Organizing to Win: Introduction

[Excerpt] The American labor movement is at a watershed. For the first time since the early years of industrial unionism sixty years ago, there is near-universal agreement among union leaders that the future of the movement depends on massive new organizing. In October 1995, John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson were swept into the top offices of the AFL-CIO, following a campaign that promised organizing at an unprecedented pace and scale. Since taking office, the new AFL-CIO leadership team has created a separate organizing department and has committed $20 million to support coordinated large-scale industry-based organizing drives. In addition, in the summer of 1996, the AFL-CIO launched the Union Summer program, which placed more than a thousand college students and young workers in organizing campaigns across the country

Introduction: The Context for the Reform of Labor Law

[Excerpt] It has become increasingly clear that the U.S. system of collective bargaining is no longer a realistic option for a large and growing proportion of American workers, and the situation will continue to worsen absent a major redirection of public policy. The decline in union density rates in this country is alarming to those who value and promote unionization. The extent to which this decline is due to management resistance and the failure of the law to promote collective bargaining is an important question that requires continued study and debate. Opinion polls reveal that for millions of nonunion American workers, workplace representation is an unfulfilled goal. These and other concerns about the inadequacy of U.S. labor law motivated the Clinton Administration to create the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, chaired by John Dunlop and charged with examining the laws that govern and shape relations in America\u27s workplaces. In the same spirit, the Department of Economic Research of the AFL-CIO and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University convened a conference on labor law reform in October 1993. Nearly forty papers and speeches advanced a variety of ways to correct the inadequacies in our system of union-management regulation. This volume contains a selection of the papers from that conference, chosen to reflect the diversity of opinion and thought represented. While all of the views and policy recommendations expressed in the papers are not necessarily fully shared by the, editors, the AFL-CIO, or Cornell, they are stimulating and provocative and deserve the widest possible discussion and debate. Our aim in producing this book is to stimulate public awareness about the need for fundamental reform of the legal and institutional underpinnings of the U.S. system of workplace representation and to offer proposals for the content of that reform

Three dimensional in vivo analysis of water uptake and translocation in maize roots by fast neutron tomography

Root water uptake is an essential process for terrestrial plants that strongly affects the spatiotemporal distribution of water in vegetated soil. Fast neutron tomography is a recently established non invasive imaging technique capable to capture the 3D architecture of root systems in situ and even allows for tracking of three dimensional water flow in soil and roots. We present an in vivo analysis of local water uptake and transport by roots of soil grown maize plants for the first time measured in a three dimensional time resolved manner. Using deuterated water as tracer in infiltration experiments, we visualized soil imbibition, local root uptake, and tracked the transport of deuterated water throughout the fibrous root system for a day and night situation. This revealed significant differences in water transport between different root types. The primary root was the preferred water transport path in the 13 days old plants while seminal roots of comparable size and length contributed little to plant water supply. The results underline the unique potential of fast neutron tomography to provide time resolved 3D in vivo information on the water uptake and transport dynamics of plant root systems, thus contributing to a better understanding of the complex interactions of plant, soil and wate

Balanced Synaptic Input Shapes the Correlation between Neural Spike Trains

Stimulus properties, attention, and behavioral context influence correlations between the spike times produced by a pair of neurons. However, the biophysical mechanisms that modulate these correlations are poorly understood. With a combined theoretical and experimental approach, we show that the rate of balanced excitatory and inhibitory synaptic input modulates the magnitude and timescale of pairwise spike train correlation. High rate synaptic inputs promote spike time synchrony rather than long timescale spike rate correlations, while low rate synaptic inputs produce opposite results. This correlation shaping is due to a combination of enhanced high frequency input transfer and reduced firing rate gain in the high input rate state compared to the low state. Our study extends neural modulation from single neuron responses to population activity, a necessary step in understanding how the dynamics and processing of neural activity change across distinct brain states

STE-QUEST - Test of the Universality of Free Fall Using Cold Atom Interferometry

In this paper, we report about the results of the phase A mission study of the atom interferometer instrument covering the description of the main payload elements, the atomic source concept, and the systematic error sources

Motives and comprehension in a public goods game with induced emotions

This study analyses the sensitivity of public goods contributions through the lens of psychological motives. We report the results of a public goods experiment in which subjects were induced with the motives of care and anger through autobiographical recall. Subjects' preferences, beliefs, and perceptions under each motive are compared with those of subjects experiencing a neutral autobiographical recall control condition. We find, but only for those subjects with the highest comprehension of the game, that care elicits significantly higher contributions than anger, with the control treatment in between. This positive influence of the care motive on unconditional giving is accounted for partly by preferences for giving and partly by the beliefs concerning greater contributions by others. Anger also affects attention to own and other's payoffs (using mouse tracking) and perceptions of the game's incentive structure (cooperative or competitive)

STE-QUEST - Test of the Universality of Free Fall Using Cold Atom Interferometry

The theory of general relativity describes macroscopic phenomena driven by the influence of gravity while quantum mechanics brilliantly accounts for microscopic effects. Despite their tremendous individual success, a complete unification of fundamental interactions is missing and remains one of the most challenging and important quests in modern theoretical physics. The STE-QUEST satellite mission, proposed as a medium-size mission within the Cosmic Vision program of the European Space Agency (ESA), aims for testing general relativity with high precision in two experiments by performing a measurement of the gravitational redshift of the Sun and the Moon by comparing terrestrial clocks, and by performing a test of the Universality of Free Fall of matter waves in the gravitational field of Earth comparing the trajectory of two Bose-Einstein condensates of Rb85 and Rb87. The two ultracold atom clouds are monitored very precisely thanks to techniques of atom interferometry. This allows to reach down to an uncertainty in the E\"otv\"os parameter of at least 2x10E-15. In this paper, we report about the results of the phase A mission study of the atom interferometer instrument covering the description of the main payload elements, the atomic source concept, and the systematic error sources