Taking the High Road

Taking the High Road

Author: David B Reynolds

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 1315291479

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This book presents a vision for farreaching economic change in America connected to practical grassroots steps. It points to an economic system in which corporate success merges with the long-term welfare of the workers and the general population. The author examines the continued reality of social democracy in Europe and what lessons can be learned for the U.S. He demonstrates how progressive economic change is already being fought for by labor and community groups throughout America in such efforts as the Living Wage Movement and the emerging battle against sprawl. And he provides a wealth of concrete examples, tools, and ideas that everyone can use to organize for economic and social justice in their own communities.


Taking On the Big Boys

Taking On the Big Boys

Author: Ellen Bravo

Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

Published: 2009-05-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1558616241

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A manifesto for the workplace feminist that moved Oscar winner Jane Fonda to exclaim “Please, please, please. All working women must read this book!” Enough about “breaking the glass ceiling.” Here are blueprints for a redesign of the entire building, ground up, to benefit women and men—as well as the bottom line. In Taking on the Big Boys, longtime labor activist Ellen Bravo explores workplace environments in both business and government. She recounts women’s testimonies from offices, assembly lines, hospitals, and schools, unmasking the patronizing, trivializing, and minimizing tactics employed by “the big boys” and their surrogates, such as portraying feminism as women against men, and dismissing demands for pay equity, family leave, and flex time as outrageous. Also included are practical tips on everything from dealing with a sexual harasser to getting family members to share chores—and build equal relationships. In this “smart, kind, funny, and very effective” Gold Medal Winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award for Women’s Issues, Bravo argues for feminism as a system of beliefs, laws, and practices that value women and work associated with women, while detailing activist strategies to achieve a society where everybody—women and men—reach their potential (Gloria Steinem, feminist icon).


Organizing at the Margins

Organizing at the Margins

Author: Jennifer Jihye Chun

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-08-11

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0801457211

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The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.


From Widgets to Digits

From Widgets to Digits

Author: Katherine V. W. Stone

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-07-26

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780521535991

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From Widgits to Digits is about the changing nature of the employment relationship and its implications for labor and employment law. For most of the twentieth century, employers fostered long-term employment relationships through the use of implicit promises of job security, well-defined hierarchical job ladders, and longevity-based wage and benefit schemes. Today's employers no longer value longevity or seek to encourage long-term attachment between the employee and the firm. Instead employers seek flexibility in their employment relationships. As a result, employees now operate as free agents in a boundaryless workplace, in which they move across departmental lines within firms, and across firm borders, throughout their working lives. Today's challenge is to find a means to provide workers with continuity in wages, on-going training opportunities, sustainable and transferable skills, unambiguous ownership of their human capital, portable benefits, and an infrastructure of support structures to enable them to weather career transitions.


Regulating Labour in the Wake of Globalisation

Regulating Labour in the Wake of Globalisation

Author: Brian Bercusson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2008-01-10

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1847314066

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In recent decades, the prevailing response to the problem of unacceptable labour market outcomes in both Europe and North America - national regulation of labour standards and labour relations, coupled with collective bargaining - has come under increasing pressure from the economic and technological forces associated with globalisation. As those forces have shifted power away from national governments and labour unions and toward capital, the appropriate institutional locus of labour regulation has become hotly contested. There have been efforts to move the locus of regulation downward to smaller units of governance, including firms themselves, upward to larger units such as regional federations and international organizations, and outward to non-governmental organizations and civil society. In this volume, labour relations scholars from North America and Europe examine the efficacy of these emerging forms of labour regulation, their democratic legitimacy, the goals and values underlying them, and the appropriate direction of reform.


Raise the Floor

Raise the Floor

Author: Holly Sklar

Publisher: South End Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780896086838

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Raise the Floor shows why so many hardworking Americans can't make ends meet.


Sisterhood Is Forever

Sisterhood Is Forever

Author: Robin Morgan

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 642

ISBN-13: 1416595767

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Thirty years after Robin Morgan's groundbreaking anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful -- named by The American Librarians' Association one of "The 100 Most Influential Books of the Twentieth Century" -- comes this landmark new collection for the twenty-first century. Sisterhood Is Forever -- with over 60 original essays Morgan commissioned from well-known feminist leaders plus energetic Gen X and Y activists -- is a composite mural of the female experience in America: where we've been, where we are, where we're going. The stunning scope of topics ranges from reproductive, health, and environmental issues to workplace inequities and the economics of women's unpaid labor; from globalization to the politics of aging; from cyberspace, violence against women, and electoral politics to spirituality, the law, the media, and academia. The deliberately audacious mix of contributors spans different generations, races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences: CEOs, housewives, rock stars, farmers, scientists, prostituted women, politicians, women in prison, firefighters, disability activists, artists, flight attendants, an army general, an astronaut, an anchorwoman, even a pair of teens who edit a girls' magazine. Each article celebrates the writer's personal voice -- her humor, passion, anger, and the integrity of her perspective -- while offering the latest data on women's status, political analysis, new "how-to" tools for activism, and visionary yet practical strategies for the future -- strategies needed now more than ever. Robin Morgan's own contributions are everything her readers expect: prophetic, powerfully argued, unsentimentally lyrical. From her introduction: "The book you hold in your hands is a tool for the future -- a future also in your hands." • Edna Acosta-Belén • Carol J. Adams • Margot Adler • Natalie Angier • Ellen Appel-Bronstein • Mary Baird • Brenda Berkman • Christine E. Bose • Kathy Boudin • Ellen Bravo • Vednita Carter • Wendy Chavkin • Kimberlé Crenshaw • Gail Dines • Paula DiPerna • Helen Drusine • Andrea Dworkin • Eve Ensler • Barbara Findlen • Mary Foley • Patricia Friend • Theresa Funiciello • Carol Gilligan • Sara K. Gould • Ana Grossman The Guerrilla Girls • Beverly Guy-Sheftall • Kathleen Hanna • Laura Hershey • Anita Hill • Florence Howe • Donna M. Hughes • Karla Jay • Mae C. Jemison • Carol Jenkins • Claudia J. Kennedy • Alice Kessler-Harris Clara Sue Kidwell • Frances Kissling • Sandy Lerner • Suzanne Braun Levine • Barbara Macdonald • Catharine A. MacKinnon Jane Roland Martin • Debra Michals • Robin Morgan Jessica Neuwirth • Judy Norsigian • Eleanor Holmes Norton • Grace Paley • Emma Peters-Axtell Cynthia Rich Amy Richards • Cecile Richards Carolyn Sachs • Marianne Schnall • Pat Schroeder • Patricia Silverthorn • Eleanor Smeal Roslyn D. Smith Gloria Steinem Mary Thom • Jasmine Victoria • Faye Wattleton • Marie Wilson • Helen Zia


Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses

Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses

Author: Vijay Prashad

Publisher: South End Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780896086890

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In this short but powerful book of interlinked essays, noted cultural critic Vijay Prashad examines the contradictions of the American economy. Prashad assesses a range of related issues: the oft-vaunted US economy, propped up by the rising debt of poor and middle-class workers; welfare policies that punish those attempting to escape the grip of debt and poverty; and a prison industry that regulates and houses the unemployed, as well as a reserve army of laborers. In Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses, Prashad argues that the advent of mass production and advertising has converted citizens into consumers whose desires are captured by the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." Yet, as Prashad so persuasively demonstrates, keeping up with the Joneses is a trap: Americans have gone into massive consumer debt, with the poorest forty percent of the public borrowing money to compensate for stagnant incomes, not to spend on luxuries. Only the richest twenty percent borrow money to invest in stocks. Not surprisingly, in the last few years, income and wealth differentials have risen to record highs. By making crystal-clear connections between the economy, welfare reform and the profit-driven prison industrial complex, Prashad offers a vision for a sustainable and vital anti-imperialist movement. Vijay Prashad is Associate Professor and Director of International Studies, Trinity College. He is the author of several books including Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, Fat Cats and Running Dogs and The Karma of Brown Folk. Each was included in the Village Voice’s "25 Best Books of the Year" list.