Who Will Build the Future?

[Excerpt] The construction unions\u27 crisis both preceded and contributed to the general decline of organized labor. At the time concessions became a household word in manufacturing, building trades workers had already endured five years of wage freezes and cuts. Just as construction unions helped set standards in the past for wages, hours and political muscle for the entire labor movement, the rise of the open shop in construction was the opening salvo of an all-out assault on the house of labor in the 1970s and \u2780s. Since World War II, building trades unions generally marched to their own tune, cementing their power locally and nationally, and often appearing indifferent to the fate of other sectors of the workforce. But their current crisis has evaporated the reigning sense of complacency and has forced union leaders to reconsider adopting the traditions of militancy and activism that built their organizations a hundred years ago. Drawing on some of the recent innovations throughout the labor movement, building trades unions are currently more receptive to new initiatives than at any time in the past 50 years

Standing at a Crossroads: The Building Trades in the Twenty-First Century

American building trades unions have historically played a critical and stabilizing role in the nation’s construction industry, establishing uniform standards and leveling the competitive playing field. Union members have enjoyed better than average wages and benefits, excellent training opportunities, and decent jobsite conditions. But in the last thirty years the industry has undergone a dramatic transformation. This article describes the decline in union density, the drop in construction wages, the growth of anti-union forces, the changes in labor force demographics, the shift toward construction management, and the emergence of an underground economy. It also analyzes how building trades unions have responded to these changes, identifies structural impediments to union renewal, and proposes strategies for building trades unions to reassert their presence and power

SUSY Moose Runs and Hops: An extra dimension from a broken deformed CFT

We find a class of four dimensional deformed conformal field theories which appear extra dimensional when their gauge symmetries are spontaneously broken. The theories are supersymmetric moose models which flow to interacting conformal fixed points at low energies, deformed by superpotentials. Using a-maximization we give strong nonperturbative evidence that the hopping terms in the resulting latticized action are relevant deformations of the fixed point theories. These theories have an intricate structure of RG flows between conformal fixed points. Our results suggest that at the stable fixed points each of the bulk gauge couplings and superpotential hopping terms is turned on, in favor of the extra dimensional interpretation of the theory. However, we argue that the higher dimensional gauge coupling is generically small compared to the size of the extra dimension. In the presence of a brane the topology of the extra dimension is determined dynamically and depends on the numbers of colors and bulk and brane flavors, which suggests phenomenological applications. The RG flows between fixed points in these theories provide a class of tests of Cardy's conjectured a-theorem.Comment: 34 pages, 12 EPS figures, one reference adde

Marginal Deformations from Branes

We study brane configurations for four dimensional N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories with quartic superpotentials which flow in the infrared to manifolds of interacting superconformal fixed points. We enumerate finite N=2 theories, from which a large class of marginal N=1 theories descend. We give the brane descriptions of these theories in Type IIA and Type IIB string theory. The Type IIB descriptions are in terms of D3 branes in orientifold and generalized conifold backgrounds. We calculate the Weyl and Euler anomalies in these theories, and find that they are equal in elliptic models and unequal in a large class of finite N=2 and marginal N=1 non-elliptic theories.Comment: 42 pages, minor changes, references adde