Books on the topic 'Workers' union structure'

This chapter compares union responses and the emergence of workers’ struggles in two segments of the European logistics sector: warehousing in Italy and parcel delivery in Austria. The two case studies show striking similarities both in the management of the supply chain, resulting in highly segmented labour markets, and in the two sub-industries’ exposure to workers’ positional power. Unions’ success and failure to organize workers in logistics supply chains and in the effective adoption of strategies to contest casualization and fragmentation are related to differences in the dominant or competing union structures to incorporate precarious workforce groups, and in building upon inclusive worker solidarity and direct action. In Italy, rank-and-file unions approach workers directly, providing labour law knowledge and militant experiences. In Austria, unions stick to their old recipes of corporatist inclusion, act defensively, and leave precarious workers to their own devices in their struggles.

Building Power from Below analyzes the success of Walmart workers in Chile. Retail and warehouse workers have achieved the seemingly unachievable. They have organized Walmart. How do we explain workers’ success in Chile, the cradle of neoliberalism, in challenging the world’s largest and most antiunion corporation? Chilean workers have spent years building grass roots organizations committed to principles of union democracy. While both retail and warehouse workers have successful unions, they have built different organizations due to their industry, workforce, and political histories. The independent retail worker unions are best characterized by what I call flexible militancy. These unions have less structural power, but have significant associational and symbolic power. While they have made notable bread and butter gains, their most notable successes have been in fighting for respect and dignity on the job. Warehouse workers by contrast have significant structural power. Their unions are best characterized by what I call strategic democracy. Their structural power has offered them the opportunity to “map production” and build strategic capacity. They have been especially successful in economic gains. While the model in Chile cannot necessarily be reproduced in different countries, we can certainly gain insights from their approaches, tactics, and strategies.

Working-class formation in the United States was considerably complicated by waves of immigration from the mid nineteenth century down to the present. In some cases, the ethnic differences lead to conflict, in others to “ethnically hybrid” cultures based on class. Labor and radical organizations often played an important role in acculturating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrant workers. The kind of ethic “niches” in earlier industrial occupational structures can also be found in the employment available to immigrants today. By the late twentieth century, union organization was also complicated by shifts in the occupational structure from manufacturing to service jobs, yet much of the meager growth in union organization in recent decades has come in service industries with heavy concentrations of immigrant workers.

Labor unions remain the largest membership-based organizations in major North American cities. As unions become more involved in the daily life of the city, they find themselves confronting the familiar dilemma of how to fold union priorities into broader campaigns that address non-union workers and the lives of union members beyond the workplace. If we are right to believe that the future of the labor movement is an urban one, union activists and staffers, urban policymakers, elected officials, and members of the public alike will require a fuller understanding of what impels unions to become involved in urban policy issues, what dilemmas structure the choices unions make, and what impact unions have on the lives of urban residents, beyond their members. This book serves as a road map toward both a stronger labor movement and a socially just urbanism. It presents the findings of a collaborative project which investigated how and why labor unions were becoming more involved in urban regulation and urban planning. It assesses the effectiveness of this involvement in terms of labor goals as well as broader social consequences of union strategies, such as expanding access to public services, improving employment equity, and making neighborhoods more affordable. Focusing on four key economic sectors (film, hospitality, green energy, and child care), the book reveals that unions can exert a surprising level of influence in various aspects of urban policymaking and that they can have a significant impact on how cities are changing and on the experiences of urban residents.

Like capitalist societies, the Soviet Union and the Soviet-type societies of Eastern Europe showed a high degree of social stratification and inequality. By the 1960s the rapid upward mobility of worker and peasant children in the intelligentsia and Party hierarchy had noticeably slowed, and an inherited class structure emerged. Because privileges in the Soviet Union were only weakly monetarized, and wealth could not be accumulated or inherited, privileged groups perpetuated themselves mainly through the use of internal ‘connections’ and by ensuring their offspring preferential access to higher education through which they would secure elite positions. We also see important differentiations within the workforce: urban vs. rural workers; ‘core’ workers vs. migrants; and men vs. women. China prior to the reform movement displayed a similar overall picture, with, however, some radical differences. Under Mao the gap in living standards between Party officials and ordinary workers was much more narrow than in the USSR, while the Cultural Revolution blunted attempts to ensure the reproduction of social stratification via access to higher education.

This chapter examines the ways in which job segregation by gender is mirrored in the structure of organized labor, by analyzing patterns of union membership by gender, occupation, and industry in the early twenty-first century. It first looks at data on workforce feminization and segregation as well as evidence of women's view of organized labor and receptivity to unionism before comparing the composition of union membership to that of the U.S. labor force as a whole. It shows that there are two separate worlds of unionism, one male and one female, each with a distinctive culture and political orientation. Finally, it considers the fact that the labor movement is highly segmented along gender lines, along with its implications for understanding the dynamics of the relationship of women workers to unions in an era of labor movement decline.

This book contributes to important discussions on gender inequality in the present-day film and television industries and labour movement through an historical analysis of women workers and their trade union in the British film and television industries from 1933 to 2017. This book concentrates on the three iterations of the technicians’ union: the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT) (1933-56), the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) (1957-91), and the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union (BECTU) (1991-2017). Drawing on previously unseen archival material and oral history interviews with activists, it casts new light on women’s experiences of union participation and feminism over nine decades. This book advances three key arguments in relation to its central themes: the operation of a gendered union structure, women’s activism, and the relationship between class and gender in the labour movement. Firstly, it argues that a gendered union structure was institutionalised from the union’s establishment and maintained through a belief system that women’s issues were not trade union issues. Secondly, it argues that separate self-organisation was essential to women’s activity within the gendered union structure as it provided an essential space and voice for women to discuss their gender-specific concerns, develop consciousness and skills and formulate policy. It further emphasises the importance of external feminist allies to women’s union activity. Thirdly, it argues that class differences between middle-class women in film and television production and working-class women in the laboratories informed the direction of women’s activity at its height during the 1970s and 1980s.

This chapter is about 9to5, an association founded by women office workers in Boston in 1973 who pioneered a new form of labor organizing. The young women built on new consciousness from the women’s movement to use affirmative action suits, public opinion, and novel organizing tactics to win power in Boston’s banks, insurance companies, and universities. In 1975, the women formed a sister union, Local 925, with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). They then replicated this dual structure on a national level by the end of the 1970s.

This chapter speaks to scholars in the field of communication studies, surveying literature on organizational democracy, storytelling, and worker voice. It first discusses the unique contributions of the present case study, unusual in its focus on labor unions as sites of activity and agency, to academic work on worker voice and democracy in workplace institutions. The gains won during contract struggles and strikes reveal how, ultimately, worker agency is a function of both communicative practice and economic clout. Second, it brings the author's past scholarship in rhetorical studies to bear on the union dissident activity at Boeing. This part of the chapter emphasizes the importance of a dialectical theory regarding the interaction of structure and agency. It argues that the gaps and contradictions between lived experience of exploitation and the discourses that justify or overlook that exploitation are resources for critique and action. For both organizational communication and rhetorical studies, the present case forces the recognition that worker agency is a combination of communication and clout.

This chapter examines the new neoliberal phase of corporate restructuring, which is producing a new foreign workforce that will have even less power than undocumented workers today. The rise of guest worker programs is an integral component of a dramatic shift in the global division of labor, perpetuated through technological advances, which permits corporations to deskill many professional jobs and reduce the number of workers necessary to perform tasks, and relies increasingly on low-skilled labor. In this hostile environment, the working class and organized labor in the United States and throughout the world must search for a means to counter neoliberal reforms that only benefit corporations at the expense of workers everywhere. But unions must reject business as usual and new forms of labor organizations rooted in nonhierarchical structures must emerge to mobilize workers in the United States and throughout the world.

The European Union: How does it work? provides an introduction to the European Union's structure and operations. Chapters cut through the complexity to explain how the EU works in practice. This edition of this text reflects the ongoing changes in the EU in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, and the global context in which the EU exists. It also features expanded coverage of theories of European integration and policy making, and considers the hugely topical debate about the United Kingdom's future in the EU.

This chapter shows that, after mass production undermined and assailed their manhood, auto workers attempted to reassert or to reclaim it in numerous ways, some positive and some negative. They relied on shop traditions, some old and some new, to regain control over their working lives. They looked to and worked to build unions that would provide dignity, a structure to resist hated changes, and a family wage to enhance their personal and economic situations. They reveled in the sexual dimension of manhood in their ribald conversations on the shop floor and in the commercialized and sexual venues of the bachelor culture. As the Great Depression arrived and deepened, they would return to industrial unionism to mitigate the worst of the managerial abuses and would build a dense white and male culture at the workplace.

Feminist struggles for better jobs and rights at work shaped women’s labor history, a project that proclaimed that the history of work and workers was incomplete without understanding the relationship between unpaid domestic labor and employment. Despite the uneven trajectory of women’s labor in a diverse nation, three major themes characterize the history of gender, work, and capitalist development. First, the persistent power of gender on the structure of work meant that employers and policymakers classified women’s labor as unskilled, supplemental, and an extension of women’s “natural” roles as wives and mothers. Second, women’s calls for dignity and improved wages and working conditions included ethnic associations, women’s clubs, and mixed-sex and women-only unions. Third, state policies offered some women protection but made few strides toward equity, which would require acknowledging women’s differential family responsibilities and establishing decent standards for all workers, including those employed in households and in agriculture.

This chapter reuses interviews conducted in 1985–8 for Paul Thompson’s ‘100 Families’ study to examine interviewees’ thoughts about class in the middle of the Thatcher decade. It finds that ambivalence and ordinariness were key themes in the discussions of many. Many did not want to class themselves, for ‘class talk’ was associated with snobbishness, superior and inferior attitudes, and because many thought that changes in the occupational structure, housing, and lifestyles had created a large ‘ordinary’ group in the middle of society: not workless but also not privileged. Some interviewees confidently claimed a working-class identity; this was usually the case where individuals had trade union experiences and/or a close-knit, working-class community to draw on. Among younger generations, however, some said that, though older class markers had disappeared, new ones had grown up to take their place.

This epilogue reflects on the legacy of Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway. It begins with a discussion of some valuable insights that the two men's experience provides. As far back as the 1960s, Gibbons and Calloway lamented the stagnation of union organizing amid structural changes in the economy that were diluting labor's strength. They thought creatively about how the Teamsters could exercise decisive economic leverage, and their concept of treating workers as total persons might find new political resonance in tackling the work–family divide that has arisen as dual earner families have become a social norm. The epilogue also considers several sobering aspects of Gibbons and Calloway's careers, including the short-lived successes of total person unionism as well as its limited reach, both within St. Louis and elsewhere. Finally, it suggests that Gibbons and Calloway's most powerful legacy was their insistence on the essential interrelationships between work, citizenship, and democracy.

This book provides for the first time an accessible, comprehensive study of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 (1977). One of Schnittke’s best-known and most compelling works, the Concerto Grosso no. 1 sounds the surface of late Soviet life, resonating as well with contemporary compositional currents around the world. This innovative monograph builds on existing publications about the Concerto Grosso no. 1 in English, Russian, and German, augmenting and complicating them. It adds new information from underused primary sources, including Schnittke’s unpublished correspondence and his many published interviews. It also engages further with his sketches for the Concerto Grosso no. 1 and contemporary Soviet musical criticism. The result is a more objective, historical appraisal of this rich, multifaceted composition. The Concerto Grosso no. 1 provided a utopian model of the contemporary soundscape. It was a decisive point in Schnittke’s development of the approach he called polystylism, which aimed to contain in a single composition the wide range of contemporary musical styles, including jazz, pop, rock, and serial music. Thanks to it and his other similar compositions, Schnittke became one of the most-performed and most-recorded living composers at the end of the twentieth century. The novel structure of this book engages the Concerto Grosso no. 1 conceptually, historically, musically, and phenomenologically: the six movements of the composition frame the six chapters. The present volume thus provides a holistic accounting of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, its influences, and its impact on subsequent music making in the Soviet Union and worldwide.

Community development takes place in contested spaces in which the interests of people living, working and surviving in communities come up against the interests of powerful groups and classes in the structures of exploitation, colonisation and neoliberalism. Where community development practices respond to issues of environmental concerns, this brings an additional dimension as ‘the environment’ becomes another arena for contestation. This book aims to draw on two essential sources for understanding this conflict. One source is in the rich yet conflicted theoretical resources which have developed through academic labour around analysing the social practices of community development, popular struggle and environmental justice. The second fundamental source is the intellectual work of ordinary people engaged in such material struggles to change the world from where they live and work and make community; people who are not employed in academic labour but who, as Gramsci highlighted, are critical thinking intellectuals without whose analytical resources emancipatory politics is not possible. This includes the struggles of activist-academics (such as the editors) seeking to learn from their own engagement with popular movements. This volume therefore works in the dialogical space between knowledges of struggle and of the academy in order to critique and inform the practices of community development professionals, academics, trade union organisers, social movements, activists and ordinary people engaged in the pursuit of justice in a range of contexts in which the messy, imprecise and contested processes of community, development and environment interact.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.