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

Ernesto Rasa and The Earthquake

A short story about a member of an evangelical church in Adelaide in the 1970s at the time that an earthquake and tidal wave were prophesied

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

An introduction to the Smarandache Double factorial function

In this paper we will study this function and several examples, theorems, conjectures and problems will be presented

Quantale Modules and their Operators, with Applications

The central topic of this work is the categories of modules over unital quantales. The main categorical properties are established and a special class of operators, called Q-module transforms, is defined. Such operators - that turn out to be precisely the homomorphisms between free objects in those categories - find concrete applications in two different branches of image processing, namely fuzzy image compression and mathematical morphology

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