The Right to Toil: Labors Fight Against Right to Work Laws

This thesis is on the passing of Right to Work (RTW) laws in Georgia. It tracks public debate surrounding the passing of Senate bills 10 and 11 in 1947. This thesis examines who was arguing for and against the bills in public forums, mainly in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper and how these bills came to pass. Existing scholarship focusing on the Taft-Hartley Act and RTW laws seemingly overlook the fact that Georgia’s RTW laws were passed months before the Taft-Hartley Act was enacted. Most of the challenges to Georgia’s RTW laws pointed out the laws contradicted the Wagner Act, the key labor law passed by Congress in 1935. This thesis follows the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations who opposed Georgia’s RTW laws. This thesis also argues that Georgia’s RTW laws paved the way for the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act

Strategic implications of counter-geoengineering: clash or cooperation?

Solar geoengineering has received increasing attention as an option to temporarily stabilize global temperatures. A key concern is that heterogeneous preferences over the optimal amount of cooling combined with low deployment costs may allow the country with the strongest incentive for cooling, the so-called free-driver, to impose a substantial externality on the rest of the world. We analyze whether the threat of counter-geoengineering technologies capable of negating the climatic effects of solar geoengineering can overcome the free-driver problem and tilt the game in favour of international cooperation. Our game-theoretical model of countries with asymmetric preferences allows for a rigorous analysis of the strategic interaction surrounding solar geoengineering and counter-geoengineering. We find that counter-geoengineering prevents the free-driver outcome, but not always with benign effects. The presence of counter-geoengineering leads to either a climate clash where countries engage in a non-cooperative escalation of opposing climate interventions (negative welfare effect), a moratorium treaty where countries commit to abstain from either type of climate intervention (indeterminate welfare effect), or cooperative deployment of solar geoengineering (positive welfare effect). We show that the outcome depends crucially on the degree of asymmetry in temperature preferences between countries