Trade unions and worker movements in the North American communications industries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports on a project that examines trends in North American labour movements, and specifically in the workforce, in the converging communications, culture, and information technology sectors. Drawing on documentary evidence and interviews, the paper concentrates on two important developments: efforts to unify workers across the knowledge and communication industries, and the rise of worker movements that operate in conjunction with, but outside, the formal trade union structure. The paper begins by situating these developments within debates about labour in a ‘post-industrial’, ‘information’, or ‘network’ society. It describes the challenges facing workers in the knowledge sector, especially rapid technological change, massive corporate consolidation, the rise of the neo-liberal state and divisions between cultural and technical workers in the knowledge sector. The paper proceeds to describe how North American workers are responding within the traditional trade union system, primarily through forms of consolidation or trade union convergence (such as the Communication Workers of America), and also through worker movements operating outside the traditional trade union system in the information technology and cultural sectors (for example WashTech and the National Writers Union). The paper concludes by addressing the significance of these developments. Do they portend a rebirth of North American labour activism or do they represent its last gasps?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".