Suchergebnisse

For more than twenty years, Robert Bruno has taught labour history and labour studies to union members from a wide range of occupations and demographic groups. In the class, he asked his students to finish the question 'Work is-?' in six words or less. The thousands of responses he collected provide some of the rich source material behind 'What Work Is'. Bruno draws on the thoughts and feelings experienced by workers in the present day to analyse how we might design a future of work. He breaks down perceptions of work into five categories: work and time; the space workers occupy; the impact of work on our lives; the sense of purpose that motivates workers; and the people we work for, in all senses of the term.

In labor's 1998 Illinois election, union members consciously focused on class‐based economic issues. Most intriguing is the finding that racially conservative white members voted for African‐American Carol Moseley‐Braun despite opposition to affirmative action. A potentially strong class voting bloc challenges unions to develop ever more effective ways of mobilizing their membership.

In the spring of 1989, Chrysler and Mitsubishi Motors entered into a joint venture to build cars in Bloomington‐Normal, Illinois. A dozen years after "lean production" and "employee teams" were introduced, this paper revisits the initial expectations of workers. Through an employee survey it assesses how employee attitudes, shop‐floor behavior, and language have coalesced to create an oppositional discourse of dissent. At Mitsubishi there appears to be a fundamental contradiction between the discourse of production as spoken and the experiences of the workers working within that discourse. The workers have created their own way of talking about work life at Mitsubishi.

Psychologists in Chicago voted to unionize and then ran an innovative campaign to win a good initial labor agreement.