Striking NYNEX

[Excerpt] The four-month strike by 60,000 telephone workers at NYNEX in 1989 was one of the largest and most significant anti-concession struggles of the decade. In an era when many unions have lost highly publicized contract fights and been forced to make give-backs, the NYNEX strikers successfully resisted management demands that they pay hundreds and eventually thousands of dollars a year for their medical coverage. They also defeated the company\u27s drive for new forms of flexible compensation designed to replace base wage increases and COLAs with lump-sum payments and profit-sharing. Successful union resistance to these concessions would not have been possible without an unprecedented pre-strike program of membership education and internal organizing. The contract campaign conducted by the 30 NYNEX local unions within the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and their allies in NYNEX units represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) reflects CWA\u27s nationwide commitment to rankand- file mobilization through the one-on-one approach

Honeycomb tessellations and canonical bases for permutohedral blades

This paper studies two families of piecewise constant functions which are determined by the $(n-2)$-skeleta of collections of honeycomb tessellations of $\mathbb{R}^{n-1}$ with standard permutohedra. The union of the codimension $1$ cones obtained by extending the facets which are incident to a vertex of such a tessellation is called a blade. We prove ring-theoretically that such a honeycomb, with 1-skeleton built from a cyclic sequence of segments in the root directions $e_i-e_{i+1}$, decomposes locally as a Minkowski sum of isometrically embedded components of hexagonal honeycombs: tripods and one-dimensional subspaces. For each triangulation of a cyclically oriented polygon there exists such a factorization. This consequently gives resolution to an issue proposed and developed by A. Ocneanu, to find a structure theory for an object he discovered during his investigations into higher Lie theories: permutohedral blades. We introduce a certain canonical basis for a vector space spanned by piecewise constant functions of blades which is compatible with various quotient spaces appearing in algebra, topology and scattering amplitudes. Various connections to scattering amplitudes are discussed, giving new geometric interpretations for certain combinatorial identities for one-loop Parke-Taylor factors. We give a closed formula for the graded dimension of the canonical blade basis. We conjecture that the coefficients of the generating function numerators for the diagonals are symmetric and unimodal.Comment: Added references; new section on configuration space

Eco-Tourism Resorts: A Case Study of Best Practices at the Hamanasi Resort in Belize

The objective of this research is to investigate best practice initiatives of sustainability involved in the successful development and management of Hamanasi Resort, an award winning eco-tourism resort located in Belize. The four phases of research at Hamanasi as originally proposed, found in Part I of the thesis, are outlined as follows: Phase one includes hands-on research through shadowing in different hotel departments, observation of management practices in Hamanasi, interviews conducted with employees, and questionnaires administered to guests; Phase two begins a study of the business and organizational model of Hamanasi along with an examination of the critical issues encountered during the start-up phases; Phase three is a SWOT analysis of Hamanasi and a market analysis of other properties that compete with the eco-resort; Phase four investigates eco-tourism promotions and policies in Belize and Hamanasi, and examines the different eco-certification practices. Part II of the thesis reports on the findings of this research with an emphasis placed on important findings