If All the People Are Banded Together : The Naugatuck Valley project

[Excerpt] The Naugatuck Valley in western Connecticut was once the center of the American brass industry and one of the most intensely industrialized areas on earth. From its center in Waterbury, the region\u27s major city, with a population of 100,000, the Valley runs north through the towns of Thomaston and Torrington and south through Naugatuck, Seymour, Derby and Ansonia. Like so many industrial areas of the Northeast and Midwest, its workers are primarily the descendants of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, with more recent additions of Blacks from the South and Puerto Ricans. During the 1960s and \u2770s it could have been renamed deindustrial valley, as dozens of plants were sold or closed. Like those in similar areas elsewhere, the people of the Naugatuck Valley have found that their established approaches have given them little leverage over deindustrialization. Conventional union tactics have exerted little influence over companies prepared to close up or sell the shop. Legislation to affect plant closings has been difficult to pass, and when passed has had limited impact. Local communities have felt powerless in the face of decisions made in distant board rooms; until recently, few efforts have been made to affect those decisions, even when they threatened the lifeblood of Naugatuck Valley communities. Over the past three years, the Valley has developed a regional organization of more than 50 religious, labor, community and small business organizations. Called the Naugatuck Valley Project, its purpose is to give workers and communities more influence over their economic destiny

The Impact of Large Language Multi-Modal Models on the Future of Job Market

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly in large language multi-modal models like GPT-4, have raised concerns about the potential displacement of human workers in various industries. This position paper aims to analyze the current state of job replacement by AI models and explores potential implications and strategies for a balanced coexistence between AI and human workers.Comment: 16 pages, 1 Tabl

AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs

This report is the latest in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center's Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (The Web at 25).The report covers experts' views about advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, and their impact on jobs and employment

The U.S. Experience of Organising in the Context of the Global Economy

Excerpt] There is no question that some unions, such as the UAW in auto-transplants and auto-parts, CWA/IUE in high tech and electronics, USWA in metal production and fabrication or the UFCW in food processing, face much greater challenges organising in their primary jurisdictions because they are confronted with more mobile, more global, and more powerful and effective employer opposition, and, in some cases, a workforce less predisposed to unionisation. Yet, as we have seen, even in the most adverse organising environments, union organising success can dramatically improve when unions utilise a comprehensive campaign strategy. Given these differences, what is perhaps most striking about our findings is how few unions are actually running comprehensive campaigns, or even consistently using any of the ten elements of our comprehensive campaign model. Most significant of all, only a smattering of unions today see themselves as global unions taking on global employers. They are not doing the strategic corporate research necessary to develop the kind of critique of the company needed to launch a truly multifaceted comprehensive campaign. They are not developing lasting labour and community networks, locally, nationally and internationally to help them build and leverage their power in the company and the industry. And they are not getting out in front on the issues that resonate with workers and the public ranging from universal health care, to the war in Iraq, global outsourcing, to affordable higher education

Autonomous Exchanges: Human-Machine Autonomy in the Automated Media Economy

Contemporary discourses and representations of automation stress the impending “autonomy” of automated technologies. From pop culture depictions to corporate white papers, the notion of autonomous technologies tends to enliven dystopic fears about the threat to human autonomy or utopian potentials to help humans experience unrealized forms of autonomy. This project offers a more nuanced perspective, rejecting contemporary notions of automation as inevitably vanquishing or enhancing human autonomy. Through a discursive analysis of industrial “deep texts” that offer considerable insights into the material development of automated media technologies, I argue for contemporary automation to be understood as a field for the exchange of autonomy, a human-machine autonomy in which autonomy is exchanged as cultural and economic value. Human-machine autonomy is a shared condition among humans and intelligent machines shaped by economic, legal, and political paradigms with a stake in the cultural uses of automated media technologies. By understanding human-machine autonomy, this project illuminates complications of autonomy emerging from interactions with automated media technologies across a range of cultural contexts

Artificial vs. Non-Artificial Intelligence: What Does ChatGPT Mean for Labor and Employment?

ChatGPT has set the world ablaze. The publicly available and free-to-use chatbot is an application programming interface (API) that generates responses to language requests through artificial intelligence (AI), and processes millions of such requests per day. Released for public access in November 2022, ChatGPT can, upon request, produce jokes, TV episodes, music, and computer code. Students now use it to write papers, businesses use it to create promotional materials, and lawyers use it to draft legal briefs. This post was originally published on the Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review on February 14, 2023. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button above

Training and the new industrial relations: New Zealand research that explores Streeck’s Thesis

This New Zealand research finds some support for Wolfgang Streeck’s thesis that education and training offer unions strategic possibilities in a neo-liberal environment. But it also finds that political strategies are necessary when unions’ quasi-constitutional status has been substantially diminished

Credit within the Firm

We exploit time variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched workers-firm data with workers histories to assess the role of the firm as an internal loans market. By tilting the workers wage-tenure profile around their tenure-productivity profile, the firm can generate borrowing flows from workers to the firm (when the earnings profile is steeper than the productivity profile) or vice versa from the firm to the workers (when the earnings profile is fatter), thus compensating for the imperfect functioning of the loans market. We find that firms located in less financially developed areas offer wages that are lower at the beginning of tenure and higher at the end than those offered by firms in more financially developed markets, which helps firms finance their operations by raising funds from workers. This effect does not reflect unobserved local factors that systematically affect wage tenure profiles, since we control for local market effects and only exploit variation time variation in the degree of local financial development induced by effects of exogenous liberalization. The credit generated by implicit lending within the firm is economically important and can be as large as 30% of bank lending. Implicit contracts help more those firms that have a problematic access to the loans market and funds come more from workers with a stronger willingness to lend. Consistent with credit market imperfections opening a trade opportunity within the firm we find that the internal rate of return of implicit loans lies between the rate at which workers savings are remunerated and the rate firms pay on their loans from banks.Implicit contracts, financial frictions, tenure profile, wage setting

Who Pays for Health Care Reform?

In this second of three chapters on the distinctive policy dynamics of particular areas of social provision, Susan Giaimo addresses the issue of whether the success of the reformed welfare state in the shape of payers’ and policy makers’ cost‐containment projects have had as their price the sacrifice of equity and solidarity. These questions are explored through the lens of health care reform in Britain, Germany, and the US since the late 1980s: each a country with a distinctive health care system, which undertook major reform initiatives designed to control health care outlays, and addressed the efficiency and equity goals in markedly different ways. Section I provides a broad background to situate the contemporary politics of health care reform, explaining how and why health care systems in Western countries have come under the stress of increasing cost pressures even as governments and employers have become more apprehensive about the possible effects of the welfare state on economic competitiveness. Section 2 develops the argument in greater depth, explaining how existing health care and political systems provide different opportunities or constraints for payers and the state to pursue unilateral cost‐containment strategies, how health care institutions themselves shape policy preferences and strategies of payers, and how some systems require compromise solutions that reconcile equity with efficiency. Section 3 presents each country\u27s case, and the concluding section considers the broader lessons from health care reform for the contemporary politics of welfare state adjustment