Workers at Play

Workers at Play
Author: Stephen G. Jones
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0429830904

First published in 1986. This book explores developments in the cinema, sport, holidays, gambling, drinking and many more recreational activities, and situates working-class leisure within the determining economic and social context. In particular, the inventiveness of working people ‘at play’ is highlighted. Drawing on an extensive range of source material, the book has a wide general appeal, and will be useful to those professionally concerned with leisure, as well as teachers and students of social history, and all those interested in the patterns of working-class life in the past.

Workers and Thieves

Workers and Thieves
Author: Joel Beinin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2015-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804798648

Since the 1990s, the Middle East has experienced an upsurge of wildcat strikes, sit-ins, and workers' demonstrations. Well before people gathered in Tahrir Square to demand the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, workers had formed one of the largest oppositional movements to authoritarian rule in Egypt. In Tunisia, years prior to the 2011 Arab uprisings, the unemployed chanted in protest, "A job is a right, you pack of thieves!" Despite this history, most observers have failed to acknowledge the importance of workers in the social ferment preceding the removal of Egyptian and Tunisian autocrats and in the political realignments after their demise. In Workers and Thieves, Joel Beinin corrects this by surveying the efforts and impacts of the workers' movements in Egypt and Tunisia since the 1970s. He argues that the 2011 uprisings in these countries—and, importantly, their vastly different outcomes—are best understood within the context of these repeated mobilizations of workers and the unemployed over recent decades.

Free Choice for Workers

Free Choice for Workers
Author: George C. Leef
Publisher: Jameson Books (IL)
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

This is a captivating chronicle of the fifty-year "David-Goliath" struggle between the bosses of Big Labor and Americans opposed to their coercive power.Few Americans realize their freedom to say "no" to compulsory unionism is largely the result of the valiant efforts of the National Right to Work Committee and its Legal Defense Foundation. Big business and the Republican Party have usually avoided the battle, leaving only Right to Work and its hundreds of thousands of grass roots supporters to defend employee freedom to get or keep their jobs without being forced to pay dues or join a union.Leef's narrative covers the New Deal legislation that gave Big Labor its initial monopoly power, and then the inspiring, decades-long struggle in Washington and the states to reduce the abusive power of labor bosses.The book also teaches a crucial lesson for those involved in public policy wars, regardless of their political philosophy -- that principled and dedicated idealists can prevail against strong special interest groups if they fight for a just cause.

Staged Action

Staged Action
Author: Lee Papa
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2009
Genre: American drama
ISBN: 9780801475238

This is an anthology of six plays from the workers’ theatre movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The book explains the movement and traces its influence on American drama, from David Mamet and August Wilson to the work of Anna Deavere Smith and Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theatre. The six selections also include have explanations providing historical, cultural, and literary context. Processional by John Howard Lawson and Upton Sinclair's Singing Jailbirds reflect the large-scale arrests of strikers and union organizers during and after World War I. Two other plays were produced at labor colleges. Bonchi Friedman's 1926 play The Miners combines expressionism and realism in a drama about a violent strike that has an unusual female union leader as its hero. In Mill Shadows by Tom Tippett, a town changes from a simple industrial village into a place of rebellion and eventually a union community. The last two plays are representative of those produced by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In contrast to Irwin Swerdlow's one-act agitprop In Union There Is Strength, the musical revue Pins and Needles-until Oklahoma the longest-running musical on Broadway-is a collection of satirical sketches that parodies workers' theatre while simultaneously taking on serious issues like the treatment of blue- and white-collar workers and the rise of fascism overseas.

Workers at War

Workers at War
Author: Joshua H. Howard
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2004
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780804748964

This book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in the wartime capital, Chongqing. The author argues that China's arsenal workers participated in three interlocked conflicts between 1937 and 1953: a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war. The work adds to the scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has previously focused primarily on rural China, showing how workers’ alienation from the military officers directing the arsenals eroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime and how the Communists mobilized working-class support in Chongqing. Moreover, in emphasizing the urban, working-class, and nationalist components of the 1949 revolution, the author demonstrates the multiple sources of workers’ identities and thus challenges previous studies that have exclusively stressed workers’ particularistic or regional identities.

What Workers Want

What Workers Want
Author: Richard Barry Freeman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780801485633

How would a typical American workplace be structured if the employees could design it? According to Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers, it would be an organization run jointly by employees and their supervisors, one where disputes between labor and management would be resolved through independent arbitration. Their groundbreaking book--based on the most extensive workplace survey of the last twenty years--provides a comprehensive account of employees? attitudes about participation, representation, and regulation on the job. More than anything, the authors find, workers want their voices to be heard. They desire a greater role in the workplace (but doubt management's willingness to share power), and have strong ideas about how their involvement could improve not just their lot but also their companies? fortunes. Many nonunion workers favor the formation of unions, and virtually all union workers strongly support their union. Most employees support the creation of labor-management committees--to which workers would elect their representatives--to run the organization and settle conflicts. And, contrary to commonly held assumptions, workers (including those in unions and those wishing to be) do not like dissension with their supervisors; they overwhelmingly prefer cooperative relations. The authors also report on the views of the supervisors, who confirm their wish to retain exclusive authority to make decisions, but demonstrate a willingness to listen more actively to labor's concerns by giving employees a more substantial voice on advisory committees. Freeman and Rogers present their findings within a broader picture of the evolving structure of labor and management in the United States. Their detailed description of their survey--how it was constructed and conducted--provides a model for workplace research in our time. And the results allow the voices of employees to be heard on matters profoundly affecting their jobs, their lives, and, ultimately, the state of the American economy.

We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative

We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative
Author: George J. Borjas
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0393249026

From "America’s leading immigration economist" (The Wall Street Journal), a refreshingly level-headed exploration of the effects of immigration. We are a nation of immigrants, and we have always been concerned about immigration. As early as 1645, the Massachusetts Bay Colony began to prohibit the entry of "paupers." Today, however, the notion that immigration is universally beneficial has become pervasive. To many modern economists, immigrants are a trove of much-needed workers who can fill predetermined slots along the proverbial assembly line. But this view of immigration’s impact is overly simplified, explains George J. Borjas, a Cuban-American, Harvard labor economist. Immigrants are more than just workers—they’re people who have lives outside of the factory gates and who may or may not fit the ideal of the country to which they’ve come to live and work. Like the rest of us, they’re protected by social insurance programs, and the choices they make are affected by their social environments. In We Wanted Workers, Borjas pulls back the curtain of political bluster to show that, in the grand scheme, immigration has not affected the average American all that much. But it has created winners and losers. The losers tend to be nonmigrant workers who compete for the same jobs as immigrants. And somebody’s lower wage is somebody else’s higher profit, so those who employ immigrants benefit handsomely. In the end, immigration is mainly just another government redistribution program. "I am an immigrant," writes Borjas, "and yet I do not buy into the notion that immigration is universally beneficial…But I still feel that it is a good thing to give some of the poor and huddled masses, people who face so many hardships, a chance to experience the incredible opportunities that our exceptional country has to offer." Whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent, We Wanted Workers is essential reading for anyone interested in the issue of immigration in America today.

Making Workers

Making Workers
Author: Katharyne Mitchell
Publisher: Radical Geography
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Capitalism and education
ISBN: 9780745399850

As globalisation transforms the organisation of society, so too is its impact felt in the classroom. Katharyne Mitchell argues that schools are spaces in which neoliberal practices are brought to bear on the lives of children. Education's narratives, actors and institutions play a pivotal role in the social and political formation of youth as workers in a capitalist economy.Mitchell looks at the formation of student identity and allegiance -as well as spaces of resistance. She investigates the transition to educational narratives emphasising flexibility and strategic global entrepreneurialism and examines the role of education in a broader political project of producing new generations of economically insecure but compliant workers.Scrutinising the impact of an influx of new actors, practices and policies, Mitchell argues that public education is the latest institution to embrace the neoliberal logic of 'choice' - pertaining to schools, faculty, and curricula - that, if unchallenged, will lead to further incursions of the market and increased socioeconomic inequality.

The Rise of the Frontline Workers

The Rise of the Frontline Workers
Author: Cristian Grossmann
Publisher:
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre:
ISBN:

2.7 billion of the world's workforce are frontline workers - this book explains how business leaders can transform their organization by making frontline workers more effective, efficient, motivated, and happier in their work."An essential business book for senior management in retail, manufacturing, construction, hospitality, or indeed any industry that employs large numbers of frontline workers." Given that 80% of the world's workforce is employed on the frontline, why have organizations not invested in the mobile tools that will make those workers more effective, efficient, motivated, and happier in their work? Desk-based workers have been provided with such tools, why not their frontline counterparts?These are the questions that Cristian Grossmann addresses in his new book, The Rise of the Frontline Workers, in which he outlines why it is so important for businesses to digitalize their frontline workforce and explains how organizations should best approach doing so.Cristian is a tech entrepreneur whose company Beekeeper has raised more than $80M in funding and supplies its employee communications app to some of the world's biggest and best-known organizations, including London Heathrow Airport, Domino's Pizza, and Hilton Hotels. Cristian, a former frontline worker himself, has an extensive understanding of what technology is required to make the frontline workforce more effective and describes why frontline workers need tools and solutions that are designed specifically for them, not a patched-up version of something that works for desk-based workers.The Rise of the Frontline Workers explores how frontline workers are essential to the smooth running of society. The events of 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic have proved that beyond any doubt. Yet for many employers, frontline workers and their needs are overlooked, time and time again. During the various lockdowns of 2020, frontline workers rarely had the option of working from home and continued to work on the frontline, often at personal risk to themselves due to a lack of PPE.This ignoring of frontline worker needs is not new and dates back centuries. But things are changing. Covid-19 has accelerated trends that had been building for years. People were already using smartphones in massive numbers and reaching frontline workers via their smartphones has become a mission-critical objective for many organizations. The on-going rise of mobile technology and changing perceptions of how frontline workers are valued have combined to create a perfect storm in which the needs of the frontline workforce are finally being addressed. Providing frontline workers with the tools to communicate with, to give them access to the information that will keep them safe at work, and to ensure they feel valued has become one of the biggest priorities for businesses now.By the end of The Rise of the Frontline Workesr, you will have gained a greater understanding of the perfect storm that has gathered to make digitalization of frontline workers so important, learn from companies that have already done so, and be ready to start your own frontline worker digitalization projects. Organizations that take the needs of 80% of their workforce seriously by providing them with the right digital tools for the job will survive and indeed thrive in the future. Those that continue to ignore the needs of the frontline workforce will head in the opposite direction. This book makes it clear why you should choose the former option.