Saturn\u27s Rings: What GM\u27s Saturn Project Is Really About

[Excerpt] In their listing of top news stories of 1985 in the economically depressed Youngstown-Warren area, local newspapers consistently listed Saturn mania near the top. In an effort to attract the Saturn project, the local community offered GM a sizable economic development package, organized a 100-car caravan to GM headquarters delivering 200,000 letters from local residents and school children, and bought billboard space and television time in Detroit. This continuation of Saturn mania belies the belief that it was an essentially harmless exercise in corporate public relations. Rather, there is much evidence to suggest that throughout the Saturn campaign GM misled the public about its intention to build an inexpensive small car; diverted public and union attention from its plans for plant closings, technological displacement and the importing of cars from its foreign subsidiaries; forced additional concessions that have weakened the UAW; and shaped the public debate surrounding U.S. economic decline and future economic development

Killing Jobs with Cooperation : the GM Memo

[Excerpt] As the UAW and General Motors prepare for difficult negotiations for a 1984 national contract, a leaked document by GM\u27s Vice-President of Industrial Relations Alfred Warren has severely embarrassed both company and union officials. The memo outlines a presentation made by Mr. Warren to GM Personnel Directors in October, 1983, and describes GM\u27s bargaining strategy and basic labor policy. The company\u27s goals include elimination of the cost-of-living allowance and productivity pay, and the institution of benefit co-payments; the elimination of local work rules and the expansion of outsourcing; the initiation of a two-tiered wage system; and the expansion of profit-sharing. The memo reveals that GM hopes to eliminate 80,000 to 100,000 jobs by 1986. To achieve these objectives, GM plans to elicit employee cooperation without surrendering traditional management rights. It hopes to replace formal bargaining with a continuous agreement and plans to launch a sophisticated public relations campaign to mold public opinion and to pressure the UAW into submission. So comprehensive and disturbing are GM\u27s plans that UAW President Owen Bieber, who supported concessions in 1982, has said that the document supports many of our worst suspicions about the motives and intentions of the General Motors Corporation. The implications of the document are far-reaching: American labor can expect employer belligerence in the foreseeable future

The Revitilization of Organized Labor in Youngstown

[Excerpt] From the Little Steel strikes of the 1930\u27s to the industrial strike at General Motor\u27s Lordstown complex in the early 1970\u27s, organized labor in the Youngstown area has been a force to be reckoned with in its efforts to protect its membership and improve the quality of life of working people. Yet, throughout the late 1960\u27s and 1970\u27s, the labor community increasingly suffered the ill-effects of business unionism. Business unionism\u27s preoccupation with economism and sectionalism caused the local labor movement to narrow its social focus and to become increasingly fragmented, insular and directionless. These inherent weaknesses became painfully obvious as corporate America systematically disinvested in the Youngstown area

The microscopic pathway to crystallization in supercooled liquids

Despite its fundamental and technological importance, a microscopic understanding of the crystallization process is still elusive. By computer simulations of the hard-sphere model we reveal the mechanism by which thermal fluctuations drive the transition from the supercooled liquid state to the crystal state. In particular we show that fluctuations in bond orientational order trigger the nucleation process, contrary to the common belief that the transition is initiated by density fluctuations. Moreover, the analysis of bond orientational fluctuations shows that these not only act as seeds of the nucleation process, but also i) determine the particular polymorph which is to be nucleated from them and ii) at high density favour the formation of fivefold structures which can frustrate the formation of crystals. These results can shed new light on our understanding of the relationship between crystallization and vitrification.Comment: to appear in "Scientific Reports

Importance of many-body correlations in glass transition: an example from polydisperse hard spheres

Most of the liquid-state theories, including glass-transition theories, are constructed on the basis of two-body density correlations. However, we have recently shown that many-body correlations, in particular bond orientational correlations, play a key role in both the glass transition and the crystallization transition. Here we show, with numerical simulations of supercooled polydisperse hard spheres systems, that the lengthscale associated with any two-point spatial correlation function does not increase toward the glass transition. A growing lengthscale is instead revealed by considering many-body correlation functions, such as correlators of orientational order, which follows the lengthscale of the dynamic heterogeneities. Despite the growing of crystal-like bond orientational order, we reveal that the stability against crystallization with increasing polydispersity is due to an increasing population of icosahedral arrangements of particles. Our results suggest that, for this type of systems, many-body correlations are a manifestation of the link between the vitrification and the crystallization phenomena. Whether a system is vitrified or crystallized can be controlled by the degree of frustration against crystallization, polydispersity in this case.Comment: To appear in J. Chem. Phys. for a special issue on the Glass Transitio

Understanding water's anomalies with locally favored structures

Water is a complex structured liquid of hydrogen-bonded molecules that displays a surprising array of unusual properties, also known as water anomalies, the most famous being the density maximum at about $4^\circ$C. The origin of these anomalies is still a matter of debate, and so far a quantitative description of water's phase behavior starting from the molecular arrangements is still missing. Here we provide a simple physical description from microscopic data obtained through computer simulations. We introduce a novel structural order parameter, which quantifies the degree of translational order of the second shell, and show that this parameter alone, which measures the amount of locally favored structures, accurately characterizes the state of water. A two-state modeling of these microscopic structures is used to describe the behavior of liquid water over a wide region of the phase diagram, correctly identifying the density and compressibility anomalies, and being compatible with the existence of a second critical point in the deeply supercooled region. Furthermore, we reveal that locally favored structures in water not only have translational order in the second shell, but also contain five-membered rings of hydrogen-bonded molecules. This suggests their mixed character: the former helps crystallization, whereas the latter causes frustration against crystallization.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

New Working-Class Studies

In this book, contributors trace the origins of the new working-class studies, explore how it is being developed both within and across fields, and identify key themes and issues. Historians, economists, geographers, sociologists, and scholars of literature and cultural studies introduce many and varied aspects of this emerging field. Throughout, they consider how the study of working-class life transforms traditional disciplines and stress the importance of popular and artistic representations of working-class

Assessing the role of static lengthscales behind glassy dynamics in polydisperse hard disks

The possible role of growing static order in the dynamical slowing down towards the glass transition has recently attracted considerable attention. On the basis of random first-order transition (RFOT) theory, a new method to measure the static correlation length of amorphous order, called "point-to-set (PTS)" length, has been proposed, and used to show that the dynamic length grows much faster than the static length. Here we study the nature of the PTS length, using a polydisperse hard disk system, which is a model that is known to exhibit a growing hexatic order upon densification. We show that the PTS correlation length is decoupled from the steeper increase of the correlation length of hexatic order, while closely mirroring the decay length of two-body density correlations. Our results thus provide a clear example that other forms of order can play an important role in the slowing down of the dynamics, casting a serious doubt on the order agnostic nature of the PTS length and its relevance to slow dynamics, provided that a polydisperse hard disk system is a typical glass former

Role of bond orientational order in the crystallization of hard spheres

With computer simulations of the hard sphere model, we examine in detail the microscopic pathway connecting the metastable melt to the emergence of crystalline clusters. In particular we will show that the nucleation of the solid phase does not follow a two-step mechanism, where crystals form inside dense precursor regions. On the contrary, we will show that nucleation is driven by fluctuations of orientational order, and not by the density fluctuations. By considering the development of the pair-excess entropy inside crystalline nuclei, we confirm that orientational order precedes positional order. These results are at odd with the idea of a two-step nucleation mechanism for fluids without a metastable liquid-liquid phase separation. Our study suggests the pivotal role of bond orientational ordering in triggering crystal nucleation.Comment: Proceedings for the the 4th International Symposium on "Slow Dynamics in Complex Systems", Sendai, Japa