Word: shaiken
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...years of today. During the 1950s, GM's gas-hogging V- 8s and exuberant tail-finned sedans reflected the confidence of a nation newly arrived at superpower status, with seemingly unlimited resources and skyrocketing productivity. "With GM, you were really talking about a bold vision of America," says Harley Shaiken, a professor of work and technology at the University of California at San Diego. Former chairman Charles ("Engine Charlie") Wilson immortalized GM's role when he told a congressional committee in 1952 that "what is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what is good for General...
...other trend-setting muscle cars. When buyers flocked to small cars during oil crises in the 1970s, GM's failure to produce a winning model was ominous. "They had become so arrogant and efficient at defining trends that when a fundamental shift took place, they failed to adapt," says Shaiken. "They couldn't do anything radically different from what they had done before." The company's rush to downsize at the end of the decade led to the notoriously shabby quality of its X-car line...
That situation should bode well for short-term U.S. competitiveness, but discontent among American workers is rising. Says Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California at San Diego: "It amounts to a reversal of the American dream." Agrees Rudy Oswald, chief economist for the AFL-CIO: "There is a growing feeling of 'We won't take any more of this...
...year can bring a prize of $500. Industrial companies have been less inclined than service firms to impose stringent computer monitoring of employee work. Tradesmen and other blue- collar workers tend to be highly resentful of automated supervision and frequently find ways to circumvent or sabotage it. Harley Shaiken, associate professor of labor and technology at the University of California at San Diego, tells in his 1984 book Work Transformed that in one particular factory, workers learned to fool the computer monitor by leaving the motors on their machines running even when the operators were away on extended coffee breaks...
...million calls a day with fewer employees than ever. As a result, most U.S. phone communications hummed along during the strike without so much as an interfering bleep, although callers had to wait a little longer for directory and operator assistance from substituting supervisory people or from what Harley Shaiken, a labor analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called "telescabs...