2015 Heartland Delta Virtual Conference

Reflections and resources from the 2015 virtual conference

The Generational Gap in the Workforce: How Flexible Schedules May Be the Answer

This article explores the importance of flexible scheduling for smaller municipalities to retain and attract talent and compete in a changing job market. The workforce is evolving, and with each generation that enters the market there is a push for a stronger work-life balance. Smaller cities can meet these generational expectations as well as retain the skills and talents of retiring generations by offering flexible schedules. Flexible schedules may be the answer for small municipalities to stay relevant while staffing their organizations

60-Minute Data Literacy Workshop Using the Junk Charts Trifecta Checkup

Business librarians have a role to play in supporting undergraduate students’ acquisition of data literacy skills. This lesson plan for a 60-minute workshop can help all librarians feel confident in implementing an interactive workshop that facilitates conversation about the use of data and data visualizations in business media. In small and large group discussions, students analyze the use of data and data visualizations in a business article, thereby growing their awareness of what questions to ask when consuming media that include data. Key principles from feminist pedagogy and critical business information literacy underlie the lesson plan

Coronavirus Cures and the Courts

The coronavirus pandemic has drastically affected nearly every aspect of American life. Unfortunately, it has also created an opportunity for those willing to exploit vulnerable citizens by selling fake “cures.” This Article analyzes a lawsuit against televangelist Jim Bakker for doing just that. This Article also calls for increased protection for individuals when a global health pandemic and national emergency have been declared. This Article advocates a novel proposal—the enacting of a federal statute making it a felony for an individual to knowingly sell a fraudulent cure for any disease that has been designated a pandemic by the World Health Organization and in which the President of the United States has designated a national emergency. The following federal criminal statute is proposed: Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, for the express knowing purpose of obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises of a cure for a disease designated by the World Health Organization as a global pandemic and designated by the President of the United States as a national emergency pursuant to the provisions of the National Emergencies Act, shall be fined not more than $2,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 50 years, or both. This potent statute will help deter individuals such as Jim Bakker from fraudulently selling “cures” during a pandemic crisis. Additionally, it will serve as a preventative measure in limiting the spread of a deadly pandemic disease such as coronavirus

Black Mobility Matters: An Exploratory Study of Uber, Hacking, and the Commons in Baltimore

Questions about the city – its boundaries, fabric, size, scale, culture, economy, historical and political contributions – populate the expansive horizon of architectural theory. Its immediate denotation is elusive, but the city is frequently captured within images of living networks: complex organisms, ecosystems, hives, colonies, bundles of neurons. These images of “city as living being,” present it as possessing essential organs connected by an indispensable circulatory system, regulated by a metabolism. Thus, the vitality and relative scale of a city can be measured from its transportation infrastructure and flow of capital. Many large-sized US cities survived the devastating effects of deindustrialization and white flight, maintaining adequate circulatory systems that connected urban residents to means of work. For the majority of medium-sized US cities – Baltimore, Cincinnati, Buffalo and Pittsburg to name a few – this was not the case. These cities suffered large declines in employment, population, and infrastructure maintenance, as they transitioned from an industrial to a tourist and service (FIRE) based economy. While mobile network technologies supplement existing transit systems in large-sized US cities, they exploit the hollowing out of medium-sized cities in the US post-industrial landscape. These technologies are attempting to both define urban labor and imagine how people connect to labor. In so doing they (re)imagine and (re)define the city itself, (re)organizing the way essential organs are connected and regulated. This article examines the economic and social practices of Uber and how it shapes, and is shaped by, the commons of medium-sized cities that revolutionizes traditional notions of urban work and mobility, but not necessarily for the better in the long run. Later, the article explores how this imagining impacts the commons through differentiating Uber from Hacking, a long-standing though illegal solution to urban immobility in Baltimore. Through their comparison, the article proposes a civic-minded, open-sourced on-demand car service that capitalizes on Baltimore’s car centricity and strengthens the commons through cooperative and mobile networks

Vouchers and Affordable Housing: The Limits of Choice in the Political Economy of Place

America\u27s housing segregation problem, and the direct role of government and private actors in creating it, is well documented. What to do about it is less clear. And even when consensus develops about particular strategies, they can be difficult to implement because of significant headwinds that impede change. These headwinds-including market forces, government policies, and private prejudices-continue to stymie progress, and even well-intentioned reform efforts can fail at best and lead to negative consequences at worst. This piece seeks not to provide answers, but rather to describe one such set of reforms and headwinds and to propose some modest policy changes that might lead to incremental progress. I discuss attempts to help poor minority families move to neighborhoods with less concentrated economic and racial segregation in one particularly challenging place: the St. Louis metropolitan area

Advancing Employment Equity in Alabama

This report, Advancing Employment Equity in Alabama, offers a framework to guide policymakers as they consider how to best connect residents to good jobs that pay family-sustaining wages and remove the barriers that have held back far too many for far too long. The Alabama Asset Building Coalition is prepared to be a partner in this effort and further our mission of building an economic foundation that allows underserved Alabamians to reach their highest potential and secure their financial future

The Cooperative Business Model in the Near West Side of Milwaukee

Cooperative economics are explored in this article through the lens of Mahatma Gandhi’s economic thought. Cooperatives seven main principles (voluntary and open membership, democratic member control, member economic participation, autonomy and independence, education/training, cooperation among cooperatives, and finally concern for community)are shown to align with Gandhi’s core economic tenets of Sarvodaya by comparing their goals. Proceeding from this, the article uses qualitative interviews to compare the lives of workers and managers of cooperative business models, nonprofit business models, and traditional business models primarily in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to see how the cooperative principles work in practice in regard to the workers. The final section then makes the case that the homecare industry will grow immensely in the years to come, so the Near Westside Partners (a local community investment group) should invest in the creation of a homecare cooperative business to provide a needed service, better the community, and enhance the lives of the workers in the co-op as well

Medicare for All, Health Justice, and the Laboratories of Democracy

A growing majority of Americans support the implementation of a national single-payer healthcare program, also known as Medicare for All, which would shift payments for healthcare services to a single public payer and provide care based on need rather than ability to pay. However, legislators, scholars, and advocates have suggested state governments rather than the federal government should take the lead by implementing state-based single-payer programs. Dozens of single-payer proposals have been introduced in state legislatures across the country, and proposed legislation in Congress would remove the federal roadblocks to state-based single-payer’s implementation. Proponents of state-based single-payer rely on the conventional wisdom that states—as the storied “laboratories of democracy”—can prove the concept of single-payer to other states, who will adopt it in time.But, in taking the “laboratories of democracy” theory at face value, advocates of state-based single-payer ignore a number of realities fatal to the assumption that universal healthcare will come from the states. This Article argues state-based single-payer is not a stepping stone to health justice or the implementation of national single-payer and that it is, rather, a stumbling block that will worsen health inequities in the United States and ultimately make the implementation of a national single-payer system even less likely than it is now. In order to demonstrate this, I analyze the history of state government experimentation in healthcare to conclude the laboratories of democracy theory has been tested in the healthcare domain and failed, harming the nation’s most vulnerable and historically oppressed people. Using the example of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion, I discuss the historic and present antidemocratic state government resistance to programs that promote health justice, particularly when those programs would increase healthcare access for poor people and people of color. Furthermore, I employ a political theory analysis to conclude state-based single-payer is not an acceptable policy for the federal government to promote under a health justice framework. This is because the implementation of state-specific single-payer programs will worsen health disparities by weakening the bargaining power of existing federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and by fracturing a growing constituency in favor of single-payer, chilling popular momentum toward a national single-payer program