Search

George Bain was interviewed on 26 January 2023, using the format of a life-course interview to frame his memories of the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, 1975–77, chaired by Alan Bullock, which explored how industrial democracy could be advanced through proposals made by the Trades Union Congress in 1972–73 for board-level workers’ representation, which it saw as a means to locate workers’ interests more centrally within corporate strategy. Two issues emerged in the workings of the committee: the macro division of class and ideology, chiefly between union and unionsympathizing advocates of worker directors on the one hand, and business and business-sympathizing opponents on the other hand; and the micro division within the trade-union movement over worker directors. Two reports were published. The Majority Report recommended that one-third of company directors be elected by trade-union members employed in the company. This was not supported by the Labour government, which proposed a diluted version of the Minority Report. The government made no attempt to legislate.

Review of: Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society, Jack Metzgar (2021)Ithaca, NY and London ILR Press, x + 229 pp.,ISBN 978-1-50176-031-0, h/bk, £35.00

There's a lot more to St Armands than shopping. at the southern end of Lido Key, on the corner of Taft and the Boulevard of the Presidents, lies a little-knows [...]

Ever since I was a child, I wanted to own a meteorite, a rock from outer space. That opportunity came many years later, while I was on vacation in West [...]

HAVING MY OWN backyard observatory was a lifelong dream. So I eagerly requested the free information on Home-Dome advertised in this magazine early last year. Soon I was poring over [...]

Credit unions battling future as just another form of banks New services mean competition for consumer market The credit union industry, steeped in populist tradition, finds it must now compete [...]

Neither Snow nor Rain nor Covid-19 Re "How to Save the Postal Service", by Mike Davis [April 20/27]: Thanks to The Nation for recognizing the US Postal Service as an essential public service as it carries on undaunted through the coronavirus contagion. The voters have made clear that he is their choice, but one doesn't need to be a Biden supporter to grasp the reality that the next administration will be either Biden's or an extension of Donald Trump's. If Biden defeats Trump, I will be at the head of the queue demanding that The Nation return to illuminating Biden's regressive policy positions and helping hold his administration accountable. [Extracted from the article]

Continued improvement expected in commercial real estate markets North Houston commercial real estate, already recovering nicely within most of its traditional geographic boundaries, may be poised to claim an entirely [...]

The ‘moral economy perspective’ has enriched a number of recent analyses in the history of industrial relations. Focusing on perceptions of fairness helps to explain the reasoning and activism of workers and trade-unionists engaged in industrial politics, movements and protests. A moral economy framework seems particularly apt where activists were animated by a sense of the established order being disturbed and dismantled by employers and policy-makers. Working-class and trade-union responses to the loss of industrial employment from the 1960s to the 1980s were often articulated in terms of collective injustice. Examination of these responses has been influenced by the works of E. P. Thompson and Karl Polanyi. Seeing the erosion of manual employment and changing working-class organization through the twin frameworks of deindustrialization and the moral economy is more productive than older and arguably dead-end narratives of economic decline and trade-union defeat.

PIEZOELECTRIC 'TRANSFORMERS' CONVERT ELECTRICAL ENERGY TO MECHANICAL ENERGY, AND VICE VERSA, TO PRODUCE HIGH-VOLTAGE AC AND DC OUTPUTS. DESPITE THEIR SMALL SIZE, THESE TRANSFORMERS PRODUCE VOLTAGES AS HIGH AS 7000V [...]

This study of the Caterpillar earthmoving-equipment factory at Uddingston in Lanarkshire from its opening in 1956 to closure in 1987 contributes to debates about workforce resistance to deindustrialization. The analysis demonstrates how workers and communities asserted rights to ‘ownership’ of a valued local resource. Built on the site of a former mining village and the largest single industrial unit in Scotland during the 1960s, the factory was established with regional financial assistance. Policy-makers tacitly offered a viable future with more sustainable employment than coal mining. This promise was violated, first by the firm’s anti-union production regime which the workers overturned with a successful strike in the winter of 1960-61; and second, when the closure was announced in 1987. Workers challenged the company’s right to dispose freely of the factory and its equipment which had been developed with public money and their efforts. A 103-day occupation from January to April 1987 was led by a factory trade-union organization embedded in an extensive social infrastructure, with powerful familial ties. Moral economy claims of communal ownership of the factory were asserted by the occupiers in the face of corporate power and private property rights. Though unsuccessful the occupation represented an important attempt to resist the acceleration of deindustrialization in the 1980s.

There is that very special time of year, that time more religious than Christmas, more wholesome than Thanksgiving and more patriotic than Independence Day, and that can only be the [...]

I enjoyed the article about the world's first jet powered helicopter, the SUD Aviation Alouette. I was under the impression, however, that the SUD Djinn actually preceded the Alouette. The [...]

I always look forward to the book reviews in each issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER and sometimes buy books based on these reviews. In the July/August issue, I found Benjamin Radford's [...]

One of my best experiences in numismatics occurred at the Long Beach Coin Show a couple of years ago. I was walking into the show on opening day and as [...]

It is well known that “formal” judicial independence—appointment on good behavior rather than at pleasure—was established in Britain with the 1701 Act of Settlement, and, like many other aspects of the English constitution, not exported to the colonies of either the First or the Second Empire. Its absence formed one of the allegations against the crown in the American Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the New Republic accordingly included a federal judicial independence provision. British imperial policy in North America after the Revolution regarding judges continued as before, so that formal judicial independence was not established until 1834, and then only in Upper Canada (now Ontario). In the other three principal British North American colonies this was later still. What is now Quebec (Lower Canada) received good behavior appointments in 1843, and Nova Scotia in 1848. In the other colonies that joined the Canadian Confederation in 1867 (New Brunswick) or within a few years afterwards (British Columbia, Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island), good behavior appointments were introduced for the first time only when the colony joined Confederation.