The MCLR Reporter

Contains Salute to Jack Metzgar, Conference Puts Forth New Vision, MCLR Research Dept. News

Mismanagement: Labor\u27s Rightful Cause

[Excerpt] Mismanagement is so widespread and its effects upon job security, wages and standards are so damaging to labor that unions must expand the traditional boundaries of their authority and begin to experiment with ways to challenge management prerogatives. While some people may argue that such a direction will lead to enterprise unionism, those arguments have many of the same weaknesses as those against worker ownership and power-sharing. The alternative in our current situation is to passively allow managers to continue to destroy jobs and communities. Those who hope to rebuild our economy based upon more humane principles will need a constituency which includes union members who have, at the local level, really dug in and challenged mismanagement, posing alternatives to save jobs. The discussion below covers the most common and damaging forms of mismanagement; the rest of this issue of Labor Research Review shows what unions can and have done to challenge bad management. It does nor cover subjects which many of us consider mismanagement of the overall economy, such as socially destructive deregulation, laissez-faire trade policies, or the massive diversion of precious financial and technical resources to the military. While not ignoring such national economic issues, the training for empowerment for more grass-roots control of the economy has to begin with local campaigns where local unions and their allies have immediate organizing handles

Labor Film Shelf: Collision Course

[Excerpt] The ongoing battle between Machinists District 100 and Eastern Airlines is one of the most scrutinized labor-management struggles in recent U.S. history. Publications ranging from Labor Notes to The Harvard Business Review have covered it, and Labor Research Review #4 was devoted exclusively to it — the first major coverage of the subject

Making the connection: transit-oriented development and jobs

Transit-oriented development (TOD) can serve the needs of working families—particularly those with low- and moderate-incomes—by linking workers to viable employment opportunities through strategically located affordable housing and accessible transit options. This article discusses the potential of economic development subsidies to support TOD and highlights ideas for communities seeking to link residents to good jobs through TOD. In addition, it presents examples of innovative TOD projects in Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas, NV; Portland, OR; and Redmond, WA.Community development ; Transportation ; Employment

Economic Conversation: Converting Tanks in Indiana

[Excerpt] Since the summer of 1984, the Calumet Project for Industrial Jobs has been involved in a public campaign to save the Blaw-Knox plant in the Calumet steel region of Northwest Indiana. The process of organizing the campaign for conversion of the plant has been both difficult and challenging. There is precious little American experience to draw on for such an effort, and when the campaign, to its credit, attracted support from a broad range of concerned parties, it was hard to keep labor and community interests in the forefront. Based on our trials and errors, we would like to offer some practical insights for the benefit of others who may become involved in similar campaigns. We highly recommend union and community involvement in such efforts. If working people and community groups are to gain power in saving manufacturing jobs and developing this country\u27s future industrial policy we need to seize every opportunity for involving ourselves in local economic development decision-making

Growing Pennsylvania's High-Tech Economy: Choosing Effective Investments

Compares Pennsylvania's high-tech economic development incentives, programs, and taxes with those of six competitor states. Includes case studies, program summaries, and analyses using a proprietary model and database. Makes policy recommendations

Gas Stripping in Simulated Galaxies with a Multiphase ISM

Cluster galaxies moving through the intracluster medium (ICM) are expected to lose some of their interstellar medium (ISM) through ISM-ICM interactions. We perform high resolution (40 pc) three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of a galaxy undergoing ram pressure stripping including radiative cooling in order to investigate stripping of a multiphase medium. The clumpy, multiphase ISM is self-consistently produced by the inclusion of radiative cooling, and spans six orders of magnitude in gas density. We find no large variations in the amount of gas lost whether or not cooling is involved, although the gas in the multiphase galaxy is stripped more quickly and to a smaller radius. We also see significant differences in the morphology of the stripped disks. This occurs because the multiphase medium naturally includes high density clouds set inside regions of lower density. We find that the lower density gas is stripped quickly from any radius of the galaxy, and the higher density gas can then be ablated. If high density clouds survive, through interaction with the ICM they lose enough angular momentum to drift towards the center of the galaxy where they are no longer stripped. Finally, we find that low ram pressure values compress gas into high density clouds that could lead to enhanced star formation, while high ram pressure leads to a smaller amount of high-density gas.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, accepted in Ap

A Cell-Surface Membrane Protein Signature for Glioblastoma.

We present a systems strategy that facilitated the development of a molecular signature for glioblastoma (GBM), composed of 33 cell-surface transmembrane proteins. This molecular signature, GBMSig, was developed through the integration of cell-surface proteomics and transcriptomics from patient tumors in the REMBRANDT (n = 228) and TCGA datasets (n = 547) and can separate GBM patients from control individuals with a Matthew\u27s correlation coefficient value of 0.87 in a lock-down test. Functionally, 17/33 GBMSig proteins are associated with transforming growth factor β signaling pathways, including CD47, SLC16A1, HMOX1, and MRC2. Knockdown of these genes impaired GBM invasion, reflecting their role in disease-perturbed changes in GBM. ELISA assays for a subset of GBMSig (CD44, VCAM1, HMOX1, and BIGH3) on 84 plasma specimens from multiple clinical sites revealed a high degree of separation of GBM patients from healthy control individuals (area under the curve is 0.98 in receiver operating characteristic). In addition, a classifier based on these four proteins differentiated the blood of pre- and post-tumor resections, demonstrating potential clinical value as biomarkers