Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing

[Excerpt] This book is about two parallel stories. First, it relates the account of the most aggressive campaign ever waged by a global union federation (GUF), a years-long effort of private security guard unions to organize against Group4 Securicor (G4S), the world\u27s largest private employer after Walmart. What began as an isolated battle in the United States blossomed into a worldwide struggle for global unionism impacting hundreds of thou­ sands of workers from over twenty countries. But the global effort also gave rise to deep local struggles. Consequently, the narrative moves among dif­ ferent scales of action, from the global arena, to the national-level context, to the local union office. Throughout the campaign, workers in different places won wage increases, union recognition, benefits, an end to abusive workplace discrimination, and, most importantly, a greater degree of control over their employer\u27s business model. In the United States, security guard union density (8 percent as of late 2012) is now slightly higher than the national private-sector average, and the campaign settlement provides the union with a dearer path to bring more workers into the fold. Rarely have global campaigns meant more than superficial changes in workers\u27 lives-this struggle set a new standard. The second story describes a transition to a new spirit of transnational labor activism. The word spirit implies a shifting idea about how labor should best confront the problems posed by global capital. In a context of rising corporate power and declining or unenforceable worker rights (publicly enforceable claims), many of labor\u27s tried and true strategies have proven wholly ineffective. In response, since the early 1970s unions have engaged in what I call governance struggles, a panoply of strategies to subordinate the rules-based logic of private companies to democratic oversight by workers and their unions. The significance of the fight against G4S is the complex and contradictory ways in which those gains at the global level were articulated onto the local context, enhancing worker mobilization and transforming local union movements. Most global union campaigns seek to assert universal labor standards and core values within a given company. But the inability to transfer any gains to the local context has often meant that workers\u27 lives remain unchanged. Rather than insist on the incompatibility of global and local levels of activism, the findings in this book suggest a paradox—effective global unionism requires reciprocity with local actors. The conclusions also permit cautious optimism about the prospects for authentic labor internationalism where others have asserted an overriding pessimism (see Burawoy 2010). The question therefore posed here is simple: How can global unions build local power

Anthropological Linguistics (LING21, ANTH020N) Syllabus

Anthropological Linguistics course description:Communication and culture mutually define one another across communities worldwide. Human linguistic diversity, language contact and language change, and face-to-face communication continue to be key areas of inquiry for both linguistics and anthropology. Colonialism, globalization, mobility, and new technologies are changing the way we transmit and conceive of cultural knowledge, community, and our selves and the natural environment. In this course we draw attention to codeswitching, creoles, language endangerment, and constructed languages as reflections of our changing societies. We also address the ethics of fieldwork as a means of investigating these important social phenomena at the interfaces of language/ecology, language/identity, Global North/South

Occasional Publications on Northern Life, No. 04

The need to exchange information on research in reindeer and caribou diseases became apparent to investigators attending the Second International Reindeer/Caribou Symposium in Roros, Norway, in 1979. Initially, bibliographies were to be exchanged by being submitted to and subsequently distributed by workers at the University of Alaska. When the bibliographies were submitted, it seemed sensible to computerize the lists to facilitate searches for specific information in the future. An apparently simple task became amazingly complex. This is the resultant collection of publications by reindeer/caribou disease researchers. Because researchers in wildlife diseases tend to work on more than one species or topic, out of interest or necessity, a decision was made to include all of a person's references rather than to limit them to strictly reindeer/caribou diseases. The authors hope this will provide a good basis for exchange of information among all those interested in reindeer/caribou diseases

Getting Started With COCA

In this assignment, students will learn basic methods in corpus linguistics, an emerging field at the intersection of humanities and quantitative social science. They will learn how to search large English language corpora (e.g., the 900 million word Cambridge International Corpus) to look for otherwise hidden patterns of language use. They will be able to track the emergence of new words, shifts in meaning in existing words, and note the obsolescence of some words. They will interpret their findings in light of how language usage reflects societal attitudes and social change

Incentive Mechanisms for Participatory Sensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Participatory sensing is a powerful paradigm which takes advantage of smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. Given that participatory sensing systems rely completely on the users' willingness to submit up-to-date and accurate information, it is paramount to effectively incentivize users' active and reliable participation. In this paper, we survey existing literature on incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems. In particular, we present a taxonomy of existing incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems, which are subsequently discussed in depth by comparing and contrasting different approaches. Finally, we discuss an agenda of open research challenges in incentivizing users in participatory sensing.Comment: Updated version, 4/25/201

The changing nature of communication and regulation of risk in Europe

The regulation and communication of risk has changed significantly over the past 20 years or so, partially as a result of a number of regulatory scandals in Europe and elsewhere (Lofstedt 2004: Majone and Everson 2001; Sunstein 2005), which have led to public distrust of regulators and policy makers. This increase in public distrust has resulted in a phasing-out of consensual-style regulation, and the emergence of a newer model of regulation based on variables including public participation, transparency, and increasingly powerful non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This paper discusses some of the consequences of adopting this new model of regulation through a series of case studies

Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacy Education in the UK: Mind the Generation Gap

Background: Pharmacogenetics is concerned with genetically-determined drug response variability and the need for pharmacists to be educated in pharmacogenetics is widely acknowledged. Aims: To identify the opportunities and challenges presented by pharmacogenetics in pharmacy practice. Methods: Thirty eight semi-structured interviews were undertaken with numerous pharmacogenetics and pharmacy stakeholders and practitioners in the United Kingdom (UK). Results: A key theme emerging from the data was that a generational knowledge gap exists between young, newly trained pharmacists who were relatively genetically literate and more experienced pharmacists who have limited genetics training in professional development. Conclusion: The knowledge gap identified could impact on the quality and consistency of patient advice and mean pharmacists are overlooked as central practitioners in delivering pharmacogenetic medicine in the future. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society and other professional bodies should engage with the debates and challenges presented by pharmacogenetics and seek to bridge this generational gap