Author - SftP Archives

Book Review: Aid as Obstacle

Aid as Obstacle is a welcome book which extensively documents the bitter reality of actions taken in the name of the world’s poor. Foreign aid is hurting the very people it claims to help. The book explains why foreign aid fails and actually increases poverty. The authors call for a stop to all foreign aid to all...

The Philippines: Medical Industry Thrives, Health Care Fails

A growing number of health care workers are engaged in the task of forging an alternative health care system based on genuine people’s participation. Experiments in grassroots health care planning have been started in various parts of the country. Their goal is to train health workers in the barrios to pass on...

Bottle Babies and Managed Mothers

Thus far, the movement against infant formula has mostly focused rather narrowly on the health or promotional aspects of what has come to be known as the great "bottle baby" scandal. This growing movement has already generated considerable literature on the marketing, nutritional, disease, and micro-economic issues...

Book Review: Microelectronics: Capitalist Technology and the Working Class

Microelectronics does not embrace the simple solution of dropping resistance to new technologies; instead it outlines other ways workers can preserved integrity. Aside from demanding higher wages and refusing job loss and job force shrinkage, workers can demand input into the design process itself when new...

‘Launch On Warning’: The Pentagon’s Computer Game

Launch on warning should be opposed by progressives in the context of the Pentagon’s dangerous and wasteful doctrine of land-based missile protection. Opposition to this doctrine has become more urgent with Reagan’s recent decision to deploy MX missiles in single, fixed silos, protected by either an ABM system or...

Unionized or Computerized: The Terminal Secretary

New computer based technology applicable to office work is becoming available at continuously decreasing cost. At the same time, clerical workers have begun to organize to demand higher wages, better working conditions and more opportuities for advancement.

Opinion: Where Is Automation in Manufacturing Headed?

Presently in the U.S., technology and production processes are exclusively defined by engineers and management in technical positions. From there technology invades the shop environment, whether it is welcome or not, and imposes new rules of work and behavior on the shopfloor people. No communication takes place...

Chips Are On Line At Left Mags

In early 1980, Dollars & Sense and Working Papers, two Boston-area periodicals, set out to develop a microcomputer-based mailing list maintenance system. It was planned as a joint venture primarily to share the considerable programming cost, but also to allow each magazine to use the other's computer in emergencies...

Book Review: Birth Control and Controlling Birth & The Custom-Made Child

The nine sessions of the conference were each devoted to one topic. Following the format of the conference, the two volumes are divided into nine sections, each of which consists of short formal papers, responses to those papers and discussions. The first volume, Birth Control and Controlling Birth, covers the...

Women’s Health Book Collective: Women Empowering Women

The Boston Women's Health Book Collective, authors of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, is just such a model. The collective has, in the last ten years, helped to radically change the consciousness of women of all classes about their bodies and their health, and has empowered women to take action for their health in...