014): 263–66, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25274302. 39. L. Cong, F. A. Ran, D. Cox, et al., “Multiplex Genome Engineering Using CRISPR/Cas Systems,” Science 339, no. 6121 (February 15, 2013): 819–23, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23287718. 40. Court of Justice of the European Union, “Organisms Obtained by Mutagenesis Are GMOs and Are, in Principle, Subject to the Obligations Laid Down by the GMO Directive,” July 25, 2018, https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2018-07/cp180111en.pdf. 41. “Secretary Perdue Statement on ECJ Ruling on Genome Editing,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, July 27, 2018, https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2018/07/27/secretary-perdue-statement-ecj-ruling-genome-editing. 42.


pages: 482 words: 150,822

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Black Lives Matter, classic study, colonial rule, COVID-19, critical race theory, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Long before the day in December 1955 when she sat down on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks had begun training for that moment. The previous summer, Parks, then an official with the Montgomery affiliate of the NAACP, had attended a session at the Highlander Folk School, a leftist, pro-labor, racially integrated outpost in the hills of eastern Tennessee. Founded in 1932, Highlander at first focused mainly on training union organizers for the hard task of operating in the South. In 1953, its leaders decided to turn more toward working for civil rights. Soon the head of its workshops was Septima Poinsette Clark, a brilliant, remarkable woman who had a powerful effect on a generation of civil rights activists. Born in South Carolina in 1898, the daughter of a formerly enslaved person, Clark had worked for decades to bring literacy to Blacks in the South, seeing the ability to read as enabling people not just to lead more productive lives—and perhaps eventually to register to vote—but also to elevate their sense of themselves.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

“We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety,” Zapolsky said. “Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.” Zapolsky was betting that Smalls would prove so “not smart or articulate”—a comment that many found rife with racist implications, given that Smalls is Black—that he would help turn the public, and union-curious employees, against unions more broadly. This was newly alarming terrain for the tech giant.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

A tiny minority went hiking. During the working week, some of the women went swimming, but ‘sport on the weekend was virtually unknown’ among them. Some lived in hostels and factory homes which on evenings and Sundays put on dances and social games as well as courses in cooking and sewing. In the winter months, trade unions organized plays and song recitals for their members. For the majority, Sundays were unchanging: in the morning to church, then housework and lunch. The afternoon was filled with walks and visits with friends and family. A few practised an instrument or rehearsed for a play. Some went on excursions with their singing club.

Fascists had their leisure organizations, social democrats and trade unions theirs; the Workers Travel Association in Britain started in 1921, initially arranging trips to the battlefields of the Great War before discovering holiday camps; the Swedish RESO (Folkrörelsernas Reseorganisation) in 1937. Danish trade unions copied Butlin’s holiday resorts. Little of that energy survived the Second World War. A Bureau International du Tourisme Social (BITS) was founded in Brussels in 1963, but ‘social tourism’ has proved no match for the private car and package tour. The Belgian trade union organization Vacances et Santé, born in 1938, still exists, and has holiday homes catering for 1.5 million nights of accommodation a year,40 but this is barely more than what two cruise ships manage together. The French comités d’entreprise steered social tourism in a new direction, as a partner rather than the enemy of commercial holidays.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

The company’s employment policies, not unique for the South in that era, were white supremacist; blacks were denied skilled, better-paying jobs and relegated largely to the dusty, often stifling leaf-processing rooms. By maintaining a two-tier wage scale for a workforce split about equally between white and black employees, the company effectively stymied union-organizing efforts across the whole rank and file. Reform efforts to improve wages and living conditions in the community, led by teachers, black preachers, and white union organizers, were promptly labeled as communistic by the company, dedicated to maintaining its cheap labor supply. After a boisterous, five-week strike in 1947, marked by standard repressive tactics like confiscation of the organizers’ sound truck and arrest of its occupants as agitators, the house union emerged stronger than ever.


pages: 1,327 words: 360,897

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

His first statement for thirteen years ‘To my Russian, to my Polish and all my Slav friends’ appeared in their journal The Bell in February 1862. Quoting the journal’s motto ‘Land and Liberty’, he reaffirmed his faith in the instincts of the people and called for a revolution which would bring about the self-government of the Slavs in a fraternal union organized from the bottom up and based on the peasant commune. While this clearly echoed Proudhon’s federalism, Bakunin went beyond his economic mutualism to insist on the communal possession of land. Herzen left a vivid picture of Bakunin at this time: ‘His activity, his idleness, his appetite, and all his other characteristics, such as his gigantic height and his continual sweat, were of superhuman dimensions, as he was himself — a giant with a leonine head and a tousled mane.’

In carrying a resolution, it was usual to operate by majority vote, but proportional representation was also used to stop the small unions from the villages being crushed by the large unions from the cities. The delegates at conferences had the mandate to discuss fundamental themes but they had to submit the propositions agreed to referendum of individual unions. At all times the members had control over the delegates and could dismiss them. As a union organization, the CNT was one of the most democratic. But there were some limitations to its libertarian structure. Interpreting strictly its principle that the emancipation of workers must be the work of the workers themselves, initially it only allowed workers who had a wage and an employer to join. This of course excluded self-employed workers, members of co-operatives, certain technicians and intellectuals.


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

One-sixth of the arable land in Hungary was declared to reside in inalienable trusts, heritable through primogeniture. The growing Hungarian underclass, now reduced to neo-serfdom, ensured the neofeudal lords a reliable supply of labor, and the police colluded by returning workers to places of work if they breached seasonal contracts, and by forbidding union organization as “interference with work of others.” Tillers of the land lapsed into semi-subsistence, with just 11 percent producing for the market, and the remainder consuming their own produce.48 Democracy shifted into reverse as well, as the percentage of male adults entitled to vote declined from more than 14 percent to 6.2 percent between the 1870s and 1905.

If they found a certain film or theater performance too “pessimistic” or excessively “realistic,” or even too “satirical” they might keep a theater director—even a famous one—from producing more plays. In every country, workers or peasants’ children who were tiny minorities at universities now came to dominate them, as well as the party and trade union organizations that had ultimate say on staffing and curriculum.58 Until the intitial enthusiasm wore off, hierarchies were reversed, with students and staff instructing professors. The new reality was also reflected in wages. For the first time in history, manual laborers earned more than white-collar workers.59 This is not to say that workers escaped the pervasive terror of these years.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

And as in a real family, it is very hard to opt out of the relationship: if one’s corporate “father” is seen as too overbearing, one usually does not have the option of disowning him by quitting and working somewhere else. The bonds of reciprocal obligation felt between workers and managers are reflected on a larger scale in Japanese union organization. Postwar Japanese unions are not organized along craft or industrial lines, as in the United States and many European countries, but as company unions; for example, the Hitachi union represents Hitachi workers, regardless of specialty. The attitudes that labor and management hold toward each other reflect a higher degree of trust than in the United States, and much more so than in European countries like Britain, France, and Italy, with histories of militant, ideologized trade unionism.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

.… What man could afford to pay for all the things a wife does, when she’s a cook, a mistress, a chauffeur, a nurse, a babysitter? But because of all this, I feel women ought to have equal rights.… Unfortunately, most low tar cigarettes tasted like nothing. Then I tried Vantage. Vantage gives me the taste I enjoy. And the low tar I’ve been looking for.… FILIBUSTER DEFEATS UNION ORGANIZING BILL … The leaders of industry, commerce and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress.… ELVIS LOVE LETTERS Fans pour out their hearts; Plus Super Color Special: The day Elvis’s home became a shrine … Noise pollution in a New York slum!


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

OEO is convinced that the consumer problems of the poor must be solved if we are ever to eliminate poverty” (Written Statement of Robert Levine, Assistant Director for Research, Plans, Programs, and Evaluation Office of Economic Opportunity, “Financial Institutions,” 106). 66. Congress, “Consumer Credit and the Poor,” 34; Credit unions, additionally, were limited by law to investing 25 percent of their capital in other credit unions. Credit union advocates, like J. Orrin Shipe, the managing director of the credit union organization CUNA international, called for raising that limit to 50 percent (Congress, “Financial Institutions,” 131). 67. Congress, “Consumer Credit and the Poor,” 34. 68. Congress, “Financial Institutions,” 82; Proxmire described the amount of money involved in these credit unions as “peanut” (“Financial Institutions,” 120). 69.


After the Cataclysm by Noam Chomsky

8-hour work day, anti-communist, British Empire, death from overwork, disinformation, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, land reform, mass immigration, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

Militant (1 September 1978), which also carries a report of a demonstration in Miami protesting “racist attacks” against Haitian refugees. The mainstream press rarely carries such news. 21. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service works in an interesting fashion. Its timing in the expulsion of victims of friendly tyrannies, for example, has a curious way of coinciding with union organizing. Thus in September, 1978, a group of Haitian custodians were arrested by INS just a day before contract negotiations for custodians were to begin. “The negotiations are now up in the air,” Martha Cooley reports; “I-Men Raid Quincy Market for Illegal Aliens, Impede Union Drives,” Real Paper, Cambridge (14 October 1978).


Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, full employment, Howard Zinn, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, long peace, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing

In fact, the U.S. role in Guatemala is unmentioned in this story. Gruson describes the increase in kidnappings, torture, and murder, the worsening situation in the cities, and the “de facto military dictatorship” in the countryside (quoting Americas Watch observer Anne Manuel). The main targets in the cities are “labor leaders, union organizers and leftists.” A spokesman for an indepen-dent human rights organization says that “there’s a democratic facade now, nothing more. The facade hides that all the power is held by the army and that the situation is getting worse.” An Americas Watch report released two weeks later accused the government of prime responsibility for the serious increase in human rights abuses, now reaching a level of about two a day, presumably a considerable underestimate, Americas Watch concludes.147 As 1988 came to a close, government atrocities mounted in the client states.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

Rather than thinking ofthe struggles as relating to one another like links in a chain, it might be better to conceive ofthem as communicating like a virus that modulates its form to find in each context an adequate host. It would not be hard to map the periods ofextreme intensity ofthese cycles. A first wave might be seen as beginning after 1848 with the political agitation ofthe First International, continuing in the 1880s and 1890s with the formation of socialist political and trade union organizations, and then rising to a peak after the Russian revolution of1905 and the first international cycle ofanti-imperialist struggles.11 A second wave arose after the Soviet revolution of 1917, which was followed by an international progression of struggles that could only be contained by fascisms on one side and reabsorbed by the New Deal and antifascist fronts on the other.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Strikes had been banned in Brazil since 1964, when the military overthrew the democratic government of President João Goulart. But news had just broken that the government had been fixing the national inflation figures so that the rise in the cost of living had been underestimated. As the 7:00 a.m. shift began, workers put down their tools. At 8:00 a.m., Gilson Menezes, a union organizer working at the plant, called the union. The president of the São Bernardo Metalworkers was a thirty-three-year-old activist called Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”). By noon Lula was at the factory. When the company asked him to persuade the employees to go back to work, he refused. The Scânia strike was the first in a wave of strikes that swept across Brazil.


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Just as Reverend Hill had been ousted from the NAACP, Crockett lost his job as head of the UAW Fair Practices Committee, Young was fired from his CIO staff position, Hood and dissident auto workers were ostracized by the Reutherite caucus of the UAW, and Raskin and McPhaul and their colleagues in the Civil Rights Congress faced relentless harassment by local anticommunists and the House Un-American Activities Committee.65 The factional struggle between Communist and anticommunist civil rights advocates came to a head in 1951. A coalition of left-wing organizations, led by the Civil Rights Congress, the National Negro Labor Council, and Communist-led unions organized a drive in Detroit for a city Fair Employment Practices Ordinance. They hoped to gather thirty thousand signatures in support of a city ordinance, which would force the Common Council to vote on the initiative or put it on the November 1951 municipal ballot. Communist party officials argued that the Common Council must be “pressured into [passing an FEP law] by labor and the people.”66 Labor and the people, however, split deeply over the proposal.


pages: 589 words: 167,680

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

He was more mindful of ethnic sensitivities, more restrained in his rhetoric—more mature. The goal this time was more than symbolism. He tailored his message of “economic justice” to a wider range of audiences—including the blue-collar whites who’d reacted to him with such hostility the last time around. “The overwhelming difference is his welcome into the community,” one union organizer said. In heavily white Iowa, Jackson took 9 percent, after barely registering four years earlier. In New Hampshire, he scored 8 percent, another big jump. He had attracted almost no white support in 1984; now he was getting at least some. Then, at last, came Super Tuesday. The New York Times billed it as “the day designed to restore the South to the dominant role it once played in the Democratic Party”—fifteen southern and border states all voting on the same day.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

Public-sector corporations had enormous debts, and the government was pouring subsidies into the industries it controlled. Most of that cash was being spent on declining businesses like coal (which was producing a third less than in 1938 despite the injection of public funds) and the railways (which were offering one-half as many miles of service as in 1938). In the private sector, two huge union organizations had an almost unchallenged say over policy—even though the number of working days lost to strikes was eight times higher than in the years before World War II. Meanwhile, inflation had drastically eroded the value of the pound sterling. One pound in 1980 had one-twentieth the purchasing power of the same amount of currency in 1938.


pages: 597 words: 172,130

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

“We trust that the Government will take all the appropriate actions,” wrote Trichet and Draghi. The letter was received with anger by Berlusconi’s government. Officials viewed it as one more volley in the long battle between the technocrats who kept the country running and elected leaders. Berlusconi’s allies saw the Banca d’Italia as a left-wing, pro-union organization and the letter as primarily written by Draghi. It was an odd reading of the situation, given that much of what the letter demanded was anathema to Italian unions. Central-bank sources say the letter was drafted by Trichet and the ECB, with Draghi and the Banca d’Italia suggesting only modest changes; when they needed help most, Berlusconi’s government was grumbling over the details.


pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Both received funding and advice from the Americans. Throughout all of this, Roger Hollis, the director-general of MI5, instructed his staff to steer clear of the planning.59 Over the next two years, the CIA executed a striking array of plots to destabilize Jagan. They rigged elections, bribed trade unions, organized strikes and riots, and apparently even orchestrated bombing campaigns.60 The latter may have been to justify a return to British direct rule, the pretext for which, the State Department accepted, had to withstand public scrutiny.61 Harold Wilson, upon entering Number 10, continued to sanction the use of covert methods in British Guiana from 1964.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Blue-collar whites also distanced themselves from the black population, whose members they believed lacked discipline and too often lived on welfare. The “whiteness” associated with the working class has historical roots. In the words of Cherlin: Many unions did not recruit black members, and even among unions that did, the local chapters were often segregated. When the American Federation of Labor (AFL) became the most powerful union organization in the 1890s, its leader, Samuel Gompers, urged its member unions to admit blacks so that employers could not use low-paid black workers to weaken the position of white workers. But the Federation did little to back up its rhetoric, and a number of important unions, such as the National Association of Machinists, were allowed to join the Federation even though they refused to admit black members.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The arbitrator said that “the ‘glaring and fatal flaw’ in Rhee’s move was that the teachers were not offered reasons for their terminations, as required by their contract.” Rhee made things worse by responding that “I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school,” which led people to ask why Rhee wasn’t prosecuting teachers for criminal behavior instead of firing them. The union organized an anti-Rhee rally. Two years after Rhee appeared on the cover of Time, the Democratic voters of Washington, DC, fired her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty. The Washington Post wrote that his “School Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s dismissal of hundreds of teachers and dozens of principals for what she said was poor performance” had managed to “alienate” these voters.


Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

In fact, it took more than seventy years before the programme spelt out in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) was implemented in full with free trade in corn (1846) and the end of the Navigation Laws (in 1851). Long before that, manufacturers had been free to impose new conditions of work, while the state outlawed ‘combination’ (i.e. trade union organization) or cleared the way for the huge railway projects that, in London at least, removed thousands of people from the path of the line. A ‘progress’ ideology regarded economic ‘improvement’ as an imperative goal and almost any social cost as a necessary evil. Any interference with the laws of economics came to be seen as futile or worse.


In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

. ,,49 In glassmaking, everything was done by hand, "the gatherers taking the 'metal' from the furnace at the end of an iron rod, the blower shaping the body of the bottle with his breath, while the maker who finished the bottle off . . . tooled the neck with a light spring-handled pair of tongs. Each bottle was individually made no matter what house- hold, shop or tavern it was destined for.,,50 There were steady inroads made by machinery in this industry, but despite its labor-saving poten- tial, glassmakers and their union organizations bitterly resisted and suc- cessfully impeded its progress. In 1878 one observer summarized the glassmakers' ambivalence: "If in many industries the substitution of mechanical for manual labor offers important advantages because . . . it decreases a man's fatigue, we do not think it will have the same effect on the absolutely special work of the glass industry, and we fear that in depriving glassworkers of difficult tasks we will destroy their skill as well as the artistic talents of which glassmakers have the right to be proud. ,,51 Pottery work was very physical and involved personal handling of the clay at every stage of production.


pages: 624 words: 180,416

For the Win by Cory Doctorow

anti-globalists, barriers to entry, book value, Burning Man, company town, creative destruction, double helix, Internet Archive, inventory management, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, New Journalism, off-the-grid, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, printed gun, random walk, reality distortion field, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, time dilation, union organizing, wage slave, work culture

In his peripheral vision, he saw Wiener wilt, look away and then turn and leave the room. He waited until the door had shut, then slumped in his seat and put his face in his hands. God, and shit, and damn. How did it all go so crapola? How did he end up with a theme-area that was half-shut, record absenteeism, and even a goddamned union organizer just the day before, whom he’d had to have security remove. Florida laws being what they were, it was a rare organizer brave enough to try to come on an employer’s actual premises to do his dirty work, no one wanted a two-year rap without parole for criminal trespass and interference with trade.


pages: 654 words: 191,864

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book value, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demand response, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, index card, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, nudge unit, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Shai Danziger, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, union organizing, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

After he was booked and put into a holding cell for a brief time, all charges were dropped. Mr. Thornton is suing Thrifty Drug for false arrest. In addition to this background material, which all participants read, different groups were exposed to presentations by the lawyers for the two parties. Naturally, the lawyer for the union organizer described the arrest as an intimidation attempt, while the lawyer for the store argued that having the talk in the store was disruptive and that the manager was acting properly. Some participants, like a jury, heard both sides. The lawyers added no useful information that you could not infer from the background story.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

The directives also dictated the course of action for awakening dormant networks, which were to be renewed continually up to the 1997 handover and beyond. Similar instructions were given to underground militants when riots erupted in the colony in 1967. In April that year, the Cultural Revolution spread to Hong Kong; unions organized strikes to protest the conditions of workers in the Kowloon Chinese quarter on the peninsula. It began on 28 April with strikes at two artificial flower factories. The crackdown was brutal. Hundreds of workers were arrested by the police, triggering riots. In Beijing, the British embassy was set on fire.


pages: 649 words: 185,618

The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow by Gil Troy

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, demand response, different worldview, European colonialism, financial independence, ghettoisation, guns versus butter model, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, open immigration, Silicon Valley, union organizing, urban planning, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

He remained consistently at the center of Labor Zionist affairs and spoke frequently before international bodies and Jewish communities abroad until his death in Jerusalem in 1944. Katznelson’s major importance, however, was not in politics, but in journalism and cultural affairs. In 1925 he founded the Tel Aviv newspaper Davar as the organ of the trade union organizations, the Histadrut. He remained its editor until his death. Am Oved, the publishing house of the Histadrut, was also his creation; indeed, he influenced the entire cultural program of Palestinian labor. Revolution and Tradition (1934) We like to call ourselves rebels—but may I ask, “What are we rebelling against?”


The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

The companies also found themselves employing junkies and thieves and people so antisocial that they wrecked whatever harmony there might have been on the polyglot assembly floor. A greater threat to the Valley companies was unionization. During the seventies, this had not been much of a threat, first because of the general ineptitude of the local union organizers and then because the sustained boom kept workers not only happy but so mobile that a quorum could never be reached for a union vote. But booms don’t last. Recessions are also fairly safe times for companies fearing the threat of unions, because employees, worried about job security and a shortage of alternatives, are rarely interested in making waves.


The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, plutocrats, traveling salesman, union organizing, Works Progress Administration

Churchill rejected a total shutdown but agreed that factories should reconfigure their hours on that Sunday so that workers had time in the morning or evening to go to church. Which irked Beaverbrook no end. “We have already many interruptions to contend with,” he complained to Churchill, citing his usual tormentors: air raids, air-raid sirens, and Labor Minister Ernest Bevin, a former union organizer. “I hope very much that these troubles will not be reinforced by Providence.” But, he wrote, “since the workers in the munition factories should have the same opportunity to pray against the enemy as anyone else, perhaps the clergy could be brought to the works instead of taking the workers to the churches.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

From 1933 to 1937, organizing unions became easier—in spite of high unemployment—because of the solid swing of the political system in favor of the increasingly liberal Democrats. The federal government was no longer an anti-, but a pro-union force. The Wagner Act gave workers the right to engage in collective bargaining. A National Labor Relations Board monitored and greatly limited the ability of anti-union employers to punish union organizers and members. Employers in large mass-production industries learned to value the mediation between bosses and employees that unions could provide. And workers learned to value the above-market wages that unions could negotiate. Along with the 1930s rise and institutional entrenchment of the union movement, there came the great compression of America’s wages and salaries.


Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity by Torben Iversen, Philipp Rehm

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Big Tech, business cycle, centre right, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crony capitalism, data science, DeepMind, deindustrialization, full employment, George Akerlof, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, lockdown, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microbiome, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Robert Gordon, speech recognition, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, union organizing, vertical integration, working-age population

“Cheap Labor: The New Politics of ‘Bread and Roses’ in Industrial Democracies.” Perspectives on Politics 6(2): 279–97. Kjellberg, Anders. 2009. “The Swedish Ghent System and Trade Unions under Pressure.” Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research 15(3–4): 481–504. Kjellberg, Anders and Christian Lyhne Ibsen. 2016. “Attacks on Union Organizing: Reversible and Irreversible Changes to the Ghent-Systems in Sweden and Denmark.” In Den Danske Model Set Udefra - Komparative Perspektiver På Dansk Arbejdsmarkedsregulering : Et Festskrif t Til Professor Emeritus Jesper Due Og Og Professor Emeritus Jørgen Steen Madsen, eds. T. P. Larsen and A Ilsøe.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

A fellow pilot recalled McCarthy coaching himself aloud through each step of a final approach—“prop feathered . . . mixture full rich . . . airspeed check . . . okay, now we’ll do this”—only to realize that he had already landed and the plane was racing along the airstrip. But his life’s work was never in doubt. When he was eight years old, McCarthy decided that he wanted to be a scientist, spurred on by Gernsbackian how-to guides like Electricity for Boys. His mother was a suffragette and his father was a union organizer and a member of the Communist party; their idealism would infuse his hope for computers as facilitators of democracy at a time when many left-wingers had a visceral distrust of technology. In high school, McCarthy taught himself calculus from college textbooks. At fifteen, he enrolled at the California Institute of Technology.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Some of those people committed themselves to crazy and unbelievable positions with regard to the Soviet Union. But the sphere of their concern was primarily at home, and much of what they did was quite respectable, very admirable in fact, within the sphere of their primary concern. In defense of civil rights of blacks, for example, or in union organizing. We probably wouldn’t have the CIO without the courageous efforts of these organizers. But recognizing that there’s a degree of overgeneralization here, it still makes sense to identify some leading factors, putting aside important nuances. I think what I’ve said about the appeal of Stalinism is basically correct.


The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

And that was precisely the goal of this system. In good times, vessel owners, insurers, bankers, ship operators, fish buyers, flag registries, and even governments profit from rampant fish piracy on the high seas. In bad times, these actors were insulated from the liability and prying eyes of Interpol, union organizers, human rights advocates, and reporters. * * * · · · By mid-February, the chase had stretched into its seventh week. More than four hundred miles directly below South Africa, the Thunder sat high in the water and low on fuel in heavy seas of the Indian Ocean. Then, on February 16, officers on the bridge of the Bob Barker noticed tall flames on the back of the Thunder throwing off thick black smoke.


Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy, Scott Brick

anti-communist, battle of ideas, disinformation, diversified portfolio, false flag, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information retrieval, operational security, union organizing, urban renewal

And reporters also had good sources, in some areas as good as his own. "What does James think?" "It reminds both of us of something that happened in the 1930s." Ryan leaned back in the chair and relaxed. "The United Auto Workers. When they organized Ford, there was trouble. Big time. Ford even hired thugs to work the union organizers over. I remember seeing photos of—who was it?" Jack paused for a moment's thought. "Walter Reuther? Something like that. It was in Life magazine back then. The thugs were talking to him and a few of his guys—the first few pictures show them smiling at each other like men do right before the gloves come off—and then a brawl started.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

Batista’s Three Year Plan was so ambitious that skeptics dubbed it the three-hundred-year plan. In April 1938, he began granting small parcels of state lands to peasants. In 1939, he enacted national rent control and lowered mortgage rates. Increasingly popular, Batista moved to expand his base further, legalizing the Communist Party and removing restrictions on union organizing. Henceforth, trade union leadership would be dominated by members of the Cuban Communist Party, working closely with Batista. Historians often refer to these years as the Pax Batistiana. Batista had already nullified the opposition and made alliances with a sector of elite reformers. He knew the US embassy in Havana had his back.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The bill introduced in May 1977 would make it harder to do that by increasing back pay for fired workers to 150 percent of lost wages. It would expand the National Labor Relations Board from five to seven members in order to hack away at its backlog of nineteen thousand union-recognition elections. It would also require companies that forced workers to attend company anti-union meetings to give equal time to union organizers, and deny federal contracts to companies violating labor law—like J. P. Stevens, which enjoyed $3.4 million in business from the Defense Logistics Agency. Given the two-thirds Democratic majority in Congress and the first Democratic Oval Office occupant in eight years, labor could have asked for more—for instance, repeal of the provision in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act allowing states to pass “right to work” laws.

illegally fired See National Labor Relations Board annual reports, 1970–1978. In the first ten years Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 289. as Orrin Hatch Hatch column, Pacific News Service, June 15, 1978. 1970–78 period See National Labor Relations Board annual reports, 1970–1978. big strikes Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of the New Economic Divide (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). “common situs” Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, 134. “venereal disease” “Salute to Reagan,” WP, June 10, 1977. policy committee Joel Rogers and Thomas Ferguson, “Labor Law Reform and Its Enemies,” Nation, January 6, 1979.


pages: 934 words: 232,651

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

active measures, affirmative action, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, centre right, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, language of flowers, means of production, New Urbanism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Slavoj Žižek, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, work culture

In the winter of 1946, the Soviet authorities at Karlshorst also informed the brand-new German cultural administration—part of the German bureaucracy set up to enact Soviet policy—that artistic and cultural groups of all kinds, whether for children, young people, or adults, were illegal unless they were affiliated to “mass organizations” such as the Free German Youth, the official trade union organization, or the official cultural union, the Kulturbund: “Otherwise they cannot be controlled.” A German inspector sent out to gauge the situation of “associations” at this time discovered many such groups not aligned to mass organizations. She seemed particularly horrified by the large numbers of independent chess clubs.


pages: 1,057 words: 239,915

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze

anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, credit crunch, failed state, fear of failure, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, imperial preference, labour mobility, liberal world order, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, price stability, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Out of the anti-socialist and anti-Semitic agitation that followed there emerged the Liga Patriotica, which was to serve as the seedbed of the twentieth-century Argentinian right.1 Throughout 1919 and 1920, paramilitaries associated with the Liga collaborated with the army and police in breaking strikes and intimidating trade union organizers, defending Argentina against the spectral threat of international revolution. Tens of thousands of leftist suspects were arrested. From the cosmopolitan Argentinian capital the politics of counter-revolution spread south to the very end of the inhabited world. In the autumn of 1921 the notorious Tenth Cavalry regiment under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hector Varela arrived in Patagonia to put down an insurgency amongst farm workers on the gigantic sheep haciendas of the desolate southern tip of the continent.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

In November the Alliance of Free Democrats was founded as a political party, arising from the Network of Free Initiatives. Once obsolete pre-war parties – the Independent Smallholder Party (in November 1988) and the Social Democratic Party (in January 1989) – were resurrected. An independent trade union organization (though attracting only minority worker support) was established in December 1988. The foundation of a Christian Democratic People’s Party followed in March 1989. By then the ruling Communist Party had accepted – an important symbolic move – that the uprising of 1956 had represented a true struggle for independence, ‘a popular uprising against an oligarchic rule that had debased the nation’.


pages: 790 words: 253,035

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

CAA has played a major role in transforming the entertainment business, and media in general, and in so doing has helped weave the texture of our daily lives. Indeed, lift the curtains of pop culture anywhere on the planet and you are bound to find CAA. And this is its story. INTRODUCTION Hollywood’s first generation of movie moguls looked upon the growing importance of talent agents about as warmly as they’d embrace union organizing or taxes. At first—very first, before “the movies” were the nation’s dominant form of entertainment—agents worked with studio bosses, relieving them of such mounting procedural and housekeeping chores as payrolls, talent scouting, and the matching of available clients to similarly available film projects.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Escalating strikes and labor unrest in 1941 underlined the need for improved relations between labor and management, not to mention the international crisis that threatened to pull America in at any moment. But HBS wasn’t just playing nice with its fellow Americans at a time of impending war. Union organizing campaigns of the 1930s, combined with various labor-friendly aspects of the New Deal, had resulted in a marked increase in union power that wouldn’t reach its peak until the 1950s. Between 1934 and 1939, “union density” in the United States workforce had surged from 11.5 percent to 27.6 percent.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

There’s a dozen waiting when one drops out.”60 The inhuman pace of industrial production has been immortalized in cultural icons such as Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line in Modern Times and Lucille Ball in the chocolate factory in I Love Lucy. Workplaces began to change in the late 19th century as the first labor unions organized, journalists took up the cause, and government agencies started to collect data quantifying the human toll.61 Bettmann’s comment on the lethality of work on trains was based on more than just pictures: in the 1890s, the annual death rate for trainmen was an astonishing 852 per 100,000, almost one percent a year.


pages: 1,000 words: 247,974

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

In 1886, that same union secured a wide-ranging agreement to set the wages of New Bedford, Fall River, and Lawrence spinners on a “sliding scale” based on the price of cotton measured against the selling price of print cloth. In the fallout of the citywide 1904 strike, Fall River mills also accepted the demands of weavers’ unions for a sliding scale wage agreement. As early as the 1890s, the city’s skilled textile workers began taking an interest in national union organization, and over the next half a century Fall River workers joined or created various regional labor organizations.11 Moreover, Fall River’s cotton workers along with their New England counterparts succeeded in improving their wages and working conditions, at least in part because as citizens of the United States they enjoyed political influence.


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Quite a few had expected capitalism itself to collapse as a result of the chaos created by the financial traumas of the early 1890s. When this did not happen, and—at least in some regions—the economy was again on the up in the latter part of the decade, mainstream Social Democrats were pushed further toward trade union organizing and processes of collective bargaining. They could draw on the lessons workers had learned from the crisis: that only an effective union could resist casual dismissals and worsening working conditions when an economic downturn struck. Union membership skyrocketed in Germany, France, Italy, and Britain.


Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan; Richard Holbrooke; Casey Hampton

Albert Einstein, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, facts on the ground, financial independence, Ida Tarbell, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois

South Africa would then be a nice compact shape with a tidy border drawn across the tip of the continent.33 Australia was not moderate on anything. Its delegation was led by its prime minister, Billy Hughes, a scrawny dyspeptic who lived on tea and toast. A fighter on the Sydney docks, where he became a union organizer, and a veteran of the rough-and-tumble of Australian politics, Hughes made Australia’s policies in Paris virtually on his own. He was hot-tempered, idiosyncratic and deaf, both literally and figuratively, to arguments he did not want to hear. Among his own people, he usually listened only to Keith Murdoch, a young reporter whom he regarded as something of a son.


The Rough Guide to Chile by Melissa Graham, Andrew Benson

Atahualpa, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, company town, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, feminist movement, Francisco Pizarro, it's over 9,000, Murano, Venice glass, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, union organizing, women in the workforce

Although Chile had seen military intervention in government affairs on two occasions in the past, these had been the exception to a highly constitutional norm. Nothing in the country’s political history prepared its people for the brutality of this operation. In the days and weeks following the takeover, at least seven thousand people – journalists, politicians, socialists, trade union organizers and so on – were herded into the national football stadium, where many were executed, and still more were tortured. Curfews were imposed, the press was placed under the strict control of the junta, and military officers were sent in to take charge of factories, universities and other seats of socialist support.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

In a 2015 murder case, police used data from a “smart” utility meter, an iPhone 6s Plus, and audio files captured by an Amazon Echo device to identify a suspect.22 In 2014 data from a Fitbit wristband were used in a personal injury case, and in 2017 police used data from a pacemaker to charge a man with arson and insurance fraud.23 In the US, local law enforcement has joined the queue of institutions seeking access to instrumentarian power. Surveillance-as-a-service companies eagerly sell their wares to local police departments also determined to find a shortcut to certainty. One startup, Geofeedia, specializes in detailed location tracking of activists and protesters, such as Greenpeace members or union organizers, and the computation of individualized “threat scores” using data drawn from social media. Law-enforcement agencies have been among Geofeedia’s most prominent clients.24 When the Boston Police Department announced its interest in joining this roster in 2016, the city’s police commissioner described to the Boston Globe his belief in machine certainty as the antidote to social breakdown: “The attack… on the Ohio State University campus is just the latest illustration of why local law-enforcement authorities need every tool they can muster to stop terrorism and other violence before it starts.”25 An ACLU attorney countered that the government is using tech companies “to build massive dossiers on people” based on nothing more than their constitutionally protected speech.26 Another, more prominent surveillance-as-a-service company, Palantir, once touted by Bloomberg Businessweek as “the war on terror’s secret weapon,” was found to be in a secret collaboration with the New Orleans Police Department to test its “predictive policing” technology.


pages: 932 words: 307,785

State of Emergency: The Way We Were by Dominic Sandbrook

anti-communist, Apollo 13, Arthur Marwick, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Doomsday Book, edge city, estate planning, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, financial thriller, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, post-war consensus, sexual politics, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Winter of Discontent, young professional

But Benn’s efforts undoubtedly helped to keep the work-in on the front pages, and where he led, others on the left felt they had to follow. By August, support for the shipbuilders had reached proportions of which the government had never dreamed. John Lennon, never one to miss a bandwagon, sent a cheque of support, while on the 18th trade unions organized the biggest demonstration Scotland had seen since the war, leading some 70,000 people from Glasgow’s St George’s Square to Glasgow Green, with pipes and massed banners proclaiming the support of workers from Derby, Barrow, Blackpool and Wolverhampton. Benn, naturally, marched in the front row; later, he addressed the crowd, telling them that the ‘shop stewards were not trying to create a little pocket of revolution in a capitalist world but were trying to engage in a serious industrial and political campaign’, although the effect was rather spoiled when somebody threw a smoke bomb at him.46 On 11 August 1971, Heath returned to London weather-beaten, weary but jubilant after one of the proudest moments of his life, having captained the British team home in the 605-mile Fastnet race and secured the Admiral’s Cup.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Asked later to justify his actions, Gul replied: “Where the security concerns are overwhelming—and right from the beginning, Pakistan has been in the eye of the storm—these concerns become uppermost both in the minds of the establishment and the nation. And that is why, again and again, the nation veers to the support of the army—even if the army acts against the political institutions.”43 After Zia’s death, the Beg-Gul union organized late-night foreign-policy brainstorming sessions with like-minded generals. The discussions dwelled on Pakistan’s geostrategic direction in the world. A Pakistani brigadier attending the discussions described the participants as “pseudo-intellectuals”44 with romantic notions of global geopolitics.


pages: 1,088 words: 297,362

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

The first Sex Pistols gig took place at the college on 6 November 1975 in front of fewer than twenty people, with Johnny Rotten, wearing baggy pin-stripes held up with braces and a ripped Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words ‘I hate’ scrawled over it, menacingly prowling the stage impersonating Ian Dury. The students’ union organizers failed to appreciate the Pistols’ performance as a defining point in rock history and pulled the plug after five numbers. • Gilbert and George in Spitalfields, p. 288. Foyle’s, Nos. 113–117 London’s best-known yet most eccentrically run bookshop was opened by William and Gilbert Foyle in 1904 in Islington and moved in 1929 to Charing Cross Road.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

History When the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established by England in 1630, Boston became its capital. It’s a city of firsts: Boston Latin School, the first public school in the USA, was founded in 1635, followed a year later by Harvard, the nation’s first university. The first newspaper in the colonies was printed here in 1704, America’s first labor union organized here in 1795 and the country’s first subway system opened in Boston in 1897. Not only were the first battles of the American Revolution fought here, but Boston was also home to the first African American regiment to fight in the US Civil War. Waves of immigrants, especially Irish in the mid-18th century and Italians in the early 20th, have infused the city with European influences.


The Rough Guide to Brazil by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, bike sharing, car-free, clean water, Day of the Dead, digital nomad, haute cuisine, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, land tenure, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Scientific racism, sexual politics, spice trade, Stephen Fry, sustainable-tourism, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, éminence grise

NUMBERS 1 Um, Uma 2 Dois, Duas 3 Três 4 Quatro 5 Cinco 6 Seis 7 Sete 8 Oito 9 Nove 10 Dez 11 Onze 12 Doze 13 Treze 14 Quatorze 15 Quinze 16 Dezesseis 17 Dezessete 18 Dezoito 19 Dezenove 20 Vinte 21 Vinte e um 30 Trinta 40 Quarenta 50 Cinquenta 60 Sesenta 70 Setenta 80 Oitenta 90 Noventa 100 Cem 200 Duzentos 300 Trezentos 500 Quinhentos 1000 Mil 2000 Dois mil 5000 Cinco mil Million/s Milhão/milhões DAYS AND MONTHS Monday Segunda-feira (or Segunda) Tuesday Terça-feira (or Terça) Wednesday Quarta-Feira (or Quarta) Thursday Quinta-feira (or Quinta) Friday Sexta-feira (or Sexta) Saturday Sábado Sunday Domingo January Janeiro February Fevereiro March Março April Abril May Maio June Junho July Julho August Agosto September Setembro October Outubro November Novembro December Dezembro A Brazilian menu reader BASICS Açúcar Sugar Alho e óleo Garlic and olive-oil sauce Almoço Lunch Arroz Rice Azeite Olive oil Café colonial High tea Café de manhã Breakfast Cardápio Menu Carne Meat Colher Spoon Conta/Nota Bill Copo Glass Entrada Hors d’oeuvre Faca Knife Farinha Dried manioc flour Garçom Waiter Garfo Fork Garrafa Bottle Jantar Dinner, to have dinner Legumes/Verduras Vegetables Manteiga Butter Mariscos Seafood Molho Sauce Ovos Eggs Pão Bread Peixe Fish Pimenta Pepper Prato Plate Queijo Cheese Sal Salt Sobremesa Dessert Sopa/Caldo Soup Sorvete Ice cream Taxa de serviço Service charge Tucupi Fermented manioc and chicory sauce used in Amazonian cuisine COOKING TERMS Assado Roasted Bem gelado Well chilled Churrasco Barbecue Cozido Boiled, Steamed Cozinhar To cook Grelhado Grilled Mal passado/Bem passado Rare/Well done (Meat) Médio Medium grilled Milanesa Breaded Na chapa/Na brasa Charcoal grilled SEAFOOD (FRUTOS DO MAR) Acarajé Fried bean cake stuffed with vatapá (see below) Agulha Needle fish Atum Tuna Camarão Prawn/Shrimp Caranguejo Large crab Filhote Amazon river fish Lagosta Lobster Lula Squid Mariscos Shellfish Moqueca Seafood stewed in palm oil and coconut sauce Ostra Oyster Pescada Seafood stew, or hake Pirarucu Amazon river fish Pitu Crayfish Polvo Octopus Siri Small crab Sururu A type of mussel Vatapá Bahian shrimp dish, cooked with palm oil, skinned tomato and coconut milk, served with fresh coriander and hot peppers MEAT AND POULTRY (CARNE E AVES) Bife Steak Bife a cavalo Steak with egg and farinha Cabrito Kid Carne de porco Pork Carneiro Lamb Costela Ribs Costeleta Chop Feijoada Black bean, pork and sausage stew Fígado Liver Frango Chicken Leitão Suckling pig Lingüíça Sausage Pato Duck Peru Turkey Peito Breast Perna Leg Picadinha Stew Salsicha Hot dog Veado Venison Vitela Veal FRUIT (FRUTAS) Abacate Avocado Abacaxi Pineapple Ameixa Plum, Prune Caju Cashew fruit Carambola Star fruit Cerejas Cherries Côco Coconut Fruta do conde Custard apple (also ata) Goiaba Guava Graviola Soursop Laranja Orange Limão Lime Maçã Apple Mamão Papaya Manga Mango Maracujá Passion fruit Melancia Watermelon Melão Melon Morango Strawberry Pera Pear Pêssego Peach Uvas Grapes VEGETABLES AND SPICES (LEGUMES E TEMPEROS) Alface Lettuce Alho Garlic Arroz e feijão Rice and beans Azeitonas Olives Batatas Potatoes Canela Cinnamon Cebola Onion Cenoura Carrot Cheiro verde Fresh coriander/cilantro Coentro Parsley Cravo Clove Dendê Palm oil Ervilhas Peas Espinafre Spinach Macaxeira Roasted manioc Malagueta Very hot pepper, looks like red or yellow cherry Mandioca Manioc/cassava/yuca Milho Corn Palmito Palm heart Pepinho Cucumber Repolho Cabbage Tomate Tomato DRINKS Água mineral Mineral water Batida Fresh fruit juice with cachaça Cachaça Sugar-cane rum Café com leite Coffee with hot milk Cafézinho Small black coffee Caipirinha Rum and lime cocktail Cerveja Bottled beer Chopp Draught beer Com gás/Sem gás Sparkling/Still Suco Fruit juice Vinho Wine Vitamina Fruit juice made with milk < Back to Contexts Glossary Agreste In the Northeast, the intermediate zone between the coast and the sertão Aldeia Originally a mission where indigenous peoples were converted, now any isolated hamlet Alfândega Customs Artesanato Craft goods Azulejo Decorative glazed tiling Baile funk Afro-Brazilian hip-hop rhythms Bairro Neighbourhood within town or city Bandeirante Member of a group that marched under a bandeira (banner or flag) in early missions to open up the interior; Brazilian conquistador Barraca Beach hut; in resorts it usually means a bar or restaurant on the beach Batucada Literally, a drumming session – music-making in general, especially impromptu Bolsa Ferry Bosque Wood Bossa nova Literally “new trend”; a jazz form that evolved from samba Caatinga Scrub vegetation of the interior of the Northeast Caboclo A person of mixed indigenous Brazilian and European heritage Candomblé African-Brazilian religion Cangaceiro Outlaws from the interior of the Northeast who flourished in the early twentieth century; the most famous was Lampião Capoeira African-Brazilian martial art/dance form Carimbó Music and dance style from the north Carioca Someone or something from Rio de Janeiro Cerrado Scrubland Choro Musical style, largely instrumental Correio Postal service/post office Correio electrónico Email CUT/CGT Brazilian trades union organizations Engenho Sugar mill or plantation Ex voto Offering of thanks to a saint for intercession Favela Shantytown, slum Fazenda Country estate, ranch house Feira Country market Ferroviária Train station Forró Dance and type of music from the Northeast Frescão Air-conditioned bus Frevo Frenetic musical style and dance from Recife FUNAI Government organization intended to protect the interests of indigenous Brazilians; seriously underfunded and with a history of corruption Garimpeiro Prospector or miner Gaúcho Person or thing from Rio Grande do Sul; also southern cowboy Gringo/a Foreigner, Westerner (not derogatory) Ibama Government organization for preservation of the environment; runs national parks and nature reserves Iemanjá Goddess of the sea in candomblé Jangada Raft Largo Small square Latifúndios Large agricultural estates Leito Luxury express bus Literatura de cordel Literally “string literature” – printed ballads, most common in the Northeast but also found elsewhere, named after the string they are suspended from in country markets Litoral Coast, coastal zone Louro/a Fair-haired/blonde – Westerners in general Macumba African-Brazilian religion, usually thought of as more authentically “African” than candomblé; most common in the North Marginal Petty thief, outlaw Mata Jungle, remote interior Mata Atlântica Atlantic forest – the native jungle that once covered most of coastal Brazil and its immediate hinterland, but is now restricted to the South Mineiro Person or thing from Minas Gerais Mirante Viewing point MPB Música Popular Brasileira, common shorthand for Brazilian music Nordeste Northeastern Brazil Nordestino/a Inhabitant thereof Paulista Person or thing from São Paulo state Paulistano Inhabitant of the city of São Paulo Pelourinho Pillory or whipping post, common in colonial town squares Planalto Central Vast interior tablelands of central Brazil Posto Highway service station, often with basic accommodation popular with truckers Pousada Inn Praça Square Praia Beach Quebrado Out of order Selva Jungle Senzala Slave quarters Sertanejo Inhabitant of sertão Sertão Arid, drought-ridden interior of the Northeast Sesmaria Royal Portuguese land grant to early settlers Sobrado Two-storey colonial mansion Umbanda African-Brazilian religion especially common in urban areas of the South and Southeast Vaqueiro Cowboy in the North Visto Visa < Back to Contexts Small print and index Small print About the authors Map symbols A ROUGH GUIDE TO ROUGH GUIDES Published in 1982, the first Rough Guide – to Greece – was a student scheme that became a publishing phenomenon.


The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

The rumours probably referred to the increase in intelligence liaison with continental police prompted by the Great Exhibition.21 During 1851, twenty years ahead of German political unification, the main German states and Austria set up a police union to exchange intelligence and coordinate operations against political subversion. For the next fifteen years the union organized annual meetings, exchanged confiscated subversive documents, and shared intelligence on wanted revolutionaries, political parties with democratic tendencies, religious groups and the press.22 According to Wilhelm Hirsch, a Hamburg-born Prussian police spy in London, surveillance of German and Austrian émigrés during the 1851 Exhibition was coordinated on the spot by ‘a police triumvirate’: Stieber from Prussia, Herr Kubesch from Austria and Police Commissioner Huntel from Bremen.23 Instead of discovering signs of revolutionary disorder in the Crystal Palace, they witnessed instead a triumphant display of British capitalism and national pride.


pages: 1,744 words: 458,385

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

Like others familiar with Comintern communications and Soviet intercepts, Kell was not surprised by the letter’s contents, believing it ‘contained nothing new or different from the [known] intentions and propaganda of the USSR’.48 He had seen similar statements in authentic intercepted correspondence from Comintern to the CPGB and the National Minority Movement (the Communist-led trade union organization),49 and is likely – at least initially – to have had no difficulty in accepting SIS’s assurance that the Zinoviev letter was genuine. The assurance, however, should never have been given. Outrageously, Desmond Morton of SIS told Sir Eyre Crowe, PUS at the Foreign Office, that one of Sir George Makgill’s agents, ‘Jim Finney’,50 who had penetrated the CPGB, had reported that a recent meeting of the Party Central Committee had considered a letter from Moscow whose instructions corresponded to those in the Zinoviev letter.


pages: 1,497 words: 492,782

The Complete Novels Of George Orwell by George Orwell

British Empire, fixed income, gentleman farmer, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, pneumatic tube, the market place, traveling salesman, union organizing, white flight

But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government.


pages: 1,799 words: 532,462

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Sometimes he would read the dispatches aloud, and when he reached such codewords as HOSANNA and HUSBAND, both of which meant Jefferson Davis in one cipher, or HUNTER and HAPPY, both meaning Robert E. Lee, he would invariably translate them as “Jeffy D” or “Bobby Lee.” War is hell, Sherman said, but he didn’t know Confederate cryptography. In contrast to the close-knit Union organization, the South apparently extended the states’ rights principle into the realm of cryptography and let each commanding officer choose his own codes and ciphers. Thus, just before the Battle of Shiloh, on April 6, 1862, that excellent officer but indifferent cryptographer, General Albert S. Johnston, agreed with his second-in-command, General Pierre Beauregard, upon a Caesar substitution for military use!


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

History When the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established by England in 1630, Boston became its capital. It’s a city of firsts: Boston Latin School, the first public school in the USA, was founded in 1635, followed a year later by Harvard, the nation’s first university. The first newspaper in the colonies was printed here in 1704, America’s first labor union organized here in 1795 and the country’s first subway system opened in Boston in 1897. Not only were the first battles of the American Revolution fought here, but Boston was also home to the first African American regiment to fight in the US Civil War. Waves of immigrants, especially Irish in the mid-18th century and Italians in the early 20th, have infused the city with European influences.