Word: labors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Oddly, the National Association of Manufacturers provides the pithiest summary of the limits-to-growth case that it opposes. The "conventional wisdom," says an N.A.M. statement, is that "potential growth is fixed at the rate of labor-force growth [currently around 1.2% a year] and the average annual increase in productivity [which was 1.1% through 1995]." That adds up to total growth of 2.3%, and "anything more than that will only feed inflation." Most true believers would include only minor qualifications, such as putting the upper speed limit...
...finally doing something instead of just talking." What Campos and more than 1,000 participants have done is sign on to the AFL-CIO's "Union Summer," a program designed to attract campus and community activists and channel their thirst for social justice into the long-moribund labor movement. Modeling itself on "Freedom Summer," the 1964 effort by 1,000 college students to register blacks in Mississippi, Union Summer hopes to galvanize a generation uneasy about its economic prospects into fighting for "workplace rights...
...stagnation, layoffs and an economy that creates jobs but not well-paying ones." Elizabeth Panetta, a 31-year-old former bartender who is training the Los Angeles students, puts it more bluntly. "Union Summer is a shot in the arm--and a kick in the butt," she says. "The labor movement has been tired and worn out in many places and unprepared for the issues...
...president, is Organize or Die. Some $20 million is earmarked for membership drives, and the tactics are increasingly bareknuckled--as in the effort to drive away New Otani's tour business. The number of organizers deployed by the federation has increased more than tenfold since 1990. And defying labor's stereotype as a bastion of old white males, the new organizers are mostly in their 20s and 30s, mostly female and, like Campos, increasingly from minority groups...
...Union Summer activists have fanned out to 20 cities. Paid a stipend of $210 a week, they are given free housing: an East Boston, Massachusetts, convent; a Chicago youth hostel; a Beaufort, South Carolina, trailer park. They are joining protesting sewage-plant workers in Denver; demonstrating against unfair labor practices on riverboat casinos in St. Louis, Missouri; pressuring a Washington department store to stop buying suits made in sweatshops; offering legal advice to strawberry pickers in Watsonville, California. They are picketing beach hotels in Hilton Head, South Carolina; knocking on doors in Boston to organize hospital workers. At least...