Committed to Organizing: An Interview with Richard Bensinger, Director, AFL-CIO Organizing Institute

[Excerpt] The Institute\u27s materials emphasize that organizing is difficult, frustrating work. But it\u27s also the best job in America because it is personally rewarding to help workers organize and fight against injustice. Richard Bensinger, a former ACTWU organizer, has been the OI\u27s Executive Director since its inception in 1989. Labor Research Review\u27s Jack Metzgar asked Bensinger to assess the OI\u27s first two years in operation

The Power and Promise of Community Unionism

[Excerpt] Shaffer\u27s statement portrays an emerging vision of union organizing that represents a dramatic departure from the way most unions have been organizing workers for the past 40 years. Borrowing from the city wide structures of the Knights of Labor in the 19th century, a new breed of union organizers is experimenting with a brand of unionism that may ultimately recast labor as a community-wide movement which tackles workplace issues. Unlike the now defunct Knights, these modern-day champions of community-based union organizing maintain close ties with unions across the country through their affiliation with resourcerich national unions. Many believe that this mixture of community organizing with national union support will spawn a new wave of union growth

Culture and disaster risk management - citizens’ reactions and opinions during Citizen Summit in Lisbon, Portugal

The analyses and results in this document are based on the data collected during the fifth Citizen Summit held in Lisbon, Portugal on April 14th 2018. Like the previous four Citizen Summits held in Romania, Malta, Italy and Germany, this Citizen Summit was designed as a one-day event combining public information with feedback gathering through different methods of data collection. In the morning session, the event started with a presentation of the CARISMAND project and its main goals and concepts, and the planned CARISMAND Toolkit functionalities. Then, overall 27 questions with pre-defined answer options were posed to the audience and responses collected via an audience response system. As in the previous Citizen Summits, all questions in this part of the event aimed to explore citizens’ attitudes, perceptions and intended behaviours related to disaster risks. Comparing and contrasting the respective results of all six Citizen Summits in the final synthesised analysis will aim to provide additional insight into cultural factors that may affect disaster-related preparedness and response. Between these questions, additional presentations where held that informed the audience about state-of-the-art disaster preparedness and response topics (e.g., large-scale disaster scenario exercises, use of social media, and mobile phone apps). Furthermore, this last round of Citizen Summits was organised and specifically designed to discuss and collect feedback on recommendations for citizens, which have all been formulated on the basis of Work Packages 2-8 results and in coordination with the Work Package 11 brief. These Toolkit recommendations are envisaged to form one of the core elements of the Work Package 9 CARISMAND Toolkit. Additionally, following the cyclical design of CARISMAND events (and wherever meaningful and possible), they “mirror” the respective recommendations for practitioners, which were discussed in the last (third) CARISMAND Stakeholder Assembly held in Lisbon in February 2018, and they are structured in two, main “sets”: A. Developing a personal “culture of preparedness” B. Taking part in disaster preparedness and response activities. These two sets of recommendations were also presented in detail during the morning session to the participating citizens. In the afternoon session, small moderated group discussions of approximately 2 hours duration were held, which aimed to gather the citizens’ direct feedback on the two sets of Toolkit recommendations presented in the morning, following a detailed discussion guideline. For a detailed overview of all questions asked and topics discussed please see Appendix A. Overall, 102 citizens participated in the Portugal event. The total sample shows a relatively even gender and age distribution, which is unsurprising given the target quotas that were requested from the recruiting local market research agency. The lower number of senior citizens aged 65 and above was expected and reflects mobility issues. Participants were asked about three key aspects of experience of disasters and disaster risk perception that could potentially have an impact on how other questions were answered. More than nine out of ten respondents (92.8%) indicated that they, or a close friend or family member, have experienced a disaster, more than half (56.7%) felt that they are currently living in an area that is specifically prone to disasters, and 57.8% answered that they know other people in the area where they live who they think are particularly vulnerable or exposed to disasters. Slight gender and age-related differences in the responses to these questions were found to be not statistically significant (p>=.05). The rest of this report presents the results of the fifth CARISMAND Citizen Summit and is structured in five main sections. After this introduction, the second section will provide an overview of the different methods applied. The third section, based on the quantitative data collected via the audience response system, presents the results from questions on general disaster risk perceptions, disaster preparedness, and behaviours in disaster situations with a particular focus on the use of mobile phone apps and social media. In the fourth section, based on the qualitative data collected in the ten discussion groups, the analyses will provide detailed insight into the participants’ feedback on the two sets of recommendations for citizens presented in the morning session. The final section compares and contrasts the results from sections 3 and 4, draws conclusions, and presents proposed changes and amendments to the Work Package 9 Toolkit recommendations based on the participating citizens’ suggestions.The project was co-funded by the European Commission within the Horizon2020 Programme (2014-2020).peer-reviewe

Cine-Therapie / Film-Therapie : eine erste Bibliographie

Darüber können viele, die in der Bildungsarbeit der Akademien versuchen, mit allgemeinem Publikum über Themen ins Gespräch zu kommen, die tabuisiert, traumatisiert, intimisiert oder sonstwie blockiert sind, berichten: Setzt man Filme als Katalysatoren des Gesprächs ein, wird es vielen möglich, über Dinge zu sprechen, die ihnen sonst unzugänglich sind. Und sie können anders darüber sprechen, als ermögliche der Film eine Spiegelung und dadurch eine Abmilderung der eigenen Behinderungen im Umgang mit einem Thema. Dass Psychiater sich dieser eigentümlichen Fähigkeit des Films versichert haben, sie zu therapeutischen Zwecken ausnutzen, nimmt nicht wunder. Zwar ist die Film- oder Cinetherapie erst seit wenigen Jahren auch Thema theoretischer Reflexion, doch spielt Film im therapeutischen Prozeß schon lange eine gewichtige Rolle. Film and andere Künste, müßte man ergänzen, weil gewisse Spielformen der narrativen Therapie, die Bibliotherapie und die Kunsttherapie sehr viel längere Traditionen auch theoretischer Reflexion kennt, manchmal zur Grundlage ganzer Therapieformen geworden ist

The Pressure is On: Organizing Without the NLRB

[Excerpt] Ask the typical union organizer to define success and he or she will probably say, Winning elections. Many labor organizations, including ours, have found out that winning a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election does not mean that the workers involved are going to receive the benefits of a union contract. One third of representation elections won by unions do not result in a collective bargaining agreement. In fact, just winning an NLRB election is a tough proposition. In 1990 the union win rate was only 47.6%. Even more alarming is the drop in the number of elections held in 1990 — 3,423, the lowest since 1984. In the 1960s and \u2770s, there were twice this number of elections each year. This trend is truly alarming when you consider that at the end of 1990 unions represented only 16.1% of the nation\u27s workforce — quite a drop from 35% of workers with a union contract in the mid-1950s. What can the labor movement do to reverse the trend of fewer and fewer workers being represented by unions

IMPACTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA TOWARDS LANGUAGE SHIFT AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Social Media Applications are inevitable in today’s people’s lives, especially for university students who cannot be separated with their gadgets. It is undeniable that the use of social media changes the way people communicate with each other, from oral communication to written text communication. This study tries to find out whether social media usage influences the language used in communication, especially among university students. Another question addressed by this study is whether students with ethnic language background still maintain their ethnic languages when communicating using social media. Forty (40) English Department students of Bina Nusantara University were conveniently selected as participants for this study. They were given a questionnaire consisting of two parts, the first relating to the language use in daily communication and the second relating to the language use in social media communication. Research revealed that social media affect the way students communicate to each other. There is a shift in the use of language from ethnic language to Indonesian. Yet, a shift from Indonesian to English will not happen in a short time

“Exploring the Basement of Social Justice Issues”: A Graduate Upon Graduation

Photograph of rides building up, taken J. Stevens' Fair, 20 June 1961 whole general view, looking West. See Leeson's notebook 9, pages 92-95 for notes

LET’S “HAVE A LISTEN” TO A RADIO TALK

This paper deals with a traditional program in the radio broadcast in Semarang. It analyzes a short piece of radio talks, which contains Javanese knowledge performed by the radio announcers in Indonesian. The traditional values, used to be reflected in Javanese, are now presented in the modern and national language of the country. The sociocultural issues in the program will be analysed in line with sociolinguistic and ethnographic approaches