Back to Work

As the Great Depression crushed the mining industry, Tri-State miners looked for ways to restore their standing as hard-working-white men and their faith in capitalism. The New Deal offered hope but brought labor unions back into the district. Some miners, but not a majority, looked to organized labor as the best way to roll back the power of the companies. This chapter explores their 1935 strike to regain what they had lost and the ways the New Deal labor regime was too weak to protect them. While strikers waited for allies in the nascent Congress of Industrial Organizations, the mining companies organized the majority of the district’s nonunion miners into a back-to-work movement that became a company union. This group rallied around old promises of racial superiority and high pay for loyal, hard-working white men who were willing to destroy the CIO union. The CIO, with the help of New Deal officials, eventually won this dispute in court, but it could not overrule the reactionary commitments in the hearts of the majority of Tri-State miners as a new world war brought the mining economy to life again.

SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND THE ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE CYCLE: CASE STUDY IN A PATRONAL UNION

Studies involving the topics of organizational life cycle and situational leadership institutions in the third sector, as a union, was little explored in the literature. Moreover, recent changes in the Brazilian legislation brought new challenges to these organizations. This study seeks to fill these gaps, to analyze the role of leadership and organizational life cycle in a company union, linking theories against the employers' association. The metaphor of the organizations life cycle allows the analysis of organizations at different stages and, consequently, the role of leadership in the development of courses. The research was qualitative, used methods of case study and oral history, and descriptive and exploratory. Data collection used documental analysis, non-participant observation and in-depth interviews with seven leaders who experienced the historical trajectory of the institution. Among the main contributions of this study, it stands out as a theoretical contribution, the association of situational leadership theories and the organizational life cycle in a union representation institution, still little explored in the literature. Among the practical contributions highlight the situational leadership as alternative for sustainability for organizational cyclic life of a union, which now depend on its resources and internal management capabilities for their survival.

Heaven's Wrath

Heaven’s Wrath explores the religious thought and religious rites of the early Dutch Atlantic world. The book argues that the Reformed Church and the West India Company forged and maintained a close union, with considerable consequences. Merchants, officers, sailors, and soldiers found in their faith an ideology and justification for mercantile, martial activities. The company, on the other hand, supported the church financially in Europe and helped spread Calvinism to other continents. Calvinist employees and colonists both benefitted from the familiar, comforting aspects of religious instruction and public worship. But the church-company union had a destructive side, too: Calvinists became the instruments of divine wrath in fighting Catholic enemies and punishing sinners and non-conformers in colonial courts, all of which imposed costs that the small Dutch Republic and its people-strapped colonies could not afford. At the same time, the Reformed Church in the Netherlands contributed to problems later blamed on the West India Company because the church kept an iron grip on colonial hires, publications, and organization. Heaven’s Wrath shows that the expense of the Calvinist-backed war and the church’s meticulous, worried management of colonial affairs hampered the mission and reduced the size and import of the Dutch Atlantic world.

Challenging ‘umthetho we femu’ (the law of the firm): gender relations and shop-floor battles for union recognition in Natal's textile industry, 1973–85

As part of a growing working-class movement that sought full legal status as employees in South Africa, stable urban residence and union recognition, female African factory workers became part of a dynamic new labour movement emanating from the shop floor. At the same time, this new role allowed them to challenge patriarchal structures of authority in the factory, the community and the home. This article examines the gender dimension of a bitter inter-union rivalry that beset Durban's Frame textile complex during the early 1980s. With African unions at last recognized by the apartheid state, Frame sought to bolster the strength of a compliant company union in order to thwart the organizing drive of a more confrontational independent union, an affiliate of the newly established Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU). This union rivalry was fought out in the courts as well as inside the factory, in the streets of Durban's townships, and in an African workers’ hostel in nearby Clermont. The legal dispute generated affidavits by women workers attesting to the pressures they faced to join the company union and their reasons for preferring FOSATU. This evidence shows that African women successfully challenged the patriarchal authority of male managers, security personnel, indunas and male co-workers at Frame in order to join an independent union.

The Quest for Uranium

The name rises as a phantom from the heart of the Congo. The dawn of the nuclear age began there, though no one knew it at the time. King Leopold II of Belgium claimed the Congo as his colony during the surge of European colonization in the 1870s, promising to run the country for the benefit of the native population. Instead, he turned it into a giant slave camp as he raped the country of its riches. Leopold didn’t care much about mineral wealth, preferring the easy riches of rubber, but aft er he died in 1909, the Belgium mining company Union Minière discovered ample resources of copper, bismuth, cobalt, tin, and zinc in southern Congo. The history-changing find, though, was high-grade uranium ore at Shinkolobwe in 1915. The real interest at the time was not in uranium—it had no particular use—but in radium, the element the Curies discovered and made famous. It was being used as a miracle treatment for cancer and was the most valuable substance on earth—30,000 times the price of gold. Radium is produced from the decay of uranium aft er several intermediates (see Figure 8.3 in Chapter 8), so it is inevitable that radium and uranium will be located together. The true value of the uranium would not be apparent until the advent of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb during World War II. Edgar Sangier, the director of Union Miniere, which owned the mine at Shinkolobwe, hated the Nazis and was afraid—correctly, as it turned out—that they would invade Belgium. In 1939, as Europe was sliding into war, Sangier learned that uranium could possibly be used to build a bomb. He secretly arranged to transfer 1,250 tons of the uranium ore out of the Congo to a warehouse in New York City. There it sat until 1942, when General Leslie Groves, the man whom President Roosevelt put in charge of the Manhattan Project, found out about it and arranged to purchase it.

Overview of Radium Legacies in Belgium

The Belgian metallurgical company, Union Minie`re, has been a key-player in the sector of radium production between 1922 and 1969. The factory based in Olen has extracted radium from minerals and produced radium sources during that period. The radium production facilities have been dismantled in the 70s but legacies of the former production have still to be remediated. An overview of these legacies and of their radiological characteristics will be given. Next to the sites related to radium production, other radium legacies are related to NORM industries, essentially from the phosphate sector (phosphogypsum and CaF2 stacks).

Improved Tank Car Safety Research

Three recent accidents involving the release of hazardous material have focused attention on the structural integrity of railroad tank cars: (1) Minot, ND, on January 18, 2002; (2) Macdona, TX, on June 28, 2004; and (3) Graniteville, SC, on January 6, 2005. Each of these accidents resulted in fatalities. Research is being conducted to develop strategies for improving railroad tank cars so they can maintain tank integrity in severe accidents. A collaborative effort called the Next Generation Rail Tank Car (NGRTC) Project intends to use these research results to help develop improved tank car designs. Dow Chemical Company, Union Pacific Railroad, and Union Tank Car Company are the industry sponsors of the NGRTC Project. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Transport Canada participate in the NGRTC project through Memoranda of Cooperation. FRA and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration intend to use these research results to support rulemaking. The approach taken in performing this research is to define the collision conditions of concern, to evaluate the behavior of current design equipment in these scenarios, and to develop alternative strategies for increasing the maximum impact speed for which tank integrity is maintained. The accident scenarios have been developed from a review of accidents and are intended to bound the range of main-line accidents that can lead to a release of hazardous material from a tank car. The accident scenarios and collision modes have been used to define car-to-car impact scenarios. These car-to-car impact scenarios define the conditions under which the commodity must be contained. The impact scenarios are being used to evaluate the integrity of current design and improved design tank cars. Full-scale impact tests are also being conducted, to help validate modeling of the baseline equipment. The models have been refined based on the test results. The models are now being applied to develop the improved equipment designs. This paper describes the overall research framework and provides an overview of the research done to date, as well as the planned efforts.