Productivity Grows, But Workers Don’t Share

[Excerpt] Productivity growth increased substantially in the 1990s. For each hour that a worker spends on the job, more is being produced. The higher productivity has lowered costs and boosted company revenues, but workers have not shared in the gains. Higher productivity means that workers should be experiencing a faster rise in real wages than in past decades. When productivity grows, employers, in general, have the ability to grant wage increases above the rate of inflation, and realize higher profits at the same time. But productivity growth in recent decades has not led to higher wages as it should. Instead, the buying power of workers has declined as employers continue to make every effort to hold down wages. In contrast to the situation of workers, profits and executive salaries are increasing at a startling rate. The benefits of rising productivity have been captured by the richest Americans, who have allowed nothing to trickle down to the rest

Paved with Good Intentions: HMCS Uganda, the Pacific War, and the Volunteer Issue

Admirals and politicians alike must have winced at the headlines: “PACIFIC SERVICE PROTEST” was splashed across the Daily Sketch; “PACIFIC? NOT US!” proclaimed the Evening News, in one of the worst public relations disasters the Royal Canadian Navy faced during the Second World War. As the two newspapers—among many others—explained, the crew of one of Canada’s two cruisers, HMCS Uganda, while on operations in the Pacific theatre, refused to volunteer for further service when requested, forcing the ship to return to port. There were, however, no accusations of cowardice or disloyalty, either explicit or implied; rather, the press explained, “The crew...had volunteered for service anywhere when they enlisted originally. They resented being asked to volunteer again.” The result was that, when war ended in the Pacific on 14 August 1945, Canada had no ship to represent it there, despite plans that at one point had called for a fleet of 60 war vessels

Providing the Gift of Life: Canadian Medical Practitioners and the Treatment of Shock on the Battlefield

The story of Ambroise Pare’s discovery has been told often; of how, during Francis I’s campaign against Turin in 1536-37, he ran out of the oil medical practitioners used to cauterize the stumps of amputees and used an herbal remedy and ligatures instead; and of how the patients treated by the latter method did so much better than those tortured with the former. The tale has much to commend it to the popular imagination: a medical hero makes a serendipitous discovery to relieve the suffering of thousands. However, the story is an exception to a steadfast rule in warfare, for in medical matters, change comes slowly. This state of affairs could be ascribed to an unthinking conservatism, but one should not rush to pass judgement. Military commanders are not so much muleheaded as wedded to techniques that, in their eyes, have worked well in the past; innovation means experiment, with perhaps catastrophic results. As we shall see in a study of how Canadian medical practitioners dealt with shock from the First World War to Korea, bringing about change is less a matter of conflict against the establishment and more of reaching a consensus on how to solve complex battlefield problems