Showing titles in Labour & Industrial Relations

Anne Helen Petersen identifies burnout with moving clarity - what it feels like and how it manifests across communities. Through her own experience, original interviews and detailed analysis, she traces the institutional and generational causes of burnout. And, in doing so, she helps us to let go of our guilt and imagine a possible future.

A good society needs a balance between aptitudes relating to head (cognitive), hand (manual/craft) and heart (caring/emotional). In recent decades in Western societies, they have got out of kilter. One form of human aptitude - cognitive ability - has become the gold standard of human esteem. The cognitive class now shapes society, and largely in its own interests: in the knowledge economy, the over-expansion of higher education and in the very idea of a successful life. To put it bluntly: smart people have become too powerful.

Discover how you can successfully manage your time as a busy mom to make sure you win at life every day. If you’re like many women, time management is a constant struggle for you as you juggle the demands of daily life...and you need to be Superwoman if you’re going to balance all your commitments and give everything your very best. But if your superpowers are waning, and you’re struggling to cope with your entire workload, you’ll become an unhappy, stressed-out mom - not good for you, your kids, or your partner.

A shocking investigative journey into the way the resource trade wreaks havoc on Africa, The Looting Machine explores the dark underbelly of the global economy. Africa: the world's poorest continent and arguably its richest. While accounting for just 2 percent of global GDP, it is home to 15 percent of the planet's crude oil, 40 percent of its gold, and 80 percent of its platinum. A third of the Earth's mineral deposits lie beneath its soil. But far from being a salvation, this buried treasure has been a curse.

*Wage-Labour and Capital* by Karl Marx is a foundational text in Marxist economic theory that explores the exploitative dynamics of capitalist societies. Originally delivered as a series of lectures, the work delves into the relationship between wage laborers and capitalists, emphasizing how workers sell their labor power for wages that merely sustain their existence, while the capitalists appropriate the surplus value created by the workers.

An expansive and accessible account of anarchism as a theory of practice.

For women in tech, Silicon Valley is not a fantasy land of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops, where millions of dollars grow on trees. It's a "Brotopia", where men hold all the cards and make all the rules. Vastly outnumbered, women face toxic workplaces rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and network at sex parties. In this powerful exposé, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals....

The shift toward automation is about to create a tsunami of unemployment. Not in the distant future - now. One recent estimate predicts 13 million American workers will lose their jobs within the next seven years - jobs that won't be replaced. In a future marked by restlessness and chronic unemployment, what will happen to American society? In The War on Normal People, Andrew Yang paints a dire portrait of the American economy. Rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation software are making millions of Americans' livelihoods irrelevant.

A compelling investigation into the phenomenon of dirty work - labour that society considers essential, but morally compromised. Guards who patrol the wards of America's most violent and abusive prisons. Undocumented immigrants who man the 'kill floors' of industrial slaughterhouses. Roustabouts who drill for oil on offshore rigs. And drone operators who kill people from thousands of miles away. These are the essential workers we prefer not to think about.

The Communist Manifesto was first published in London in 1848, by two young men in their late 20s. Its impact reverberated across the globe and throughout the next century, and it has come to be recognised as one of the most important political texts ever written. Maintaining that the history of all societies is a history of class struggle, the manifesto proclaims that communism is the only route to equality, and is a call to action aimed at the proletariat. It is an essential listen for anyone seeking to understand our modern political landscape.

The Peter Kropotkin Anthology includes The Conquest of Bread, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Fields, Factories and Workshops, Appeal to the Young, and an original biography of Kropotkin titled The Life of Kropotkin. Kropotkin was a thought leader in communist anarchism and tirelessly approached a cause which he believed would benefit humanity and continued to inspire his fellow countrymen to join the movement until his death in 1921.

In this important book, an eminent authority presents a new perspective on affirmative action, investigating its actual consequences in the United States and in other countries where it has been in effect. Evaluating his empirical data, Thomas Sowell concludes that race preference programs worldwide have not met expectations and have often produced the opposite of what was originally intended.

The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means, we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world and what we choose not to bring into the world.

As two-income families find themselves ever more time-poor, many look to outsource to cleaners, nannies, and care workers. More and more, it would seem, people are finding themselves without either the emotional or the financial resources to take care of themselves and each other. The home, rather than an escape from the work and its pressures, is in fact an extension of it. After Work is a crucial corrective to this trend, extending its attention beyond paid jobs to the impact of domestic work upon familial relationships, social bonds, and our conceptions of domestic space.

A Washington Post reporter's intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin - Paul Ryan's hometown - and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class. This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its factory stills - but it's not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next, when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.

Rules to Win By: Participation and Power in Union Negotiations is a book for anyone who wants to understand how to build the power required to effectively challenge and reverse income inequality and attacks on democracy.

Look around you. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a futuristic notion. It's here right now - in software that senses what we need, supply chains that "think" in real time, and robots that respond to changes in their environment. Twenty-first-century pioneer companies are already using AI to innovate and grow fast. The bottom line is this: Businesses that understand how to harness AI can surge ahead. Those that neglect it will fall behind. Which side are you on?

Thirty years ago, almost nobody talked about the white working class: in the House of Commons and the House of Lords the term had been used just three times in the previous two decades. Brexit helped to turn the group into a towering social and political force. But, in the aftermath, one-third of the population has been reduced to a cartoon. Veteran Economist journalist Joel Budd has spent years travelling around Britain, from Teesside to the Isle of Wight, south Wales to Lincolnshire. In Underdogs he offers a sharp corrective to the familiar stereotype of the white working class.

On the Clock takes us behind the scenes of the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce to understand the future of work in America - and its present. Until robots pack boxes, resolve billing issues, and make fast food, human beings supervised by AI will continue to get the job done. Guendelsberger shows us how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest - and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity.

In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation.