Beneath the conservative-versus-liberal parrot-speak is a coherent, timely conversation about the power and relevancy of...
An entrepreneur’s account of building a nationwide cleaning business and undergoing an attempt by Service Employees International Union to unionize his workers.
If readers skip the prologue—which compares union organizing tactics with Nazi Germany—they can start with the many issues that merit discussion. Bego (Devil at My Doorstep, 2009) launched a commercial cleaning services company, Executive Management Services, in 1989. Based in Indianapolis, the company grew to more than 5,000 employees in locations throughout the country. Its increasing visibility attracted the attention of Service Employees International Union, and thus began a five-year battle for the hearts and minds of Executive Management Services’ workers. Labor unions’ historical efforts to protect workers from unsafe working conditions as well as ensuring fair wages and job security account for positive changes in many American industries, and that’s not disputed here. The core questions Bego raises, however, are: What should the unions’ role be in this era of global economy; what are American workers’ rights regarding unionization; and what are the rights of entrepreneurs pursuing the American dream of business ownership? Bego posits that modern unions aim to increase their dues-paying memberships in order to sustain their own viability and influence legislation, regardless of workers’ genuine needs. The author also emphasizes a push to pass the Employee Free Choice Act—legislation that eliminates secret ballot elections used by workers to choose union representation—in light of the tactics used by SEIU to unionize employees who had not necessarily even invited SEIU to represent them. He asks excellent and valid questions, which elsewhere can often be obscured by partisan labeling. Bego notes in a statement to Congress, “Americans need to demand more nonpartisan openness, research, dialogue, and civility from their elected officials on both sides of the aisle.” Why wait to be elected?
Beneath the conservative-versus-liberal parrot-speak is a coherent, timely conversation about the power and relevancy of today’s labor unions.Pub Date: April 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1439285220
Page Count: 332
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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