The Decline of Organized Labour and How its Current Trajectory Can Be Reversed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is an apocryphal story that Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought about Western Civilization. He is said to have responded that it would be a good idea. That is pretty much my view of the labour movement today: despite decades of being on the receiving end of ferocious attacks from corporations and governments, organized labour is not functioning like a movement at all. The experience of unions in the communications sector provides a startling illustration of the prevailing situation, showing that even though unions have faced staggering challenges over the last 25 years, they have not made a serious effort to come to grips with the destructive, anti-social forces that are arrayed against them. Instead of responding as a movement, they have chosen to function as individual, isolated organizations and have been picked off one by one as a result. Due to the particular conditions that prevailed in the telecommunications sector for much of the post-war era, workers who laboured there enjoyed a relatively privileged existence. Employed by highly regulated private and public monopolies, they earned wages that were superior to those of other organized workers and their job security allowed them to retire with decent pensions after a lifetime on the job. But this comfortable relationship began to unravel with the 1984 break-up of the at&t company in the US, an event that proved to be the opening salvo in a series of massive changes that have rocked the sector ever since. In a forerunner of the wider process that has since come to be known as globalization, the corporate sector forced governments to abandon social oversight of the telecommunications industry and to allow competition in the highly profitable long distance part of the business so that companies could reduce their communications costs and the industry could be reshaped to address their organizational needs. presentation / presentation
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".