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a little lighter, gayer, 'poppier', and more accessible than what a lot of us are probably used to, but excellent nonetheless. quicksand + jane's addiction + melvins + whatever else with a drunken, belligerent joe preston on bass.
Metal Album Reviews[RSS]
TORCHE is one of the best bands I've heard in a long time. This album is perfect for what I've been looking for. The first album was good, but the poppy vocals threw me off to begin, but now I love them. In Return brought less of the vocals to induce a more doomy and trance-inducing feel, almost in a Neurosis kind of way.
There were show fliers up for a band called Torche at my college (Buffalo State) that were really cool with flaming whales falling from the sky onto houses. They were bizarre and screen printed, so I took one and the same day was given a copy of this CD while cleaning out a back room at the college radio station. I popped it in and listened to the first song. I was like "sabbath!" I expected this because of the promotion company being named after sabbath. Then I listened to the rest of the CD later and thought "helmet!" This is a kick ass CD. It isn't the best modern metal band on earth, but anyone into any kind of fairly slow paced (though they do move around) stoner metal influenced more by sabbath than maiden, this is a great disk to pick up. I only wish I would have had enough money to go to the show, which is in 2 days. Damn!
It's pretty dumb that this has been out for months and no one has reviewed it yet! Now that I have that off my chest…Any fan of heavy rock from Sabbath to Qotsa to Helmet to Sunn 0))) needs to own this disc now! Those familiar with Steve's former act FLOOR should know what to expect from this, but it's got alot more going on than the aforementioned. Guitars and bass tuned to shuttle launch, giant sounding drums, and early Helmet styled vocals…Stoner pop? Call it whatever you like, this album will not disappoint fans of creative heavy music, with tons of melodies that you would'nt expect from such a ridiculously heavy act! Buy this album now or miss out on one of the best of 2005 so far!!!
Clocking in at only about 30 minutes, this will leave you Foaming at the mouth for way more! absolutely what I needed in my ears right now, and for my personal taste's, right up my alley. To put it roughly, imagine if Paige Hamilton was KYUSS' lead singer… But even that cream dream does it no justice… This is definitely an album that needs to be heard, and even the most ADD'd out fans of Doom, Metal, Rock, Sludge can fit 30 minutes of Sonic bliss in their time budgets… Seriously, TORCH rocks!! m/.


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Durango History
Durango, Colorado sits in the midst of some of the world's most beautiful mountain scenery, a richness that is matched only by its colorful history.
Indeed, the hills were filled with silver and gold, and miners by the scores began to flock to the area in the 1870s. The town of Durango itself was the child of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad Company, established in 1879. Company management planned and laid out the charming downtown that remains today, though when the railroad first "arrived" in town on August 5, 1881, Durango was dubbed the "Smelter City" and "the new city in the wilderness," as it was host to the region's growing smelting, mining and agricultural economy.
With the then state-of-the-art rail transportation and the "quick money" made by the area's miners, enterprising merchants, saloon gals, ranchers and farmers soon settled into the valley, giving a balance to the city's economy and culture. The newcomers built churches, schools and many of the fine buildings and Victorian homes still standing today.
Durango was designed to be the most "up-to-date" city in Colorado. Nothing could compare to it, if her boosters had anything to say about it. Signs of progress began to appear everywhere in the late 1880s and early 1890s, including a grand hotel (the four-story brick Strater), electric lights with a home owned electric company, the telephone, an electric trolley and a three-story sky scraper with an electric elevator (Newman Building - 800 Main).
Over the years Durango became less and less dependent on mining, and increasingly diversified with tourism, oil & gas production, higher education, and clean light industry. Fort Lewis College contributes greatly to the stature and personality of the community.
The area's rich history actually predates the development of Durango by at least 1,300 years. The mild climate, fertile soils and abundant wild game first attracted the ancestral Puebloan culture around 700 AD. Some of the most spectacular and well-preserved Puebloan ruins in the United States are found within a 100-mile radius of the Strater Hotel. The government has declared many sites protected for the express purpose of studying the ancient inhabitants of this area.
The most famous site containing ruins of the complete Ancestral Puebloan development is, of course, Mesa Verde National Park. However, to the south are the Aztec Ruins, Chaco Canyon, and the Salmon Ruins that display the Ancestral Puebloan culture in its various stages of development and decline.
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CUT peppers into quarters; place in large bowl. Add mushrooms and 1/4 cup of the dressing; toss to coat. Meanwhile, preheat grill to medium heat.
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[Forthcoming in WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society Volume 11, Number 3, September, 2008.]
"Block hiked back to the city but wasn't doing well.
He said 'I'll join the union, the great AF of L.'
He got a job that morning, got fired by the night
He said, 'I'll see Sam Gompers and he'll fix that foreman right!'
Sam Gompers said, 'You see, you've got our sympathy.'
–From the lyrics to "Mr. Block" by Joe Hill.
In early June, I found myself in San Juan, Puerto Rico, awaiting a vote by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) about whether to expand its current experiment with call center servicing. On the eve of SEIU's 2008 convention, President Andy Stern told The New York Times: "We have a 1930′s teletype model of representation in the 21st century world. You can Google almost anything. But then you call your local union office and you have to push 1 or 2 and then you can't find someone who speaks the language you speak." To remedy this problem-real enough even to many English-speakers trying to reach a sympathetic union ear-the Stern administration proposed the following:
"During 2008 and 2009, we will work together to evaluate, test, and pilot member resource centers (MRCs). We will determine the most effective and efficient manner in which to implement MRCs and to provide high quality member representation…. across the union.
"By 2012, a majority of members will have 24/7 access to quality information and services from member resource centers….MRCs will meet union-wide standards for cost, quality of service to members, ease of access, multiple language capability, support available to member leaders and staff, and quality of data to support SEIU programs and strategies." (1)
Prior to their vote on Resolution 204, all 2,000 delegates were encouraged to "experience" the "Member Resource Center" themselves. A clever invitation was distributed (in English and Spanish) on a pink telephone message slip, which asked: " Are you tired of talking to machines? Leaving voice mail messages? Getting put on hold? Visit the MRC exhibit to find out how SEIU locals can improve member service and support stewards and other member activists." Those who inspected the roomful of call center equipment on display became eligible for a prize-"just for visiting"-and could put on head phones to hear a sample exchange between a caller and a union staffer. Computer screens displayed the kind of contract information that call center workers will have at their disposal to better handle individual queries (while updating a local's membership data base).
Delegates were also given a glossy 30-page report entitled, "The Union of the Future: Membership Action and Leadership to Win for Working People." This document is the "report and recommendations" of a fifteen-member SEIU committee, chaired by Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, that conducted a three-year inquiry into "local union strength."
During its study, the Burger panel was aided both by union advisors and a number of CEOs, corporate consultants, pollsters, and business school professors (from the Boston Consulting Group, the Beneson Strategy Group, X2 Technology, QB International, MIT's Sloan School of Management, and Peter Hart Research.) To "take a deeper look" at "the member experience across SEIU"-and the concerns of its servicing staff–Burger's committee also contracted with a Palo Alto, California-based firm called IDEO. The latter is "a world leader in innovation and design…known for working on products such as the Macintosh mouse and the Palm pilot."
The resulting committee report includes a section on the "near- death experience" of unions in Australia. There, anti-labor governments in power prior to last year introduced draconian legislation to curtail collective bargaining, dues check-off, and union density. "The combined effect of the conservative attack was that many unions lost half their membership within a very short time period." As part of their come-back strategy, the Aussies-according to SEIU-"reorganized representation using modern call center technology" so workers with a weakened shop-floor union presence could call "a central location for critical information and to file grievances." This new technology, in turn, enabled their unions to develop "improved member lists" and an "outgoing call" capacity which facilitated "better service, accountability, and consistent handling of worksite problems."
Aided by "experienced Australian union staff," SEIU's California public sector locals began partnering with the International union in 2006 "to create the largest most technologically advanced MRC yet." By the San Juan convention, it was projected that this Pasadena facility would "be serving more than 200,000 members from California locals 221, 721, 521, and 1021." What do these workers think of their new MRC so far? The "Union of the Future" report references a "member survey" conducted in April, 2008, the results of which supposedly "speak for themselves." On page 19 of the Burger report, there is a boxed summary of those results, with no supporting data and not even a footnote about the size of the sample or who questioned members about their level of customer "satisfaction." Nevertheless, it shows that 94 to 96 percent of all respondents "agree" with a series of positive statements about the quality of MRC access in Pasadena, its information provision, follow-up contacts, fulfillment of grievant expectations, and user willingness to refer co-workers to the center.
As with everything else proposed by Stern and Berger at SEIU's 2008 convention, the "ayes" prevailed when call center servicing came up for a vote on Tuesday, June 3. As their approved plan is further implemented, the 500,000 dues-payers "already served by a member resource center" nationwide will include many more. But Resolution 204 didn't pass without strenuous objections, on the convention floor and off, from a minority of delegates critical of the idea. As United Healthcare Workers (UHW) delegate Leslie Harding, a Kaiser HMO surgical technologist from Redwood City, California, wrote in her local's daily convention blog: "I never dreamed I'd see my own union imitate credit card companies, the IRS, and major insurers and try to turn us into 'dial a union.' Having a union is supposed to help us stand up to management, not just give us the ability to pick up a phone and call a 1-800 number. A union is not about long-distance representation from someone who's never set foot in your work-place, who doesn't know you or your manager, and who doesn't have any understanding of what goes on where you work."
At a UHW press briefing one day before the MRC vote, delegate Michael Fenison-a relatively new member of SEIU from a hospital in Inglewood,CA.-raised a process objection as well. He noted that SEIU's call centers aren't really being introduced "on a trial basis for the next two years." According to Fenison, "this resolution [204] is being forced down our throat….We're going to get call centers whether they work or not."
If You Have A Job Problem, Don't Let Your Fingers Do The Walking
Even before hearing and agreeing with the losing side of this debate in San Juan, I must admit to being a call center skeptic myself. This is not because of any great personal attachment to the dominant "model of representation" during the last century. Labor's 'teletype"-era methods have, after all, mainly involved routine and increasingly "professionalized" individual case-handling, rather than creative, militant direct action on the job. Nor is my problem with MRC's merely an allergic reaction to their purple packaging (ie the slick "new product roll-out" by Brother Stern in San Juan–although, in truth, that wasn't very confidence-inspiring either). Instead, my concerns are based on considerable experience dealing with the very entity that SEIU has so fervently embraced. As an organizer, grievance-handler, or negotiator for the Communications Workers of American (CWA) for 27 years, I've spent a lot of time in call centers, supporting unionized workers in their daily jousting with management about "service quality" and all the factors that affect it (like work organization and scheduling; training and equipment; coaching, monitoring, and the content of scripts; performance standards and productivity incentives; and even caller access to "foreign language queues.")
As suggested by the list of resource people in the aforementioned "Union of the Future" report, SEIU's call center pilot programs and big plans for their expansion seem very corporate-inspired. So I can't help wondering whether SEIU staffers would be quite as enthusiastic about the wonderful world of call centers if they'd spent as much time as I have, over the years, listening to the inflated service quality claims of companies like Verizon, which have a much bigger "customer base" than SEIU (not to mention far more operational experience servicing it over the phone). In CWA, there can be considerable interplay between habits of work formed in the "21st century" environment of telecom call centers and how a local union composed of customer service reps services its own members. To wit, I offer the cautionary (and instructive) tale of CWA Local 1400:
This local was born (via an NLRB vote) in 1980, with just 150 members at three New England Tel residential customer service centers in New Hampshire. Thanks to a strike-backed "bargaining to organize" campaign two decades ago, the local achieved, in 1994, a ten-fold increase in size within NYNEX, the company now known as Verizon. (2) By 2003, Local 1400 had more than 1,800 dues-payers spread out over four-states in a dozen Verizon call centers ranging in size from 50 to 500 workers. (It has since recruited additional members in wireless retail stores operated by AT&T Mobility). Unfortunately, under Local 1400′s increasingly domineering 20-year president, its steward system atrophied badly. Critical information was hoarded among the four full-time officers who worked out of a small rented office in New Hampshire, where grievance handling was tightly controlled. The top leadership had failed to recruit, train, and maintain a multi-location network of stewards and chief stewards. Rank-and-filers were not involved, to the degree they should have been, in the presentation of grievances. As a result, some stewards quit in frustration or disgust, while others felt ill-equipped to answer questions about the contract or handle the day-to-day problems of their co-workers.
As CWA's shop floor presence diminished, more members with a question or problem-being customer service reps on the phone all day themselves-began to pick up the phone and call the local's own 800 number. Throughout 1400, the habit of dealing directly with one of its four officers-or, more often just the president herself–began to spread. As the volume of calls to its de facto "call center" increased, more and more requests for help or information didn't get answered in timely fashion, or at all. As the longtime international rep assigned to the local, I began to get more of its "over-flow calls," to use Verizon jargon. Members called my CWA District 1 office in Massachusetts to determine the status of their backlogged grievances or arbitration appeals, hardship transfer requests, missing FMLA paperwork, or other matters. And none were very happy about the poor customer service they had received, while "in queue," after placing previous calls to the local.
This membership dissatisfaction became a deciding factor in the politics of the local in early 2003-during a hotly contested leadership election (that involved a D-1 supervised re-run because the first vote was stolen). 1400′s incumbent president was ousted, along with key allies who supported her approach. At my urging, one of the first things the new officers of the local did when they took over was to re-establish and strengthen the local's workplace steward network. This required recruiting and training new stewards, making sure they knew the contract and giving them the chance to enhance their skills and self-confidence by participating in worksite-level labor-management meetings. The local's rank-and-file executive board-previously underutilized in the grievance procedure-was redeployed to do more contract enforcement work alongside the stewards and elected chief stewards. A new system was developed to keep members better informed about the status of their grievances at each step of the process. For the first time in the local's history, grievants themselves were invited to participate in all three pre-arbitation steps of the procedure to help present their own cases (a change in the local's MO that was particularly upsetting to VZ labor relations personnel).
Workplace activists began to get a steady flow of information about their legal and contract rights. For the first time, CWA's internal organizing bible-"Mobilizing For Power"-was put in the hands of any member who wanted a copy. That frequently updated 54-page guide opens with the following news flash about the "servicing model" of unionism:
"CWA, like most unions, was organized on the basis of
member involvement. Fundamentally, a union's power
at any point in time is nothing more than the total energy
and support of its members who can be mobilized.
"The basic premise of mobilization is that we must return to our roots and commit to a strategy that rests on increasing our power through membership education and involvement.
We have become too reliant on the crafty union negotiator, the clever chief steward, and the experienced local president to solve our problems.
We can no longer solely rely on grievances, arbitrations or labor laws to achieve workplace justice." (3)
The newly-elected 1400 leaders did not hide out in the local's office, as their predecessors had done during the waning days of the old regime. Instead, they became highly visible and accessible to the membership by making frequent workplace visits to lay the groundwork for contract campaign activity related to 2003 regional bargaining with VZ, covering 75,000 workers from Maine to Virginia. (One building block of that campaign was a communications network, based on members' home email addresses that had to be systematically collected in workplaces by stewards signing co-workers up to become recipients of regular Unity@Verizon bulletins). Union sticker-wearing, group grievance-filing, informational picketing, and other displays of workplace solidarity (like wearing red every Thursday) also became the order of the day. When local bargaining started, the 1400 committee was expanded to include board members, as well as officers. And, for the first time in the local's 23-year history, working members were also invited to attend the negotiations as observers, on their own time.
But, at every call center the new officers visited, the message was the same: "Don't call the local when you have a problem-go to your steward first." The local's four elected full-timers (plus their experienced secretary) continued to get plenty of calls, of course-but not as many from members directly. Far more of their phone conversations were now with stewards, chief stewards, and Local 1400 V-Ps calling on a member's behalf for information or advice about how they should be handling that person's problem themselves. As this process of re-education and restructuring continued, the local's old dysfunctional division of labor was gradually replaced by a new and more effective one. For contract enforcement and membership mobilization purposes in 2003, Local 1400 now had 75 to 100 newly-empowered workplace activists to deploy, most of whom had previously felt sidelined and even alienated from the union. (Some even got very excited about and involved in a 2004 SEIU project, the short-lived Democratic presidential primary campaign of Howard Dean.) When reformers took over the local in 2003, they–as trained, experienced customer service reps themselves–could easily have continued the de facto call center servicing arrangement they inherited at Local 1400. They certainly would have handled its "call volumes" in more competent, diligent, and enthusiastic fashion than their jaded predecessors. Instead, the leadership a created a strong local detachment of what CWA calls its "stewards army"-which, for several years, injected new life into 1400 on the shop floor. (4)
SEIU's Rationale For MRC-Based Servicing
Now, any official supporter of MRC's in SEIU is likely to have several reactions to-and objections to the relevance of-the case study above. First, they would probably be very dismissive of the idea of even having a local with less than two thousand members. In the SEIU worldview, that's clearly not the kind of "scale" necessary to support massive new organizing and more successful political action. Structurally, smallness lends itself to a myopic and self-defeating preoccupation with "local union interests"–ie the workplace problems of "just us." As SEIU organizer and IEB member Stephen Lerner explained in a recent MRzine exchange, the "Justice For All" program adopted in Puerto Rico further shifts the union's focus away from "servicing and defending remaining islands of unionization. According to Lerner, "the most radical development from the SEIU convention is that delegates overwhelmingly voted to commit SEIU to changing the world, not just their worksites."
SEIU strategists might also question why CWA restricts itself to a talent pool of elected local leaders drawn primarily from the rank-and-file. After all, ordinary Verizon customer service reps-like SEIU-represented janitors, security guards, hospital and home care workers-may not be up to the task of running, by themselves, even a "small" local, much less creating a "21st Century" union. In SEIU today, there are statewide and multi-state "locals" with as many as 80,000 to 300,000 workers-bigger, in fact, than many national unions in the AFL-CIO. These affiliates tend to be run-for better or worse, depending on your point of view-in staff-dominated fashion. And 1.7 million member SEIU has led the way in recruiting former community organizers, campus activists, labor relations program grads, political operatives, and organizers from other unions to serve as staff members. Increasingly-as was evident at the SEIU convention–even the top elected leadership in many of its locals is not drawn from the working membership and, instead, often fits the demographics of the outside hires. These new recruits have been installed as local leaders after varying degrees of time on the union payroll as organizers, researchers, or reps-but sometimes only as little as several years. Frequent International union trusteeships, on-going local mergers, and membership transfers due to jurisdictional realignments (and/or the creation of new local franchises for headquarters favorites) have created many opportunities for upward mobility among the "best and brightest" in SEIU. (5)
The union's increasingly centralized organizational structure and "new class" of highly mobile, professional managers are much applauded in left-liberal political circles, plus parts of the business press. Both are viewed as critical components of what Stern calls "a culture of success"-rarely found anywhere else in today's labor movement. But even fans of the "SEIU model" for increasing union "density" and "market share" would have admit that the traditional mechanism for expressing rank-and-file dissatisfaction with the quality of day-to-day servicing-or contract bargaining outcomes-is, as a practical matter, not really available to mega-local members. Once their local union gets beyond a certain geographical scale and membership size, SEIU incumbents are fixed for life (unless challenged perhaps by a fellow officer or staff member or they, like UHW President Sal Rosselli, become foes of Stern). Certainly, the kind of rank-and-file reform campaign mounted successfully in 2003 by disgruntled working members of CWA Local 1400 would be hard to replicate in, say, 300,000-member United Healthcare East, the former NYC-based District 1199/SEIU, which now extends from Buffalo to Boston and all the way down to Baltimore.
In such mega-locals, not only are there no "general membership" meetings to attend-in any traditional sense of the term-where local-wide leaders can be questioned and like-minded co-workers rallied to the cause of holding the officialdom accountable. Hundreds of thousands of SEIU's newest members are also home-based workers who labor in non-traditional workplaces. There, they have far less immediate access to a steward (or co-worker of any type) than workers in the cubicle-filled world of a CWA call center or a state government office represented by SEIU.
So among the rationales for SEIU's shift to call center servicing is the challenge of being responsive to dues-payers who work in relative isolation from each other, and the need to free up resources to organize another 500,000 members in the next four years.
According to the Burger report, MRC's are already providing "great service" to "home care locals in California, Washington, Oregon, and Illinois….in an industry without common worksites." 80,000-member Local 32BJ in New York City-which extends from Hartford, Ct. to Washington, D.C.-claims to be getting 500,000 member calls a year already, regarding representation issues and benefit plan questions; as a result, more staff could be devoted to "organizing the largest contract action team ever in the commercial janitorial division" and "dramatically increasing member participation in COPE." A tri-state property services local based in the mid-west is said to have "a strong system of representation in place" thanks to both a 4-year old MRC and a companion "grievance center." "Not only have services improved" at Chicago Local 1 but more staff are now available for "crucial campaigns, including organizing 5,000 janitors in Houston." Overall, that local, headed by SEIU national V-P Tom Balanoff, reports being able "shift its staff focus from two-thirds representation to two-thirds union building."
In a June posting on a Labor Notes blog-set up to provide SEIU convention coverage–an anonymous SEIU staffer (who expressed agreement with some LN criticism of the union) defended these MRC results against "misleading" attacks from the left, inside and outside SEIU.
"The devil is in the details," he or she wrote, "but, all in all, call centers have been effective at some locals in freeing up some time for field reps and stewards to do more pro-active 'big picture' work."
"As it is implemented at Local 1 and planned in California, [the MRC] is to answer basic questions, determine if there is a possible grievance,etc. The point is to take some of the workload off the field reps and give them more time for actual organizing.
There will still be field reps out doing steward development, issue organizing, and there will still be a field rep for handling grievances, disciplinary cases, etc. and both will still work with stewards. The call center people will even have the contact info of stewards, and what level of training they have, and will refer some cases directly to those stewards." (6)
In the Burger report itself, there is a similar sketching out of an ideal scenario, in which call center-derived cost savings and greater staff efficiencies will make mobilization on the job and in the community more, rather than, less likely. Citing organizational synergies achieved in Australia, the report projects a rosy future in which members are "so strongly supported" by call centers that stewards and field staff can now "focus on building the union: identifying and developing leaders; organizing around workplace issues; fighting for better contracts, uniting more workers, and winning politically and in the community."
To bolster this point in San Juan, SEIU communications staffers not usually in the business of passing out material authored by the union's leading dissident gave the press UHW President Sal Rosselli's own 2007 report from "down under." Based on meetings he and other SEIUers had with the Queensland Public Sector Union (QPSU) and the Health Services Union (HSU), Roselli concluded that their "member service center and data base application innovations"-if coupled together and used appropriately-would "enable UHW to be more efficient and effective…increase member confidence and loyalty, achieve a more consistent level of representation," and "create permanent and comprehensive membership and employer files."
Call Centers And Their Discontents
If the future of call center servicing is indeed so bright, why are some in SEIU still not wearing shades-particularly in sunny California, an epicenter of its MRC experiment (where even UHW is now more critical of the concept, as applied so far). According to one San Juan convention guest, Jonathan Tasini–the Change-to-Win-friendly director of Labor Research Association (LRA)–SEIU marketing experts may have just dropped the ball. In a June 2, 2008 posting on his "Working Life" blog, Tasini lamented that the union had not done "a very good job of explaining how these call centers will operate." As a result, he noted, that "there has been much consternation about SEIU's proposal to…handle workplace and union issues" through its MRCs. After all, Tasini wrote, "when you say 'call center,' most people"- including himself -"think of some faraway operation" that's not always consumer-friendly during routine commercial transactions.
Unfortunately, some SEIU members are already experiencing what Tasini admits might be a downside of call center servicing-ie "members begin[ing] to feel distant from the union." For example, there are the 15,000 food service, housekeeping, and laundry workers around the country who belong to Service Workers United (SWU), a joint creation of SEIU and UNITE-HERE. Their employers-Sodexho, Compass Group, and Aramark-have developed a labor-management relationship with SWU's national union backers that has been much in the news lately. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report about the confidential "card check" deals that have enabled SEIU and UNITE-HERE to recruit new SWU members at locations determined by these outsourcing companies themselves. (7) In addition to "raising questions about union transparency, " reported The Journal, critics of these deals like SEIU Local 2007 President Zev Kvitky also object to their negotiated restrictions on workers rights. These curbs apply both at contract expiration (when workers are not allowed to strike) and during the contract term (when worker leafleting, picketing, and community outreach about job complaints or contract issues are also limited as part of the quid pro quo for union recognition).
So, while barred from engaging in normal membership mobilization
activity at contract time-under the terms of an agreement they are not allowed to see-who do cafeteria workers at Stanford University contact when they have a grievance? They call a call center. As Steve Franklin reported in The Tribune:
"About 100 food service workers at Santa Clara and Stanford Universities were moved two years ago from an SEIU local [715] to the new Service Workers United. They were not given the chance to vote on the move, and later didn't know whom to go to for help, Kvitky said.
"They were told to call an 800 number that would connect them to an official at the new organization's offices back east. "But they didn't get any calls returned," Kvitky said, adding that he decided to begin helping them. "I don't like saying it, but they weren't represented." (8)
A leader of the newly-formed SEIU Members for Reform Today (SMART), Kvitky based his convention opposition to call center servicing on the treatment of these workers whose Stanford cafeteria jobs have been contracted out to Bon Appetit, a subsidiary of Compass. Kvitky got involved because local servicing of SWU bargaining unit members around the country is itself "outsourced to the nearest UNITE-HERE or SEIU local," in this case his own higher education Local 2007. When cafeteria workers dealing with the SWU service center in New York were having a problem with what Verizon would call "customer mistreats," Kvitky placed a call on their behalf in his capacity as local president. His/their complaint was about a unilateral change to a higher cost health plan. He was told that, under the broad management rights clause in the SWU contract, nothing could be done about it.
At a statewide meeting of California SEIU dissidents last March, Kvitky expressed dismay at SWU representation in general-from its remote control bargaining to the absence of local steward structures and mechanisms for an effective rank-and-file voice in the union. "All of their issues are supposed to be handled through a national call center, " he said. "There's no way a call center is going to help these people. It's the closest thing I've seen in the labor movement to a company union." Kvitky also views SWU as another sign that "SEIU is headed toward becoming an AARP or Sierra Club-type organization, where members get an 800 number to call and a list of benefits. This model is antithetical to building a real, grassroots bottom-up movement."
In May of 2008, students involved in the Stanford and Santa Clara affiliates of United Students Against Sweatshops echoed Kvitky's criticism in a letter to Andy Stern protesting the fact that cafeteria workers on their campuses "have received little to no support from SWU" since being transferred into that nationwide "local." Joined by fellow students at UC-Irvine, they also objected to SEIU's attempt there to interfere with student backed-AFSCME Local 3299 organizing that succeeded in returning cafeteria staff to "a statewide master contract with 20,000 other University of California employees that gives them better wages and benefits and, most importantly, greater power." According to Dennys Lopez, Carla Osorio, and Ana Chirino-the three UC-Irvine Student-Workers Alliance members who signed the letter-SEIU tried to thwart their local coalition "strategy of pressuring the University to kick Aramark off campus and let these workers join Local 3299 as direct UC employees."
At Wesleyan University in Connecticut-in a campus building services unit with supposed access to SEIU Local 32BJ's call center in NYC-the janitors have similarly turned to students and direct action to help them deal with issues neglected by the union. As reported by Dan Clawson in The Next Upsurge, Wesleyan janitors first got organized, in 1999-2000, through a card check recognition process forced on the university after a campaign by students that included a building occupation.(9) By 2005, however, the latest janitorial contract-holder, ABM Janitorial Services, was increasingly annoyed by the regular intervention of Wesleyan's United Student Labor Action Coalition (USLAC) in on-going labor-management disputes. So ABM, a nationwide bargaining partner of SEIU, issued a directive in English and Spanish threatening "disciplinary sanctions" against any Wesleyan janitor who tried to address workplace problems outside the confines of the contract grievance procedure and/or with the help of campus allies.
To get faster results, janitors were in the habit of enlisting USLAC in joint protests over harassing supervisors and other contract violations because the standard refrain of their Hartford-based business agent was "just file a grievance over it." When Local 32BJ took no effective action to challenge the ABM memo that clearly interfered with the janitors' Section 7 right to engage in such "protected concerted activity," USLAC filed its own unfair labor practice charge alleging a violation of Sec. 8 (a) (1) of the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB agent investigating the case agreed that ABM's memo threatened unlawful retaliation against anyone who by-passed the grievance procedure and complained about a workplace problem to USLAC, a state or federal agency (like the NLRB), or even Wesleyan's own sub-contractor "Code of Conduct" compliance board. As part of a quick Board-negotiated settlement of the case, ABM was forced to rescind the memo. (10)
There is, therefore, a tension between traditional union grievance handling methods-whether or not they're enhanced by call center servicing-and the workplace reality that well-organized collective action still gets the best results, while building the union, from the bottom-up. At the statewide meeting of SEIU dissidents mentioned above-a March, 2008 gathering in Berkeley, sponsored by SMART and attended by some workers who later became SEIU convention delegates- a series of speakers vented against the Pasadena MRC. Among these critics of the call center servicing concept and its California implementation were state and county workers whose locals had, in several instances, been restructured and consolidated into much larger geographical entities. In fact, three of the four locals produced by this merger process and served by Pasadena–521, 721, and 1021-ended up electing delegates to the San Juan convention who joined the large UHW delegation in opposing various Stern proposals, including Resolution 204. (11)
Mike Donaldson, who works at Laney College in Oakland, went from a 35,000-member Local 790 that had a Bay Area focus, a "relatively democratic structure," and rank-and-file involvement to the new 55,000-member Local 1021. Despite promised "communication tools" like the MRC, he worries that members won't have the same 'connection to the union" now. "It's not just the aspect of losing local control," he says. "We're becoming spectators in our own union, passive consumers of the union product-and that's a serious problem."
Catherine Alexander, a Santa Clara County librarian and former SEIU chief steward shifted from Local 715 to 521, was first briefed on SEIU's call center project 2 and ½ years ago. Then, in the summer of 2007, she and other members learned that the MRC was being introduced, at great expense to her new local. In fact, she learned, money was diverted from the local strike fund to pay for 521′s call center servicing. (Local 521 President
Kristy Sermersheim downplayed this as a problem, explaining to a Fall, 2007, executive board meeting in Bakersfield, that work stoppages were no longer affordable in the local anyway, because of previous depletion of the fund. "We can give them [strikers] coffee and donuts for one day, "she explained. "But that's about it.") Alexander reports that the local's 2008 budget shows the new MRC system costing 521 an estimated $1.2 million at a time when it faces of deficit of nearly $2.8 million.
"I felt the whole thing was a slap in the face, " Alexander said. "As stewards, we've taken classes, learned to empower ourselves and helped our co-workers exercise their rights in the workplace." In a long posting on the SMART website (www.reformseiu.org), Alexander wrote: "Many of us feel that the call center system will depersonalize the union and remove the face-to-face trust gained while organizing and representing members on the job. We have grown our members' union loyalty and gained their confidence while standing with them during the worst times at their jobs."
According to longtime Local 1000 activist Joyce Thomas-Villaronga, a state corrections department worker, "SEIU doesn't have a good history of day-to-day representation, of handling the problems that we, as stewards and local officers, have to deal with…A lot of our longtime leaders have gotten frustrated and walked away." At the SMART meeting in March, she reported on her participation in a pre-convention session of an SEIU "member representation task force." There, she learned that her local's labor reps-fulltime paid staffers-will no longer handle grievances because that work will be shifted to the MRC. Instead, the reps will be shifted to internal organizing (in state worker units with many agency fee payers). She questioned the effectiveness of this redeployment on the grounds that working members would be more effective signing up their co-workers than paid staffers. "Members need to be more engaged and they should be the ones organizing other state workers while the staff should be doing professional representation work and mentoring stewards on how to write effective grievances, " she said. "We're not teaching enough of them how to write grievances."
Another call center critic, from southern California, is Arturo Diaz, a convention delegate who opposed Resolution 204 in San Juan. Diaz works as a computer programmer for Los Angeles County and was a rank-and-file executive board member of Local 660 before it was dissolved and merged into a new seven-county entity, 85,000-member Local 721. After that consolidation, 721 was run by a Stern-appointed interim president, Annelle Grajeda, the former staff director of 660, and "provisional board of directors" that she appointed. As of March, 2008, dissident members estimated that their local had already spent $360,000 on the Pasadena MRC. Like Alexander, Diaz doubts that this expenditure will be an adequate substitute for trained stewards and some of the experienced 660 staffers who were displaced by the merger of 660 into 721. One such casualty was Paul Krehbiel, a resident of Pasadena who has been a union activist for forty years and a frequent contributor to Labor Notes. As a 660 field rep and organizer, Kehbiel had focused on building large steward committees and promoting member activism on the job. (12) At the time of the merger, says Diaz, Krehbiel and other "popular, effective and active staff members were let go." Replacing them-in the local and, he believes, in the call center as well- are SEIU payrollers "who never had a real job and don't know anything about labor." Says Diaz: "I don't have anything against young people, but a lot of them are getting a big check now so their attitude [toward Grajeda] is 'Whatever you want me to do, boss'……When you're speaking with someone on the telephone, it's just too easy for them to say,'You don't have a grievance.' And that's the end of the story."
SMART member Dan Mariscal is a blue-collar worker for the City of Los Angeles and served as an SEIU steward for 18 years prior to his Local 347 being merged into the new 721. Mariscal doubts whether call center personnel will ever be as responsive to members as an elected (or even an appointed) steward who is their co-worker. He acknowledges that MRCs are designed to route calls to the "right people," in terms of second language or legal advocacy skills, but "not necessarily anyone knowledgeable about your particular contract." (13) During a post-convention tour of the Pasadena MRC in June, 2008, which included a meeting with its new director, Mariscal learned that the "Member Resource Organizers (MROs) employed there "have not worked in any of the [local] unions they handle," receive only three weeks of new hire training, and are "employed by the International, not the locals." According to Mariscal:
"There are accountability issues in that kind of arrangement. In the former Local 347, the staff was accountable to the member-
elected executive board. If a staff member wasn't 'cutting it,' the board could fire him/her and also approve his/her replacement. That's obviously not the case now…There is no evidence that our Los Angeles City employee worksites are stronger or better off than before the merger of Local 347 into 721."
The lack of personal connection between caller and call center employee seems to be the deciding factor in turning many UHW activists against MRC servicing. Although currently facing retaliatory downsizing by Stern, Oakland-based UHW is still a mega-local too, with nearly 150,000 members throughout California. (To learn more about why SEIU's third largest local was first threatened with trusteeship earlier this year and now the forced-transfer of 60,000 members to a more Stern-friendly local, see www.seiuvoice.org) (14) Despite the local's scale, its "member-leaders" believe UHW remains responsive to the rank-and-file because of their active role as workplace advocates. As Mel Garcia, a 30-year SEIU activist at Kaiser, explained to reporters at a UHW press briefing June 2, the very existence of elected worksite leaders "encourages co-workers to come to them because they are known, respected, and trusted. With call centers, you take away that face-to-face connection"
"How can any worker feel protected and supported," Garcia asked, "if they have to pick up a phone and call an 800 number, particularly in a discharge situation? That, to me, is not a union….If a member calls me or comes to my desk, they're going to say, 'Get back to me.' If you call someone on the phone in this big call center system, it will be very easy for your message to get lost and your call not returned. At Kaiser where I work, we would get so much push-back on such an idea." At the same pre-convention Q & A session with the press, Rosselli himself took a much harder line against MRC's than he did in his 2007 report from Australia. "We're not against new ideas for being more innovative and effective, as long as they work," the UWH president insisted. But the call center concept, as implemented now by SEIU nationally, "directly undermines building power for workers in the workplace."
The Transformational Potential Of Call Centers
In a lengthy pre-convention critique, entitled " 'Justice for All' 'or 'Control for Just Us,' " a UHW document elaborated on Roselli's point about the risk of shop-floor organization being eroded:
"Throughout SEIU's history, we have learned that powerful unions require trained and effective workplace leaders, strong shop-floor organization, and a culture of solidarity and action among members….[They] require stewards and member leaders
who can organized their co-workers, interpret and defend their contract, conduct issue fights, handle grievances and resolve problems. This combination of people, skills, organization, and culture allows members to build worker-led unions…"(15)
In contrast, Stern's call centers are designed "to dispense with workplace conflict administratively and re-construct the union as an issue advocacy organization to pursue priorities and execute campaigns in which workers would have little say." UHW points the finger at "a branding study" done for the International Union by "the Silicon Valley-based firm IDEO." According to UHW, this corporate consultant proposed that "SEIU should displace its employer relations work from the center of its membership activity, outsourcing worksite grievances to call centers, and other employer relations matters to top union officials…."-a recommendation reflected in 2008 convention-approved changes which introduce even more top-down control of SEIU bargaining.
In its worst case scenario, which may well be unfolding, UHW predicts that SEIU will "abandon the core purpose of the union in favor of using the employment nexus as an efficient means of securing dues check-off, mailing lists, phone lists, and e-mails, and a voter file." Emulating the AARP, MoveOn.org, and mega churches, the union could then "become the biggest, strongest, and best-funded issue advocacy organization in America, without worrying any longer about being an organization of workers, by workers and for workers."
At SEIU's 2008 convention in San Juan, about ten percent of the delegates objected to this disturbing trend. That minority is, however, much larger than four years ago when Stern's exercise of union restructuring power was challenged in San Francisco by a lone delegate, Massachusetts social worker and then-Local 509 president John Templeton. Shedding the traditional core functions of a union, in favor of the Sierra Club model, will not be an easy transition in the years to come-thanks to the emerging SEIU reform movement, anchored by UHW and now being spread to other locals via SMART. These purple dissidents have already mounted impressive popular resistance to Stern's steam-roller campaign for call center servicing. Architects of the MRC plan expect SEIU members to become such happy campers that more will enlist in external organizing drives, the Obama campaign and other union-backed electoral efforts, and issue-oriented lobbying by SEIU. No doubt many rank-and-filers will-if only because the union-minded don't need a call center to remind them about the consequences of declining density or four more years of Republican presidential rule. But the coming consumer backlash against the inevitable underperformance of union-wide call center servicing may turn the MRC's into a feeder system of a different sort. Instead of steering more workers toward officially sanctioned forms of union activism, call center dysfunction-and resulting member alienation–could produce more recruits for SEIU's nascent reform movement.
(1) "The Union of the Future: Membership Action and Leadership to Win for Working People," a June, 2008 report from SEIU's Local Union Strength Committee with recommendations for the union's 2008 convention.
(2) For more on Local 1400′s membership recruitment at Verizon, see Steve Early, "Membership-Based Organizing," pp. 82-103, in A New Labor Movement For The New Century, edited by Gregory Mantsios (New York:Monthly Review, 1998).
(3) "Mobilizing For Power," a publication of Communications Workers of America Education and Mobilization Department, 2004. (www.cwa-union.org)
(4) In his bid for re-election as president of Local 1400 in 2005, one-term reformer Don Trementozzi was supported by a majority of the Verizon workers in the local. But overall, he lost by less than 20 votes. His challenger's margin of victory was provided by a disgruntled 150-member non-telephone bargaining unit that has since departed, per mutual agreement, for the sunnier climes of the United Auto Workers. In Local 1400′s upcoming election, in the Fall of 2008, Trementozzi and his mobilization-oriented allies are favored to return to office. The #1 issue in this year's campaign is the current incumbent's disastrous return to Local 1400′s pre-2003 methods of top-down, long-distance servicing.
(5) For more on this phenomena, see Steve Early, "Reutherism Redux: What Happens When Poor Workers' Unions Wear The Color Purple," in Against The Current, September/October, 200
(6) See Labor Notes' coverage of SEIU 2008 convention at www.labornotes.org (Mark Brenner blog, June 2, 2008)
(7) Kris Maher, "Unions Forge Secret Pacts With Major Employers," The Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2008, page A1.
(8) Steve Franklin, "Unions' Secret Deals to Get Foot in Door at
(9) See Dan Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and The New Social Movements," Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 180-87.
(10) See "Charge Against Employer," filed by United Student Labor Action Coalition against ABM Janitorial Services, Dec. 26, 2005 with Peter Hoffman, Regional Director, National Labor Relations Board, Hartford, CT. (In the interests of full-disclosure, this ULP charge was filed by my daughter Alexandra, then a student at Wesleyan and now a contract campaign mobilizer for SEIU's United Healthcare Workers in California.)
(11) Delegates voting against the Stern administration proposal for expanded MRC's (and other "Justice For All" platform resolutions) numbered about 233. Of those, approximately 150 were from UHW and the remaining ones represented members in other California and Nevada locals, including 99, 521,721,1000, 1021, and 1107.
(12) See Paul Krehbiel, "Reform Movement Forms in SEIU," Labor Notes, April, 2008, pp. 1,4.
(13) See "fightfor347," a Yahoo discussion group, set up to air the grievances of SEIU staffers themselves, including some unhappily reassigned to MRC work. One recent insider posting complained that "the sheer size and poor planning of the 721 merger" produced a backlog of 600 pending grievances at its MRC, with "not nearly enough staff to handle them." According to this anonymous blogger, staffers at the "Advocacy Center" responded by staging a 'sick-out' in protest. Unfortunately, another work-load reduction technique "is to simply tell the rank-and-file: "You don't have a grievance, we can't help you."
(14) See Steve Early, "A Purple Uprising In Oakland," CounterPunch, April 1, 2008
(15) See UHW document entitled " 'Justice for All' or 'Control for Just Us'-A First Look at SEIU's Plan to Centralize Decision-Making Power and Financial Resources at the Expense of Union Democracy and Strong Organization Among Members," May, 2008, posted on www.seiuvoice.org.
(Steve Early worked as a CWA international representative and organizer between 1980 and 2007. He is currently writing a book for Cornell ILR Press on the role of Sixties' movement activists in American labor. He can be reached at: [email protected])


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Farm burial relaxations to begin at midnight
The Chief Veterinary Officer for Wales has told ITV News that farmers will be able to bury their dead animals in 'certain areas' of Wales where no other option is available.
Dr Christianne Glossop says that farmers will have to contact a 'fallen stock collector' before they can be aprroved to dispose of their own dead animals.
The law relaxations will come into force from midnight.


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Cape Ann Seafood Exchange
The Cape Ann Seafood Exchange handled 29,500 pounds of fish Thursday.
Top species landed and average prices were:
:Medium pollock: 10,500 pounds (95 cents)
Medium and small pollock: 3,200 pounds (87 cents)
Large hake: 3,200 pounds ($1.37)
Ocean perch: 2,400 pounds (45 cents)
Medium hake: 1,500 pounds (80 cents)
Other landings
The Buyers And Sellers Exchange (BASE), an electronic auctioning company that sells landings at owner Whaling City Seafood Display Auction in New Bedford, Boston's Whaling City Auction, and Gloucester's Whaling City Auction, handled 64,700 pounds of fish and scallops Wednesday.
The Portland, Maine, Display Auction handled 4,600 pounds of fish Wednesday.
No landings were reported Thursday at the New England Fish Exchange in Boston.
— National Marine Fisheries Service


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BOARDMAN, Ohio - A man suspected to be a "career criminal" with involvement in a series of home invasions around the Mahoning Valley has taken a plea deal with a Mahoning County court.
Steven Direnzo, 41, was arrested last Tuesday when a stolen vehicle from Canfield was recovered near a laundromat next door to his house on Mathews Road. Police said he was suspected of home invasions in Western Pennsylvania and may be connected to a number of related incidents in Pulaski Township as well.
"We've dealt with him for 15 to 20 years, probably. It seems like every several months we end up arresting him for auto theft, house burglaries, receiving stolen property or drug charges," said Boardman Police Chief Jack Nichols.
In a plea deal, a charge for receiving stolen property was dropped and the charge for tampering with evidence was bound over to the Grand Jury. Direnzo was sentenced to 180 days in jail, with 170 suspended. He was also given a $225 fine and had his driver's license suspended for two years.


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There are 3.7 million unfilled jobs in America due to a lack of skilled workers. Learn how you can get an education to help solve this problem.
University of Phoenix experience
At University of Phoenix, we strive to make education work around your schedule to help you succeed academically. We offer flexible scheduling with the option to attend classes online or at a campus location near you, and student resources like our e-library and PhoenixConnect® academic social network. Watch these videos to learn what an education is like at the University.
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1 posts tagged "Walt Disney Concert Hall"
L.A. Gets A New Dance Company Of Its Own—And A Supportive A-List Fan Base To Match-------
One-company-town reputation aside, Los Angeles is the epicenter of a wide variety of artistic disciplines beyond film. Choreographer Benjamin Millepied (left)—at least as well known, if not better, in Hollywood-loving L.A. as the husband of Natalie Portman—aims to make one more at home with the launch of the L.A. Dance Project, a curatorial collective conceived by Millepied, composer Nico Muhly, art consultant Matthieu Humery, video producer Dimitri Chamblas, and producer Charles Fabius.
Following the sold-out premiere performance at Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, Millepied emphasized the influence of the city on his new venture. "The identity of Los Angeles is going to be very important to me," he said. "It's a city so rich in artists and culture that I would really like the dance company to embrace that and carry it throughout." The debut program included Millepied's own Moving Parts, a performance of William Forsythe's Quintett, and the first showing of Merce Cunningham's Winterbranch in 50 years. In the audience: locals like Rodarte's Kate and Laura Mulleavy, who designed the costumes for the performance, as well as fans Robert Pattinson, Rashida Jones, and Dita Von Teese.
Portman, for her part, wearing a gown from Raf Simons' first collection for Dior Haute Couture and jewels from Van Cleef & Arpels, was just as enthusiastic as her husband about the future of dance in Los Angeles. "It is always amazing to have things expressed that can't be expressed in other mediums, and it makes you feel things that words or sound can't make you feel," she said. "We didn't have a dance company and now we do. It's amazing that Ben is bringing it here."


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Narrow your search
The "next-generation" game consoles are here -- but until their game library hits critical mass, the
Two years in, the PlayStation Vita has come of age and become a refined piece of hardware and an excellent place to play a lot of games. You don't need one, but it's really fun and worth its price.
Formerly known as the Vita TV, the microconsole will be available for $99 or in a $139 bundle with a controller. We gave it a try at E3 2014.
Wildly imaginative and existing in a masterfully created sci-fi world, Transistor successfully conveys a vision that is adeptly matched by a clever combat system and attack mechanic.
Pricing not available
Child of Light is a brave move from a mainstream developer, and one that hopefully heralds a new way forward.
Pricing not available
The PlayStation 4's beautiful graphics, blazing interface, near-perfect controller, and lower price give it a slight edge on the Xbox One -- for now.
While it may not reach the pinnacle of other next-gen sports games, MLB 14 The Show is a solid effort that brings just enough new exciting bits to the PS4 experience.
Suffering from boring, uninspired gameplay, Thief is nearly dead on arrival. Plain and simple, it's just not fun to play.
In the face of stiff competition from smart phone and tablet gaming, we were hoping for something more audacious from Sony's Vita revamp. The Vita Slim is still a powerful, portable games machine however -- just watch out for those pricey, proprietary memory cards. Owners of the original shouldn't worry about upgrading, but if there are Vita-specific titles you've been hankering to play for a while now, this is a good time to get involved.
While it may not be the change of pace or innovation that die-hard Infamous purists are probably after, Second Son is still an aptly executed game worthy of your attention.
With just the right amount of brutality and craziness, Wolfenstein: The New Order is a genuine good-old Nazi-killing time.


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You've heard about Yeshiva University, but how well do you really know us? The best aspects of the YU experience have to be experienced in person to be appreciated—the quality of our teaching, the warmth of our community, the energy of our beit midrash.
In order to give you the opportunity to get to know us on a personal level, we invite you to come visit at your convenience. Spend some time in our classrooms. Meet our students and professors. Find out for yourself what makes a YU education an experience like no other.
Your visit might include:
Get an overview of YU's campuses, including maps and directions.
Book a Visit!
Please try to give us at least a week's advanced
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To visit one of our graduate schools, please see "Contact YU's Grad Schools."
Yeshiva University
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New York, NY 10033
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New York, NY 10033
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We suggest you upgrade newer and better browser like: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera
PirateGuy says: Epic medieval strategy awaits you in this RTS/TBS hyrbid!
PirateGuy says: Take 1 cup of great story, 1 quart of fun RPG combat, and as much personality as you can hold, mix, and you have Planescape:Torment.
PirateGuy says: The first of a series of classic adventure games.
PirateGuy says: It's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum in this FPS classic.
PirateGuy says: All the fun of the classic Alien Shooter with a fresh coat of paint and a fancy new engine!
PirateGuy says: If you love shoot-em-ups, you WILL love this game. :)
PirateGuy says: Give yourself a bit of vertigo with this revolutionary FPS.
PirateGuy says: A solid FPS that was the first to use the (in?)famous CryEngine.
PirateGuy says: A fairly fun (but complex) TBS game where you command a squad of Mercenaries attempting to overthrow the oppressive government of Arulco.
PirateGuy says: Conquer the world in this original, retro-styled RTS.
PirateGuy says: A fun, strange, RTS/Adventure game where you command ghosts to terrorize the living.
Treat your GOGmix as your child - name it! ;)
Coming up with a cool and descriptive title should be your first priority. Being original is in your best interest - bet you wanna get lots of nice votes, right? Go all crazy if you want, but be sure to keep it civil!
So, what are the ingredients?
Pick a game that belongs in your GOGmix from the list, or find it by typing something in the text field. Relevance is key here - Earthworm Jim doesn't quite fit the "Sexiest heroines of all time" bill now, does it?
Justify your choice... Or not!
OK, so it's not required, but now that you went through the trouble of adding a game, telling everyone why you did it would be a nice finishing touch. After you're done here, add another game, rinse, repeat.


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State Agencies |
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Find more...
Last month, the department asked that resident educator program coordinators share the news about deadline extensions for RESA Tasks 2, 3, 4 and 5 to midnight Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, June 1, 2014. The complete news item on this topic includes explains that the department made change in deadlines because of the extreme weather and related school closures. To ensure that all candidates are able to complete the work, the department and Teachscape strongly recommend that candidates follow the original submission schedule. Look inside for tips for staying on track and a suggested timeline.
Memorandum 2013-1 notified districts that an agreed upon IEP can no longer serve as prior written notice (PWN) to families.
The Center for Instructional Supports and Accessible Materials (CISAM) has just released a new online training opportunity, CISAM AIM Training Series (CATS), that provides information for the implementation of accessible instructional materials (AIM). The series is broken into 5 modules for easy access to specific AIM-related information.
The K-3 Literacy Measure will appear on Ohio's A-F Report Card in 2014. This grade answers the question—are more students learning to read in Kindergarten through third grade? The 2014 report card will report some results. The 2015 report card will display one grade for Kindergarten through Grade 3.
In this Know! Alert we are warning teachers and school administrators about youth getting high on cough syrup. While young people abusing cough medicine is nothing new, is seems to have grown again in popularity, with one in 10 teens partaking nationwide.


text: Colorful Wooden Toys For Kids Think Outside the Blocks! 7 Cool, Colorful Wooden Toys by Katharine Stahl 1/30/13 2 Reactions 19 Shares Print 4 5 10 0 0 Wooden toys are a classic addition to any child's collection, but we found seven contemporary, colorful options that go way beyond your everyday building blocks. From The Land of Nod's animal-tastic beanbag toss to Melissa & Doug's stackable owl — with modern blocks, puzzles, and imaginary play toys in between — these toys will inspire your little ones and make you feel a bit better about the mounds of plastic you've accumulated! Keep clicking to find your favorite. Big Game Beanbag Toss What's Your Reaction? 0 0 0 0 0 0 The Land of Nod's Big Game Beanbag Toss ($59) is a colorful menagerie of an illustrated giraffe, snail, hedgehog, elk, and peacock with seven cutout shapes to throw six canvas bags through. Get wild! 1 / 7 Bird-Tree Puzzle What's Your Reaction? 0 0 0 0 0 0 This whimsical bird-tree puzzle ($40) is painted with nontoxic paints and dyes and features seven brightly painted birds of different sizes and shapes. Your kids find their proper perches. 2 / 7 Melissa & Doug Stackable Owl What's Your Reaction? 0 0 0 0 0 0 Melissa & Doug's stackable owl ($13) is a vertical puzzle with eight pieces on a sturdy wooden base. Arrange them on the base or without it. 3 / 7 Baby Walker What's Your Reaction? 0 0 0 0 0 0 Giggle's baby walker ($75) is a two-in-one toy that helps boost baby's coordination and balance. The eco-friendly push toy helps babies explore their worlds, while the block set helps them learn shapes, sizes, and colors. 4 / 7 It Makes a Village Block Set What's Your Reaction? 0 0 0 0 0 0 The Land of Nod's colorfully dyed, hand-sanded It Makes a Village Block Set ($199) lets your little one become a city planner (albeit with blocks) or a puzzle master. Designed to be handed down for generations of kids (12 months and older) to play with. 6 / 7 Haba Vegetable Set What's Your Reaction? 0 0 0 0 0 0 Even if you can't get them to eat their vegetables, they'll certainly play with them! The Haba Vegetable Set ($20) comes with carrots, a radish, tomatoes, mushrooms, and peppers, all made from beechwood with a nontoxic, water-based stain. They all come in a reusable shopping bag. Check out the fruit set, too! 6 / 7 Shusha Wooden Toys What's Your Reaction? 0 0 0 0 0 0 Perhaps the most innovative wooden toy collection we've ever seen, Shusha toys are made in Russia by two young parents who believe in the importance of play. All the toys, including these awesome face building blocks, help kids develop early motor and logic skills and use their imaginations. Email Shusha directly for buying info. 7 / 7 4 5 10 0 0 Back to Homepage Comments Read More The Land Of NodKid ShoppingMelissa & DougWooden ToysToys What's Your Reaction? 0 0 0 0 0 0 0Reactions Link Love Mom forced to stop feeding baby homemade formula — BabyCenter Blog The easiest ways to save on organic food — The Stir A look inside Fergie's second baby shower — Celebrity Baby Scoop Danielle Jonas debuts her baby bump — People Moms & Babies 7 light and fresh recipes to take you through Summer — FitPregnancy Does where you live affect your risk for PPD? — The Bump Where to find the best deals on school supplies — Real Simple Now this is how you announce a pregnancy! — HuffPost Parents


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Two Beaumont firefighters were injured Thursday morning fighting a blaze on Beaumont's west end. A homeowner was also burned trying to put out flames before firefighters arrived.
Dispatchers received a call just before 4 a.m. reporting a house fire near the corner of West Lucas Drive and Delaware Street.
When firefighters arrived, flames were concentrated in a front bedroom of the house located at 2790 West Lucas. Flames spread to the attic and began coming out of the roof.
A man and wife were home at the time of the fire. Both were able to get out of the house. The husband received burns as he attempted to put out the fire before firefighters arrived.
Investigators believe the fire started with an electrical short in the front bedroom.
The family owned three dogs and one cat. Only one of the dogs made it out of the house. The other pets died in the fire.
Beaumont firefighters remained on the scene for hours putting out hot spots.
The home was heavily damaged by smoke, fire and water.
A fireman on the scene said all injuries sustained by the firefighters and the homeowner were non life-threatening.
The American Red Cross was called to assist the family.
Newsroom: (409) 838-1212
Front Desk: (409) 833-7512
News Fax: (409) 981-1564
News Email: email@example.com


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Hurricane Sandy Recovery Review
Witnesses testified at a hearing on the response to and recovery from Hurricane Sandy, andthe challenges faced by affected communities following the storm.
*The transcript for this program was compiled from uncorrected Closed Captioning.
People in this video
- Holloway, Cas Deputy Mayor New York, NY->Operations
- Menendez, Robert "Bob" U.S. Senator [D] New Jersey
- Schumer, Charles E. U.S. Senator [D] New York
- Tighe, Kathleen Inspector General Department of Education
- Begich, Mark U.S. Senator [D] Alaska
- Booker, Cory A. U.S. Senator [D] New Jersey
- Darcy, Jo-Ellen Assistant Secretary U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
- Donovan, Shaun L. S. Secretary Department of Housing and Urban Development
- Fugate, William "Craig" Administrator Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Gillibrand, Kirsten E. U.S. Senator [D] New York
- Landrieu, Mary U.S. Senator [D] Louisiana
- Paul, Rand M.D. U.S. Senator [R] Kentucky
- Porcari, John D. Deputy Secretary Department of Transportation
- Tighe, Kathleen Chair Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board
Hosting Organization
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FEMA, HUD, and Red Cross Conference Call on Hurricane Sandy
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BOSTON, Mass. – More than 160 volunteer-run tournaments were recognized by the Jimmy Fund on Feb. 7 at the Yawkey Center for Cancer Care at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, for their commitment to the Jimmy Fund Golf program. By organizing golf tournaments, they helped raise more than $6.4 million in 2013 for adult and pediatric cancer care and research at Dana-Farber through Jimmy Fund Golf, one of the largest and oldest grassroots charity golf programs in the nation.
Shown being recognized for their outstanding efforts is Bill Grigg of Medfield, Mass., and Jon Rosenberg of Natick, Mass. They helped organize the Ted Golf Tournament at The International Golf Club, raising $140,600 for Dana-Farber.
Jimmy Fund Golf is one of the oldest and largest charity golf programs in the country. Now in its 32nd year, Jimmy Fund Golf has raised more than $97 million to support adult and pediatric cancer care and research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. From traditional golf tournaments and country club member events to mini golf tournaments and day-long golf marathons, golfers of all ages and skill levels can conquer cancer through Jimmy Fund Golf.
You can join in the fight to conquer cancer by starting a golf tournament of your own. To learn more, visit www.jimmyfundgolf.org or call (866) 521-4653.


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Your search "gozo island" resulted in 1 Article
Spring Fling: Dwejra BayDwejra Bay is a place of wild nature with a great natural arch that plunges into the sea, an ideal place for a romantic spring! Where is this beautiful place? It is in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, in Malta (Island of Gozo).
Are you new to Lomography?
This week's popular entries
Agfa CT Precisa 100: The Fabulous 35mm Slide Film This film has fine grain, especially when cross-processed in C41. And if you use a Lomo camera, maybe the LC-A or the LC-Wide, the results will be more interesting with strong vignettes in your pictures!
BarkBox Rumble Winners Announcement We called all you dog-lovers out there and you sent such wonderful photos in response! Check out the cutest, most adorable dogs that won the rumble!
LomoGuru of the Week: trash-gordon-from-outerspace He is a graphic designer from Kassel, Germany who has been a Community member for about a decade. His ten-year stay has been remarkably fruitful. Aside from honing his photography skills, it is in this Community of ours where he met his girlfriend, made a lot of friends, and helped organize a huge weekend meet-up for fellow lomographers. Say hello to Daniel Lauterbach, also known as trash-gordon-from-outer-space, our LomoGuru of the Week!
More of this weeks popular entries
- Show Your Stash, roxyvonschlotterstein
- Lomography x One Must Dash Rumble ends in 19 days
- Guess That Tag! Rumble: Happy Birthday, Diana Mini! ends in 12 days
- Lomography Redscale XR 50-200 120: Perfect for Endless Multiple Exposures!
- Photographer Carlos Somonte Shares New Cover Image for The Criterion Collection Edition of 'Y Tu Mamá También'
- Awesome Albums: Petzval Flower Portraits by antiox
- Sassy Mugshots of Female Criminals from the 1920s
- Most Popular Photo Last Year: August 16, 2013
- Side Effects: A Roll in Aniseed-Flavored Liquor
- pasadena85 is our LomoHome of the Day!
Latest Shop News
What is happening today
- The Lomography Hipshot Showdown: Summer Refreshment ends in about 11 hours
Ongoing competitions
- The Lomography Hipshot Showdown: Summer Refreshment ends in about 11 hours
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- Vertical Panoramas Rumble ends in 4 days
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What events are up next?
- Get Your Hands on the New Petzval Lens starts in 1 day
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- C/O Berlin Moves to Amerika Haus, Grand Opening slated for October starts in 2 months


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KINGSTON — The Board of Directors of the Kingston Lake (Great Pond) Association, Inc. will meet on Wed., March 27, at 7:00 p.m., at the Kingston Community Library.
This will be an open meeting and anyone interested in the Association is welcome. Selected agenda items for this meeting will include: improvements to the State Boat Ramp, a Watershed Protection Ordinance for the town of Kingston, Kingston State Park clean up days May 17 and 18, the shoreline clean up on June 15th and the annual membership meeting on June 26.
If you are interested in these topics or have other ideas you are welcome. If you would like more information on Kingston Lake (Great Pond) Association, contact Muriel Ingalls at 642-3156 or visit their website at www.kingstonlakenh.com.


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You know your startup is doing something right when the CIA's investment arm decides to invest some money into the business. That's exactly what has happened to Portland-based AppThwack, a small business of four employees founded by two former Intel employees that tests mobile apps for developers. AppThwack announced today a "strategic partnership" with In-Q-Tel (IQT), an… Read More
Bezos, CIA invest $30M in quantum computing startup
Jeff Bezos has put money into a robot factory worker, a 10,000 year clock and private car service. And he's not done yet. Bezos Expeditions and In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA, announced Thursday a $30 million investment in D-Wave Systems, a Vancouver-based company that develops quantum-computing applications. D-Wave Systems integrates computer science and physics… Read More


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ECO 103: Introduction to Economic Perspectives
F&M LIBRARY CATALOG and E-Z BORROW
Search the catalog to find out what books, journals, newspapers, videos, maps, CDs, music, etc., the library owns.
To find a book, begin by conducting a Keyword search our your topic. Analyze your topic or research question and break it down into its key concepts, which becomes the Keyword search. Once you have found a record for an item that looks useful, click on a Subject Heading to retrieve other items with similar content.
JOURNALS, MAGAZINES & NEWSPAPERS @ F&M andInterlibrary Loan (ILL)To determine whether or not the F&M Library owns a journal, use the JOURNALS: search our catalog of print and online journals feature on the Library's web site. If the library does not have a journal you need, and you have at least 1 week to 10 days before your assignment is due, you can submit an Interlibrary Loan: request journal articles & books request to have the journal article acquired for you by the library. Allow 3-7 days for the article to arrive.
291-3844 or firstname.lastname@example.com
Last updated: 2/08 mg/ls/jb


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Single Sign-On for SAP: Active Directory-based Authentication to SAP Applications
Download Now Free registration required
Executive Summary
Do users in your organization have multiple user ids and passwords - one set for SAP, one for Active Directory and so on? Multiple identities create problems: spiraling help desk costs, decreased user productivity, and potential security breaches.
Single sign-on (SSO) is the answer. SSO controls the costs, reduces confusion and eliminates the security risks of single users with both an SAP and Active Directory sign-on and password. This new technical brief, "Single Sign-On for SAP," discusses how technology from Quest meets the challenge of multiple SAP and Active Directory system identities and passwords. Read the paper today.
- Format: PDF
- Size: 0 KB


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About the Author
Eric Edholm
Senior editor
Recent posts by Eric Edholm
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Updated 10:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Nov. 27
For now, the NFC East is a two-horse race, and the Giants did themselves a big favor by trouncing the Packers and maintaining a two-game divisional lead in advance of their game next week with the Redskins. Here's a wrap-up of the Week 12 action in the East:
What we learned: This team is talented, but also fragile and inconsistent. It seems that there is a terrific individual effort every week — on Thanksgiving, it was Dez Bryant who had a monster game — but the Cowboys often come up a few plays short of a complete team game. They fell to 5-6 with the loss to the Redskins, who share that record now but have the greater momentum for the postseason. Blame slow starts for the Cowboys' problems. In their six losses, they allowed first-half double-digit deficits in four of them, including a 28-3 second-quarter hole against the Redskins. And much like the home loss to the Giants last month, the Cowboys fought hard to come back but couldn't finish the operation.
What's in store next: Three of the next four are at home, including this Sunday night's game against the Eagles, who still might be without QB Michael Vick and RB LeSean McCoy. Really, the Cowboys at this point pretty much have to consider every game a must-win. There are only two left against the NFC East, but that ship probably has sailed. Three of the final five are conference games, and the Cowboys must separate themselves from the seven teams at 5-6 or better who are battling for the two wild-card spots.
What the heck? It has been a brutal season for injuries, and they struck again in the Week 12 loss. ILB Bruce Carter, who had stepped up amid the loss of Sean Lee, reportedly will be out for the season with a dislocated elbow. Carter had been making the defensive calls in Lee's place and was playing at a very high level. The Cowboys now are down to Dan Connor, Ernie Sims and Alex Albright and are expected to sign Brady Poppinga, who started 12 games for the Rams last season. Injuries this season have targeted certain positions, including the offensive line, running back and the secondary.
What we learned: On their best day, the Giants can beat anyone. Sunday was that kind of day as the Giants jumped on the Packers early and never relented. It was a two-pronged attack, as the Giants' skill-position players roasted the Green Bay defenders and the pass rush picked apart a shorthanded offensive line. Eli Manning responded from a poor November to put together his finest performance in some time, hitting three different receivers for touchdowns. RB Ahmad Bradshaw also showed that his practicing last week was no fluke; he took a screen pass 59 yards on the opening drive and had more than 100 all-purpose yards in the first 20 minutes of the game. A week of rest on bye served the Giants quite well, it appears.
What's in store next: In the 38-10 statement-serving victory, the Giants also accomplished some business: keeping the Redskins at arm's length for now. The teams will meet Monday night in Washington in what suddenly is a fascinating battle. They met back in Week Seven, a 27-23 barnburner that ended with an offensive flurry capped with Manning hitting Victor Cruz on a 77-yard touchdown pass in which he just ran past the defense. The problem: Robert Griffin III was also fantastic with 258 yards passing and 89 rushing. The Redskins might have stolen a win but were undone by four turnovers.
What the heck? Where in the world has this performance been all season? Did the bye week provide that much recharging? The Giants now have beaten the Packers and 49ers, two of the best teams in the NFL, by a combined 51 points. They also have lost to the Eagles and Cowboys, division opponents, sure, but subpar teams nonetheless. They also have staked bad teams such as the Browns to double-digits leads and later let the Bengals walk all over them. The Giants are hard to figure out, though we have learned in recent seasons that their finest performances often are more telling than their throwaway games. But the hesitation to call them great remains.
What we learned: The Redskins finally can start talking playoffs again. It's going to be a haul, getting headlong into the race, and the 3-6 hole they put themselves into will make it tough. But Robert Griffin III gives them a chance, and he's the rare rookie who can help the team compensate for weaknesses elsewhere. The confidence level of this team has been high much of the season, but it's now in focus. The return of WR Pierre Garcon adds a much-needed dimension to the offense, and the defense has learned (for the most part) how to compensate without its missing parts.
What's in store next: The Giants remain two games up in the division, and the Redskins can't catch them in next week's massive battle in D.C. with a win. But they certainly can put the heat on the Giants with a win, splitting the season series and cutting the NFC East lead to one game with four to play. If the Giants win, the division is pretty much wrapped up (as far as the Redskins would be concerned) and the wild-card battle might be too much of a stretch. The Redskins actually did a fairly decent job containing Eli Manning last time and will need four quarters of solid defense to win the rematch.
What the heck? Are the Redskins capable of four quarters of great defense? Thanksgiving was a pretty good illustration of what they are capable of these days: spurts of excellent play on that side of the ball sandwiched around bouts of head-scratching ineffectiveness. In the first half against the Cowboys, the Redskins were terrific in terms of keeping the heat on Tony Romo and forcing him to check down to lesser options. They also forced turnovers for the second week in a row; that's six now in two games, which is great. That's a big part of the story of how the Redskins built a 28-3 lead in the second quarter. But the fact that Dallas almost came back is stunning, and the late-game breakdowns were inexcusable. Bad tackling, poor coverage and misplayed assignments all were culprits. That has happened before (the Week One Saints game, up 33-17 in the fourth, comes to mind; so does the Bucs game, up 21-6 well into the third) where leads have evaporated. And those are just the victories — we won't get into the games in which the defense has failed and the Redskins have lost.