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Archived article from Nov 18, 2003
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Edwards’ next project will focus on the relationship between jazz and poetry. “I’m interested in how poets imitate or emulate jazz and how a number of jazz musicians, such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, wrote poetry.” He is currently teaching an undergraduate seminar on jazz and poetry, and a graduate seminar on black internationalism.
—Amy Vames
How technology and globalization impact the lives of low-income workers
In 2001, 27.5 million Americans — nearly 24 percent of the workforce — earned less than $8.70 an hour, poverty wages for a family of four. The working poor labor in virtually every sector of the economy: manufacturing, retail sales, telecommunications, hospitality and health care.
Eileen Appelbaum, director of the Center for Women and Work, has co-edited a book that documents the work lives of low-income employees in 25 industries across all of these sectors.
In “Low-Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), Appelbaum and co-editors Annette Bernhardt and Richard J. Murnane explore how rapid economic growth in the 1990s squeezed labor markets and pushed wages higher for high-school educated workers, while, at the same time, advances in information technology, globalization of markets, deregulation of industries and changes in financial markets increased competitive pressures.
Employers’ responses to heightened competition, the editors argue, “worsened labor market outcomes for high school-educated workers” and prevented real earnings for males from returning to their 1970s level. Labor unions lost clout, and the real value of the minimum wage declined to $5.15 per hour in 2001 from $7.18 (in 2001 dollars) in 1973.
The studies offer important lessons to policy-makers, the editors write. A higher minimum wage would level the playing field for companies wanting to compete not on cost savings, but on service or product quality. Regional consortia of employers could seek new markets, set quality standards, standardize working conditions, cut training costs and encourage cross-firm mobility of low-wage workers. Enforcement of labor law can support workers’ power to earn a living wage through organizing and collective bargaining.
Such reforms are necessary, the editors write, to reverse current trends, which are creating income disparities not seen since the 1920s. “Such income inequality threatens the social fabric of our society and the stability of our democracy,” they warn.
— Patricia Lamiell
Preserving a dictionary of an 18th-century wordsmith
When Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, it was a literary milestone for three reasons: It was the first English dictionary to devote so much space to everyday words, the first to be so resoundingly thorough in its definitions, and the first to illustrate the meaning of words by quoting from Shakespeare and other great writers.
For the next 150 years, until publication of The Oxford English Dictionary, Johnson’s two-volume work defined the language. At 2,300 pages, it was the dictionary consulted by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, by Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Brontës, the Brownings, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde.
Now, nearly 250 years after its publication, much of Johnson’s original dictionary has been reborn in “Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary” (Walker & Company, 2003), edited by Johnson authority Jack Lynch, an assistant professor of English at Rutgers–Newark. The publication date of Sept. 18 was significant: it marked Johnson’s 294th birthday.
“Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary is a kind of founding document, like the Declaration of Independence,” Lynch says. “If you want insight into the United States, you read the Declaration of Independence. If you want to know about the English language, you read Johnson’s Dictionary.”
Lynch’s new edition of the dictionary contains more than 3,100 selections from the 42,773 in Johnson’s original dictionary. A word-lover’s gold mine, the tome is strewn with nuggets like “looby,” a lubber or clumsy clown; “muckender,” a handkerchief; and “slubberdegullion,” a paltry, dirty, sorry wretch.
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