No comments about Teachers, Union and Collective Bargaining in Public Education.

2 comments about Hoffa.

1. Good book, well I don't know much else to say, I read it a long time ago, but I remember being enthrulled with it; I couldn't put it down!



2. Sloane takes us on a journey through Hoffa's life. From his early childhood, to the end. Sloane spends time on Hoffa's relationship with Ferral Dobbs and the tactics and strategies that he learned in Minneapolis that Made Hoffa one of the most effective Union organizers of all time. This book literally cuts through the crap and vilification and shows Hoffa the man, the Union organizer, and the Union leader. A must read

5 comments about Stolen Dreams: Portraits of Working Children (Single Titles).

1. I saw a story about the man who wrote and photographed this book on 60 Minutes. It was so intersting, I bought the book. The book opens your eyes to child slave labor in third world countries. It's heart breaking to see these children being abused in this manner. The photos are a reality check, and the text will make you weep.



2. It was a stuinning book that truly opened my eyes



3. When I first read this book I didn't exactly know what it meant. After I finished I did. It is really sad that kids my age or older or younger have to do more work than I could do in two years. It's not fair that they are being denied a childhood. They never will have the chance to fall out of a tree, or get grass stains on the new pair of jeans that they will never have. If you don't find this sad you need to find a heart, picutre yourself doing all the work. I don't think we could do it.



4. I knew this book delt with matters of oppression, but to see that people would actually harm children simply because they were poor, that breaks my heart. This book has many breath taking pictures of children suffering from oppression for some reason or another. The chapter on Iqbal Masih really brings it home. A HIGHLY recommended book.



5. The images in "Stolen Dreams" are powerful. The expressions on the children's faces and the looks in their eyes make up exactly the expression of the title of the book. I would have liked to see more in depth investigation into the problem of child labor-- causes, reasons, problems, solutions, advocacy groups, challenges, etc. of which admittedly there is some discussion about. However, as I'm doing research on the topic, I bought the book with the mindset that this would be more about images than thorough information about the problem. So, the author accomplished what they were after perhaps. Good illustrative work.

1 comments about Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth Century America (Independent Studies in Political Economy).

1. Out of Work, the best economic history of 20th Century America. The authors document the crimes of government against Americans' economic well-being, an indictment of taxation and all the monstrous and stupid things our government has done to us.

1 comments about A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West.

1. 
   James J. Lorence (professor emeritus of history, University of Wisconsin-Marathon County) presents A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West is the biography of poet, ordained Congregationalist minister, labor organizer, educator, leftist activist, and political figure Don West, a twentieth-century American advocate for traditional religious values who dedicated himself to building a nonracist, egalitarian south. Chapters meticulously scrutinize West's adolescence, the passion with which he threw himself into his life's work, the ethical and religious roots of his dogged antifascism, and his lifelong determination to defend mountain culture and his advocacy for the rural poor. Extensive notes, a bibliography and an index round out this heavily researched account of a life well and dutifully lived.

4 comments about Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace (BK Currents (Hardcover)).

1. This book is very well researched and scholarly but also written in a very readable format -- even with a respectful sense of humor in places. As a human resources professional, I find the subject of this work of particular interest. Not only does it cover the subject of free speech in the workplace in a very authoritative manner, but it also provides some excellent legal context on topics such as 'employment at will' in an easily understand fashion for the reader who may not have any formal legal experience. Overall, it was a very worthwhile read which both informed and captivated me on a topic of significant import in today's workplace. A respectable piece of writing on a complex and potentially controversial topic! Well done Professor Barry.



2. As a business ethicist, I expected to find in Speechless a detailed discussion of the implications of voice and silence for ethics in organizations, with references to topics like whistle-blowing, groupthink, and moral imagination. I found that discussion in Chapter 9, which is about the right length for it, because those topics have been covered well elsewhere, and Chapter 9 is a good introduction to many of the important works in that area.
   
   The rest of the book treats the restriction of expression in the workplace as an ethical problem of a different order, with implications both for the quality of life of individual employees, and for the quality of participation in political and cultural institutions outside the firm. But despite clear advocacy for greater freedom of expression in the workplace, Speechless also explores the risks that such freedom poses: a hostile working environment, partiality in public bureaucracies, employees driven to distraction by each other, or the legal and reputational threats that can arise when someone says something thoughtless. The result is a thorough, evenhanded, and entertaining study of a perennial problem: with liberty comes liability, both for those who grant them and for those who take them.
   
   Speechless's readable discussions of the relevant legal frameworks and cases are particularly helpful. They facilitate not only understanding the tensions between goods at stake, but also identifying remedies that can be taken at both the public policy and the enlightened-management levels. For scholars interested in exploring the implications of speech and its restriction in the workplace, this book is a useful introduction to the perspectives of law and management on the problem. Managers trying to ascertain what they have a responsibility to control and what they have the freedom to permit will also find Speechless to be a valuable resource . . . as will employees who are curious or nervous about the risk posed to their careers by the scope of their convictions or their recreations.



3. This is an important book, and I read it with a growing sense of its value and force. It is in the American dialogue - the great national debate that takes place at the water cooler as well as the blogosphere; the church picnic as surely as the corner bar - that the warp and hue of our nation's culture take shape - finally forming through policy, legislation and influence the environment that we, and those who follow us, will inhabit.
   
   If this is correct, as Vanderbilt University professor Bruce Barry makes a solid case for in his timely, lucid and meticulously researched "Speechless - the Erosion of Free Expression" in the American Workplace (swerving neither left nor right as he goes) then certainly, if we are to have a true democracy, this dialogue must carry forward the beliefs of all Americans. Nor are these beliefs merely intended for the ballot box; indeed, they are the essence of what Dr. Barry refers to as the marketplace of ideas. For it is in this marketplace (as Dr. Barry makes plain) with its tension, its push and pull of competing voices, that arises the most vital and important element of a functioning democracy: Truth.
   
   This notion of a marketplace of ideas and the necessity of its vitality is not new. In Chapter 6 ("Why Free Speech Works"), Dr. Barry quotes Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous dissent in the 1919 Abrams v. United States, in which Holmes describes "the best test of truth" as "the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."
   
   A marketplace for ideas, from which truth is sometimes "roughly" (mostly roughly, it seems) constructed - this very truth which informs our laws and policies and national conversation - we have this very marketplace now, right? And it's protected by the First Amendment, right? In fact, in the Internet age, this marketplace for ideas is bigger and better than ever, right? So why write a book called "Speechless - the Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace"? Ok, so maybe we can't always say what we want in the workplace, but doesn't that still give us weekends and evenings for speaking our mind?
   
   Wrong. And this is where "Speechless" especially shines - as a compelling, sometimes unnerving study of the vast patchwork quilt of law and policy that many of us confidently suppose is there to cover our back.
   
   In "Speechless," Barry shows us how that quilt is doing an increasingly uneven job of protecting us (us mainly being employees but by extension here, all Americans) as it inevitably, along the way degrades our national dialogue. Building his case that our backs are either not covered, or not covered very well (nor with any kind of predictability), Barry travels the country, producing case after case of this employee and that employee losing his or her job for reasons complex and simple, large and small. Drawing out guidelines based on state action (i.e., the right that congress will not curtail our speech), differences in public vs. private employment, and exceptions like whistleblower protection (including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act), and others, we are left with a certain cold clarity: as a public-sector employee, "you have rights to free speech except where you don't," and rather worse for private-sector employees: "you have no right to free speech except when you do."
   
   But it's not even that simple. Shoring up many of these free speech (or lack thereof) terminations (with, in these cases, their attendant litigation) is the rule of "at will" employment - basically meaning that both employee and employer either may be fired - or may quit - without "cause, notice or severance." In other words, if as an employer I decide I don't like your blog about, say, undocumented workers (regardless of what it says), and even though it has nothing to do with my company and you wrote it on your own computer, on your own time, I can fire you when you next walk in the door, and not hand over a penny in severance pay. (If as an employee, I don't like my boss's blog, I am free to quit my job without notice, etc, but I am the one without the paycheck.)
   
   And as Barry points out, at-will employment is the "dominant employee relations policy in the United States."
   
   Combine "at-will" employment with such additional conditions as (among others) a significant decline in union employees, judges increasingly likely to tilt toward management, an increase toward company political partisanship, and longer work hours w/the Internet at hand, and the net result is that our glorious marketplace of ideas is lately more often the kind of place where if you value your job, you'll want to watch what you say, and to whom you say it. Of course, anyone may contest a termination and push it toward settlement or courtroom - but the individual (possibly still minus a paycheck) will be squaring off against Goliath, and Goliath's well-paid lawyers.
   
   Dr. Barry has performed a much needed job in rounding up so concisely the many loose strands that circumscribe America's environment for free speech. But he also done something else: in Speechless, he broadly and brightly illuminates areas of our lives as Americans that have slipped deeper into the shadows, where essential protections have begun to drop off and in some cases, no longer even exist. And it is only with this knowledge that we can begin to reclaim what we are losing.



4. SPEECHLESS: THE EROSION OF FREE EXPRESSION IN THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE is a top pick for college-level business libraries, addressing issues of freedom of speech from legal, managerial and ethical perspectives and examining how the legal system affects employee speech rights and employer workplace management alike. From office politics and political correctness to protection for expression and how and why free speech works, SPEECHLESS is a key acquisition not just for business holdings, but for libraries strong in American politics and civil rights issues.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch

No comments about Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy (Sociology for a New Century Series).

No comments about Blood and Oranges: Immigrant Labor and European Markets in Rural Greece (Dislocations) (Dislocations).

2 comments about The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do, but Join Much Less.

1. Lipset et al. assert facts, provide statistical evidence, and use quantitative methods to prove their point without helping us understand why Americans do not join unions. The book is simplistic, and rehashes old arguments. The writers fail to use historical and comparative analysis of the divergent tracks and the U.S. and Canada have in labor relations. The statistical analysis does not substantiate the problemmatic that U.S. workers are more or less militant than Canadians. Not to be taken seriously THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN UNIONISM is nothing more than an ideological screed for intellectuals with lots of time on their hands but little to say of substance.



2. The book presents a challenging hypothesis that some may not agree with or like: that deep seated national values matter and can explain why Americans, despite appearing more union friendly in survey approval ratings, have much lower union density than Canadians. The argument is not a new one, Lipset himself made the argument many years ago, but what is novel his how the seeming contradictory data regarding opinion polls actually can be used by the authors to show that Americans are not so easily dislodged from their deep values of freedom. Canadians, on the other hand, have less fear of equality or government involvement, and it this that translates into laws and behaviour (as opposed to attitudes) that are more union friendly north of the border. I liked this book, but it demands patience to read through all the data. If I was a student studying labour markets or industrial relations it would be invaluable.

No comments about Silicon Valley's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs.