How a Blog Held Off the Most Powerful Union in America

How a Blog Held Off the Most Powerful Union in America
Author: Paul F. Levy
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-04-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9781482730777

The decline in private sector unions in America is well documented, but some unions have bucked this trend, most notably the 2.1 million member Service Employees International Union. Its former president liked to say: "We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn't work, we try the persuasion of power." The targets of SEIU's corporate campaigns find themselves on the defensive and, tied to traditional public responses, are often flummoxed by the intensity and thoroughness of the SEIU's efforts. There is, however, a new arrow in the quiver that can be used by firms that are being attacked in a corporate campaign. Social media offers an effective remedy, if used early, thoughtfully, and decisively. This book tells the story of one such counter-campaign, a story of how a blog held off the most powerful union in America. With a foreword by Professor David P. Boyd, D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University "What a fascinating story! This is a powerful lesson in winning a battle of perception with the modern tools of transparency and internet speed." Roni Zeiger MD, CEO Smart Patients "Corporate campaigns by unions seek to bypass secret ballot elections that are provided for workers under current law. It was the genius of Paul Levy to capitalize on that anti-democratic deficiency in the union's approach by shining the full light of exposure on this tactic. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants" and Paul's use of social media and his blog was just the disinfectant needed to show a curious public that SEIU's campaign against Beth Israel Deaconess was no public service, but a frequently outrageous effort at self-promotion and union organizing without having to do the actual hard work of persuading employees to vote that a union was truly in the workers' interest." Kenneth C. Robbins, JD, President, Illinois Hospital Association (1983-2009) "Paul Levy, an innovative, caring, thoughtful, and strategic hospital CEO, writes convincingly how he used a blog, a low cost vehicle, to help counter a well-financed union corporate campaign that sought a neutrality agreement and card check. This fascinating story deserves to be read, it offers lots of insights and useful lessons." Fred K. Foulkes, Professor of Organizational Behavior, Boston University "Just as we have seen Arab Spring erupt from chaos because of the use of new forms of social media, and Ai Weiwei thwart the Chinese government with his use of the internet to spread his freedom message, Paul Levy's effective use of the blogosphere to frame and advance his side of a union-management conflict illustrates how leaders can use social media effectively in a modern era of health care and business. "Levy artfully tells the story of getting his hospital's message out without having a war chest to spend on public relations. His persistent and effective use of social media evened the playing field and allowed him to keep diverse audiences informed and engaged." Harris A. Berman, M.D., Boston

Legendary Locals of Newton

Legendary Locals of Newton
Author: Gail Spector
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 146710146X

Newton has more than enough legendary locals to fill volumes of books. Endless are the stories about men, women, and young people who dedicated, or still dedicate, countless hours of their lives in order to make Newton and the world a better place. Newton has been a launching ground for award-winning authors, Nobel Prize winners, Olympic medalists, and Hollywood stars. Some of Boston's best athletes have chosen to make "the Garden City" their home. In the pages of this book, readers will learn about Newton's first mayor, James Hyde, who never lost an election in more than 50 times on the ballot; Rev. Edmond Kelley, the first pastor at Myrtle Baptist Church and a former slave; Leonard Zakim, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League who dedicated his life to fighting prejudice and civil rights violations; Louise Bruyn, who walked from Newton to Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War; Shirley Lewis, known as the "regal queen of the blues"; and Ted Williams, regarded as baseball's greatest hitter, who lived in Newton Upper Falls.

Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981

Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981
Author: Philip S. Foner
Publisher:
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2018-01-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781608467877

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of Black workers' contribution to the American labor movement.

Beyond the Fields

Beyond the Fields
Author: Randy Shaw
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2008
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520268040

Much has been written about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers' heyday in the 1960s and '70s, but the story of their profound, ongoing influence on 21st century social justice movements has until now been left untold. This book unearths this legacy.

Break It Up

Break It Up
Author: Richard Kreitner
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780316510578

From journalist and historian Richard Kreitner, a "powerful revisionist account"of the most persistent idea in American history: these supposedly United States should be broken up (Eric Foner). The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name--and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn't limited to the South or the nineteenth century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away. With a scholar's command and a journalist's curiosity, Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the thirteen colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town's petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil. From the "cold civil war" that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age.

Blog Theory

Blog Theory
Author: Jodi Dean
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2013-04-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745659551

Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications. Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system. In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchangesÑfrom blog posts to text messagesÑhave widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

Murder in the Garment District

Murder in the Garment District
Author: David Witwer
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1620974649

The thrilling and true account of racketeering and union corruption in mid-century New York, when unions and the mob were locked in a power struggle that reverberates to this day In 1949, in New York City's crowded Garment District, a union organizer named William Lurye was stabbed to death by a mob assassin. Through the lens of this murder case, prize-winning authors David Witwer and Catherine Rios explore American labor history at its critical turning point, drawing on FBI case files and the private papers of investigative journalists who first broke the story. A narrative that originates in the garment industry of mid-century New York, which produced over 80 percent of the nation's dresses at the time, Murder in the Garment District quickly moves to a national stage, where congressional anti-corruption hearings gripped the nation and forever tainted the reputation of American unions. Replete with elements of a true-crime thriller, Murder in the Garment District includes a riveting cast of characters, from wheeling and dealing union president David Dubinsky to the notorious gangster Abe Chait and the crusading Robert F. Kennedy, whose public duel with Jimmy Hoffa became front-page news. Deeply researched and grounded in the street-level events that put people's lives and livelihoods at stake, Murder in the Garment District is destined to become a classic work of history—one that also explains the current troubled state of unions in America.

The Union of Their Dreams

The Union of Their Dreams
Author: Miriam Pawel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2010-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608190994

Named one of the Best Books of 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle A Los Angeles Times Notable Book

The Great Influenza

The Great Influenza
Author: John M. Barry
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2005-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780143036494

#1 New York Times bestseller “Barry will teach you almost everything you need to know about one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history.”—Bill Gates "Monumental... an authoritative and disturbing morality tale."—Chicago Tribune The strongest weapon against pandemic is the truth. Read why in the definitive account of the 1918 Flu Epidemic. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Barry concludes, "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart." At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.