mind workers

Examples of mind workers in the following topics:

• Ominous Trends in the U.S.

  • Workers who perform easily automated tasks are being replaced by technology that can do the work faster, cheaper, and more efficiently.
  • Production and service workers in industrialized nations are unable to compete with workers in developing countries, who are willing to tolerate much lower wages.
  • They can either settle for low-skill, low-wage jobs, or they can move up, joining a group called "mind workers. " This category includes engineers, attorneys, scientists, professors, executives, journalists, and consultants.
  • Currently, these "mind workers" form about 20% of the workforce.
  • Increasingly, jobs in countries like the United States are polarized into low-skill, low-wage jobs or the high-skill, high-wage jobs of these "mind workers. " Because of this polarization, there is a growing disparity between the incomes of the rich and poor.

• The Changing Face of the Workplace

  • Secondly, workers are being forced to compete in a global job market.
  • Solutions that involve having the workers work less hours are usually met with high resistance from the workers.
  • Individuals who lose their jobs must either move up— joining a group of "mind workers" (engineers, attorneys, scientists, professors, executives, journalists, consultants)— or settle for low-skill, low-wage service jobs.
  • The "mind workers" form about 20 percent of the workforce.
  • Conversely, production workers and service workers in industrialized nations are unable to compete with workers in developing countries.

• The Decline of Union Power

  • It also is much more aggressive about fighting unions' attempts to organize workers.
  • Many older factories have introduced labor-saving automated machinery to perform tasks previously handled by workers.
  • Women, young people, temporary and part-time workers -- all less receptive to union membership -- hold a large proportion of the new jobs created in recent years.
  • Union arguments that they give workers a voice in almost all aspects of their jobs, including work-site safety and work grievances, are often ignored.
  • The kind of independent-minded young workers who sparked the dramatic rise of high-technology computer firms have little interest in belonging to organizations that they believe quash independence.

• The Argument for Barriers

  • It is asserted that trade has created jobs for foreign workers at the expense of American workers.
  • There is no doubt that international trade can have strong effects, good and bad, on the wages of American workers.
  • The plight of the worker adversely affected by imports comes quickly to mind.
  • But it is also true that workers in export industries benefit from trade.
  • Moreover, all workers are consumers and benefit from the expanded market choices and lower prices that trade brings.

• Basic Ingredients of the U.S. Economy

  • The number of available workers and, more importantly, their productivity help determine the health of an economy.
  • When immigrants flooded labor markets on the East Coast, many workers moved inland, often to farmland waiting to be tilled.
  • As a result, government leaders and business officials increasingly stress the importance of education and training to develop workers with the kind of nimble minds and adaptable skills needed in new industries such as computers and telecommunications.
  • Numerous tasks are divided among different divisions and workers.
  • Before managers or teams of workers can produce anything, of course, they must be organized into business ventures.

• Labor Unions

  • Labor unions provide members with the power of collective bargaining over and fight for workers rights.
  • Labor unions are legally recognized as representatives of workers in many industries in the United States.
  • To join a traditional labor union, workers must either be given voluntary recognition from their employer or have a majority of workers in a bargaining unit vote for union representation.
  • Although much smaller compared to their peak membership in the 1950s, American unions remain an important political factor, both through mobilization of their own memberships and through coalitions with like-minded activist organizations around issues such as immigrant rights, trade policy, health care, and living wage campaigns.
  • Outline the development and purpose of labor unions for workers in society

• The Great Steel Strike

  • It was a union of skilled iron and steel workers which was deeply committed to craft unionism.
  • However, technological advances had slashed the number of skilled workers in both industries.
  • Distrusting immigrant workers to manage their own affairs, the AFL intended to run unions for them.
  • As the strike began, they published information that supposedly demonstrated that the steelworker strike was being master-minded by communists and revolutionaries.
  • Public opinion quickly turned against the striking workers .

• Mass Hysteria

  • Hysteria is a diagnostic label applied to a state of mind, one of unmanageable fear or emotional excesses.
  • A recent example of psychogenic illness resulting from mass hysteria occurred in Jilin, China in 2009 when hundreds of workers at an acrylic yarn factory began to fall ill.Doctors in China determined that, for most of those who fell ill, there were no physical indications of poisoning, which is what the workers claimed caused the illness.

• Productivity Gains in Manufacturing

  • Worker productivity on the United States is the highest in the world.
  • The number of steel workers fell from 500,000 in 1980 to 224,000 in 2000.
  • Worker productivity on the United States is the highest in the world.
  • It doesn't matter if workers in a low-cost country are paid an eighth of what American workers get paid if a single American worker can make the same amount of product as 10 workers in the low-cost country.
  • However, as Sainati noted, pundits and politicians "say the word 'manufacturing' and they see in their minds' eyes things they used to see when they were kids. " But those days are long gone, and with them the old manufacturing stereotypes.

• Gompers and the AFL

  • Gompers helped found the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1881 as a coalition of like-minded unions.
  • He thought economic organization was the most direct way to achieve these improvements, but he did encourage union members to participate in politics and to vote with their economic interests in mind.
  • In late August 1893, Gompers addressed twenty-five thousand unemployed workers who had massed on the shore of Lake Michigan.
  • In 1905, Haywood and the WFM helped to establish the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, whose members were known as Wobblies), with the goal of organizing the entire working class.
  • The IWW's long-term goal was to supplant capitalism with a workers' commonwealth.