3,251 research outputs found
Saturn\u27s Rings: What GM\u27s Saturn Project Is Really About
[Excerpt] In their listing of top news stories of 1985 in the economically depressed Youngstown-Warren area, local newspapers consistently listed Saturn mania near the top. In an effort to attract the Saturn project, the local community offered GM a sizable economic development package, organized a 100-car caravan to GM headquarters delivering 200,000 letters from local residents and school children, and bought billboard space and television time in Detroit.
This continuation of Saturn mania belies the belief that it was an essentially harmless exercise in corporate public relations. Rather, there is much evidence to suggest that throughout the Saturn campaign GM misled the public about its intention to build an inexpensive small car; diverted public and union attention from its plans for plant closings, technological displacement and the importing of cars from its foreign subsidiaries; forced additional concessions that have weakened the UAW; and shaped the public debate surrounding U.S. economic decline and future economic development
The Revitilization of Organized Labor in Youngstown
[Excerpt] From the Little Steel strikes of the 1930\u27s to the industrial strike at General Motor\u27s Lordstown complex in the early 1970\u27s, organized labor in the Youngstown area has been a force to be reckoned with in its efforts to protect its membership and improve the quality of life of working people. Yet, throughout the late 1960\u27s and 1970\u27s, the labor community increasingly suffered the ill-effects of business unionism. Business unionism\u27s preoccupation with economism and sectionalism caused the local labor movement to narrow its social focus and to become increasingly fragmented, insular and directionless. These inherent weaknesses became painfully obvious as corporate America systematically disinvested in the Youngstown area
Killing Jobs with Cooperation : the GM Memo
[Excerpt] As the UAW and General Motors prepare for difficult negotiations for a 1984 national contract, a leaked document by GM\u27s Vice-President of Industrial Relations Alfred Warren has severely embarrassed both company and union officials. The memo outlines a presentation made by Mr. Warren to GM Personnel Directors in October, 1983, and describes GM\u27s bargaining strategy and basic labor policy.
The company\u27s goals include elimination of the cost-of-living allowance and productivity pay, and the institution of benefit co-payments; the elimination of local work rules and the expansion of outsourcing; the initiation of a two-tiered wage system; and the expansion of profit-sharing. The memo reveals that GM hopes to eliminate 80,000 to 100,000 jobs by 1986.
To achieve these objectives, GM plans to elicit employee cooperation without surrendering traditional management rights. It hopes to replace formal bargaining with a continuous agreement and plans to launch a sophisticated public relations campaign to mold public opinion and to pressure the UAW into submission.
So comprehensive and disturbing are GM\u27s plans that UAW President Owen Bieber, who supported concessions in 1982, has said that the document supports many of our worst suspicions about the motives and intentions of the General Motors Corporation. The implications of the document are far-reaching: American labor can expect employer belligerence in the foreseeable future
The microscopic pathway to crystallization in supercooled liquids
Despite its fundamental and technological importance, a microscopic
understanding of the crystallization process is still elusive. By computer
simulations of the hard-sphere model we reveal the mechanism by which thermal
fluctuations drive the transition from the supercooled liquid state to the
crystal state. In particular we show that fluctuations in bond orientational
order trigger the nucleation process, contrary to the common belief that the
transition is initiated by density fluctuations. Moreover, the analysis of bond
orientational fluctuations shows that these not only act as seeds of the
nucleation process, but also i) determine the particular polymorph which is to
be nucleated from them and ii) at high density favour the formation of fivefold
structures which can frustrate the formation of crystals. These results can
shed new light on our understanding of the relationship between crystallization
and vitrification.Comment: to appear in "Scientific Reports
Assessing the role of static lengthscales behind glassy dynamics in polydisperse hard disks
The possible role of growing static order in the dynamical slowing down
towards the glass transition has recently attracted considerable attention. On
the basis of random first-order transition (RFOT) theory, a new method to
measure the static correlation length of amorphous order, called "point-to-set
(PTS)" length, has been proposed, and used to show that the dynamic length
grows much faster than the static length. Here we study the nature of the PTS
length, using a polydisperse hard disk system, which is a model that is known
to exhibit a growing hexatic order upon densification. We show that the PTS
correlation length is decoupled from the steeper increase of the correlation
length of hexatic order, while closely mirroring the decay length of two-body
density correlations. Our results thus provide a clear example that other forms
of order can play an important role in the slowing down of the dynamics,
casting a serious doubt on the order agnostic nature of the PTS length and its
relevance to slow dynamics, provided that a polydisperse hard disk system is a
typical glass former
Understanding water's anomalies with locally favored structures
Water is a complex structured liquid of hydrogen-bonded molecules that
displays a surprising array of unusual properties, also known as water
anomalies, the most famous being the density maximum at about C. The
origin of these anomalies is still a matter of debate, and so far a
quantitative description of water's phase behavior starting from the molecular
arrangements is still missing. Here we provide a simple physical description
from microscopic data obtained through computer simulations. We introduce a
novel structural order parameter, which quantifies the degree of translational
order of the second shell, and show that this parameter alone, which measures
the amount of locally favored structures, accurately characterizes the state of
water. A two-state modeling of these microscopic structures is used to describe
the behavior of liquid water over a wide region of the phase diagram, correctly
identifying the density and compressibility anomalies, and being compatible
with the existence of a second critical point in the deeply supercooled region.
Furthermore, we reveal that locally favored structures in water not only have
translational order in the second shell, but also contain five-membered rings
of hydrogen-bonded molecules. This suggests their mixed character: the former
helps crystallization, whereas the latter causes frustration against
crystallization.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure
Importance of many-body correlations in glass transition: an example from polydisperse hard spheres
Most of the liquid-state theories, including glass-transition theories, are
constructed on the basis of two-body density correlations. However, we have
recently shown that many-body correlations, in particular bond orientational
correlations, play a key role in both the glass transition and the
crystallization transition. Here we show, with numerical simulations of
supercooled polydisperse hard spheres systems, that the lengthscale associated
with any two-point spatial correlation function does not increase toward the
glass transition. A growing lengthscale is instead revealed by considering
many-body correlation functions, such as correlators of orientational order,
which follows the lengthscale of the dynamic heterogeneities. Despite the
growing of crystal-like bond orientational order, we reveal that the stability
against crystallization with increasing polydispersity is due to an increasing
population of icosahedral arrangements of particles. Our results suggest that,
for this type of systems, many-body correlations are a manifestation of the
link between the vitrification and the crystallization phenomena. Whether a
system is vitrified or crystallized can be controlled by the degree of
frustration against crystallization, polydispersity in this case.Comment: To appear in J. Chem. Phys. for a special issue on the Glass
Transitio
Water-like anomalies as a function of tetrahedrality
Tetrahedral interactions describe the behaviour of the most abundant and
technologically important materials on Earth, such as water, silicon, carbon,
germanium, and countless others. Despite their differences, these materials
share unique common physical behaviours, such as liquid anomalies, open
crystalline structures, and extremely poor glass-forming ability at ambient
pressure. To reveal the physical origin of these anomalies and their link to
the shape of the phase diagram, we systematically study the properties of the
Stillinger-Weber potential as a function of the strength of the tetrahedral
interaction . We uncover a new transition to a re-entrant spinodal
line at low values of , accompanied with a change in the dynamical
behaviour, from Non-Arrhenius to Arrhenius. We then show that a two-state model
can provide a comprehensive understanding on how the thermodynamic and dynamic
anomalies of this important class of materials depend on the strength of the
tetrahedral interaction. Our work establishes a deep link between the shape of
phase diagram and the thermodynamic and dynamic properties through local
structural ordering in liquids, and hints at why water is so special among all
substances
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