technology

  • Make Technology Work For—Not Against—Us
    Charley Richardson
    Aug 13 2010 - 8:49am

    New technologies can affect the number of jobs, the skills needed, training issues, monitoring, pace of work, intensity of work, control over the work process, and even the ability to do our work well. What should we do about technology? What do we need to know? We do have rights, but we need to take the initiative.

  • Warehousing Gets Lean and Mean
    Mark Brenner
    May 11 2010 - 9:44am

    Taking a page from manufacturing, retailers are driving their vast network of warehouses and distribution centers to get “lean.” Deploying a combination of technology and ratcheting production standards, U.S. retailers are making warehouse jobs stressful and less safe.

  • Fatal D.C. Train Wreck Raises Questions about Automation
    Paul Abowd
    Sep 8 2009 - 3:40pm
  • Hospital Technology Stresses Workers
    Mischa Gaus
    Jul 15 2009 - 1:12pm

    Technology gives health care workers new tools to digitize medical records and locate supplies, but it also gives managers the ability to track workers. Increased monitoring means speed-up, harassment, and worse.

  • Why do Obama and Newt Gingrich both want $19 billion for health technology?

    Charley Richardson

    Because they're too impressed with technological fixes. Tacking these fixes onto failed organizational structures can just make those structures worse. And keeping the workforce out of technology decision-making ignores both workers’ needs and knowledge as well as their understanding of the actual stuff that's getting done. . . .


    Yes
  • Despite Layoffs, Bailed-Out Banks Hire Contractors on Visas

    Mischa Gaus

    Bailed-out banks are driving down tech workers’ wages and stoking anti-immigrant hostilities by replacing entire departments of local techies with foreign-born workers on visas—all while laying off tens of thousands of workers. . . .


    Yes
  • Writers Walk Pickets For Share of New Media

    Mark Brenner

    TV lovers get ready for more re-runs ahead. On November 5 more than 12,000 television and screenwriters, members of the Writers Guild of America, traded in their pens for picket signs. Industry insiders predict the strike could last well into 2008, and writers are preparing for a long battle. . . .


    Yes
  • Using the Airwaves to Educate & Mobilize

    Author(s):
    Tiffany Ten Eyck

    Excerpt:

    If you happen to be scanning the radio dial near two unique towns in the United States, you could stumble across something unusual: FM radio run by and for farmworkers. In Woodburn, Oregon and south central Florida, farmworkers have added low-power community radio to their organizing arsenal. . . .

    Body:

    If you happen to be scanning the radio dial near two unique towns in the United States, you could stumble across something unusual: FM radio run by and for farmworkers. In Woodburn, Oregon and south central Florida, farmworkers have added low-power community radio to their organizing arsenal.

    To set up their radio stations, the two organizations—Oregon’s Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United (PCUN) and Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)—called on Prometheus Radio Project.

    The non-profit helps low-wage communities set up radio stations and learn the technical aspects of keeping a radio station alive. Called “low-power” radio because the signal does not travel as far as commercial outlets, the stations target the communities they serve, with a range of five to seven miles.

    Available Online:
    Yes

  • GE Workers Strike Against Globalization

    Alexandra Brown Executive Board, IUE-CWA Local 201

    In the latest skirmish in its battle against General Electric’s globalization strategy and destruction of members’ jobs, for four days in late October Local 201 of the International Electronic Workers-Communications Workers struck GE’s Lynn, Massachusetts plant, which makes engines for jet fighters.


    Yes
  • The Persistent Problem of Health and Safety in the Auto Industry

    by Kim Moody

    Whether assembling cars, stamping out auto bodies, or making parts, an auto plant is one of the most dangerous places to work in the United States. While the number of fatalities in the private sector dropped somewhat from 1993 through 1998, they rose 50 percent in the auto industry over the same period. This was before the disastrous 1999 explosion at the Ford Rouge complex near Detroit that killed six.


    Yes