Documents University of Michigan Press 6 results

"In February 2018, 35,000 public school educators and staff walked off the job in West Virginia. More than 100,000 teachers in other states--both right-to-work states, like West Virginia, and those with a unionized workforce--followed them over the next year. From Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma to Colorado and California, teachers announced to state legislators that not only their abysmal wages but the deplorable conditions of their work and the increasingly straitened circumstances of public education were unacceptable. These recent teacher walkouts affirm public education as a crucial public benefit and understand the rampant disinvestment in public education not simply as a local issue affecting teacher paychecks but also as a danger to communities and to democracy.

Strike for the Common Good gathers together original essays, written by teachers involved in strikes nationwide, by students and parents who have supported them, by journalists who have covered these strikes in depth, and by outside analysts (academic and otherwise). Together, the essays consider the place of these strikes in the broader landscape of recent labor organizing and battles over public education, and attend to the largely female workforce and, often, largely non-white student population of America's schools."

"As corporations and government agencies replace human employees with online customer service and automated phone systems, we become accustomed to doing business with nonhuman agents. If artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances as today's leading researchers predict, these agents may soon function with such limited human input that they appear to act independently. When they achieve that level of autonomy, what legal status should they have? Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White present a carefully reasoned discussion of how existing philosophy and legal theory can accommodate increasingly sophisticated AI technology. Arguing for the legal personhood of an artificial agent, the authors discuss what it means to say it has ""knowledge"" and the ability to make a decision. They consider key questions such as who must take responsibility for an agent's actions, whom the agent serves, and whether it could face a conflict of interest."

"In a global economy, workers must assert their collective rights as workers in order to win human rights as individuals. 'Workers of the world, unite!' Karl Marx's famous call to action still promises an effective means of winning human rights in the modern global economy, according to economist Richard P. McIntyre. Currently, the human rights movement insists upon a person's right to life, freedom, and material necessities. In democratic, industrial nations such as the United States, the movement focuses more specifically on a person's civil rights and equal opportunity.The movement's victories since WWII have come at a cost, however. The emphasis on individual rights erodes collective rights - the rights that disadvantaged peoples need to assert their most basic human rights. This is particularly true for workers, McIntyre argues. By reintroducing Marxian and Institutional analysis, he reveals the class relations and power structures that determine the position of workers in the global economy. The best hope for achieving workers' rights, he concludes, lies in grassroots labor organizations that claim the right of association and collective bargaining. At last, an economist offers a vision for human rights that takes both moral questions and class relations seriously."