Justice for Janitors: Scales of Organizing and Representing Workers

Low levels of unionization in the United States have led to much attention being devoted recently to the development of new models of organizing workers. In contrast to those which dominated for most of the past half century, the models currently being embraced by many labor leaders are typically grassroots and bottom‐up in nature and call for a high level of participation by rank‐and‐file workers. The Justice for Janitors (JfJ) campaign is an example of just such a model, one which has been widely lauded for its innovativeness and success. However, whereas the campaign is often thought of as representing a highly decentralized approach to organizing because of the sensitivity it pays to local labor market conditions, the Service Employees’ International Union which developed it has recently called for a concentration of power in a small number of national union bodies. This has raised questions about the geographical scale at which power should rest within the union movement and how to develop organizing strategies which are locally sensitive yet also capable of challenging nationally and/or globally organized firms.     

The preservationist paradox: modernism, environmentalism and the politics of spatial division

According to Bruno Latour, the imposition of crude classificatory schemes onto complex entities has two main effects: firstly, the classifications lead social actors to sift the world into the schemes' simple categories; secondly, underlying relations subvert the schemes' functioning, resulting in the production of transgressive 'hybrids'. Thus, classification and relation interact and this interaction shapes both the practice of classification and the world that is classified. In this paper, we examine the interaction between a scheme of spatial classification and the spaces that are enrolled within the scheme. We show that a division between urban and rural areas was put in place in post-war England in order to protect a 'vulnerable' rural nature from urban advance. However, as soon as it was imposed, this division was transgressed by complex socio-economic processes. We assess the response to this transgression by considering the activities of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), an environmental group that played some considerable part in constructing the urban–rural divide in the first place. We show that the CPRE has responded to the 'paradox of preservationism' by placing urban–rural divisions in the context of 'ecological' relationships. We illustrate this 'ecologization' of the modernist divide using the example of housing and we argue that the CPRE's ecological approach illustrates how a new alignment between 'urban' and 'rural' may herald a new and more sophisticated form of spatial classification.     

Phylogeographic analysis of barley DNA as evidence for the spread of Neolithic agriculture through Europe

Results of analyses of the photoperiod response gene (PPD-H1) and simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in modern landraces of cultivated barley were used as evidence for the mechanism of agricultural spread in Neolithic Europe. In particular, we explored the usefulness of considering adaptive genes as indicators of past selective pressures acting on crops, during their spread through Europe. In some areas, such as the Alpine region, Britain and Scandinavia, we have evidence to suggest that the adaptation of crops to certain climatic conditions may have contributed to the timing of agricultural spread. At the northern fringes of Europe, and in higher altitude locations in central Europe, the introduction of more suitably adapted cereals may have facilitated successful agriculture to trigger agricultural expansion. This research opens up the possibility of investigating other genetic adaptations to climate, which would permit a fuller evaluation of the relative contributions of climate/crop and forager/farmer interactions in the process of agricultural spread.     

The origins of agriculture in North-West Africa: macro-botanical remains from Epipalaeolithic and Early Neolithic levels of Ifri Oudadane (Morocco)

This research aims to shed light on the early stages of agricultural development in Northern Africa through the analysis of the rich macro-botanical assemblages obtained from Ifri Oudadane, an Epipalaeolithic–Early Neolithic site from North-East Morocco. Results indicate the presence of domesticated plants, cereals (Hordeum vulgare, Triticum monococcum/dicoccum, Triticum durum and Triticum aestivum/durum) and pulses (Lens culinaris and Pisum sativum) in the Early Neolithic. One lentil has been dated to 7611 ± 37 cal BP representing the oldest direct date of a domesticated plant seed in Morocco and, by extension, in North Africa. Similarities in both radiocarbon dates and crop assemblages from Early Neolithic sites in Northern Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula suggest a simultaneous East to West maritime spread of agriculture along the shores of the Western Mediterranean. Wild plants were abundantly collected in both the Epipalaeolithic and the Early Neolithic periods pointing to the important role of these resources during the two periods. In addition to fruits and seeds that could have been consumed by both humans and domesticated animals, fragments of esparto grass (Stipa tenacissima) rhizomes have been identified. This is a western Mediterranean native plant that may have been used as a source of fibres for basketry.     

Latitudinal variation in a photoperiod response gene in European barley: insight into the dynamics of agricultural spread from ‘historic’ specimens

Between ca. 6000 BC and ca. 500 BC, barley cultivation spread across the continent of Europe from the extreme south to the extreme north. Carbon-dating would suggest that this spread, and indeed the spread of crop cultivation generally, varied in its pace, with ‘delays’ at certain points along its route. Such delays in the spread of agriculture have been explained as resulting from the slow assimilation of agricultural practices by existing indigenous human populations or as the time taken for the crops to adapt to novel climatic conditions, such as altered temperature regimes and day-lengths. A mutant form of the photoperiod response gene, Ppd-H1, causes barley to be non-responsive to long days, while the wild-type responsive form allows plants to flower in response to long days. We sequenced this gene in 65 ‘historic’ barley accessions, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in order to explore the potential role of environmental adaptation in the spread of agriculture. We chose to use ‘historic’ material, to complement the richer patterns in extant genetic lines, by spreading the data range in both time and space. Our ‘historic’ barley data shows a latitudinal divide in the Ppd-H1 gene similar to that found in extant lines, but with clearer geographical resolution, and extending northwards into the Arctic Circle. We discuss the implications of our results in relation to the dynamics of agricultural spread across Europe.     

The Efficiency of Flotation Compared with Other Methods for Recovering Assemblages of Terrestrial and Aquatic Gastropods from Archaeological Deposits,with Reference to the Site of Pico Ramos (Basque Country,Spain)

ABSTRACT

We analysed assemblages of shells of land snails and small aquatic and wetland gastropods from a late Mesolithic-early Neolithic deposit in the cave of Pico Ramos (Basque Country). Shells were recovered by hand during excavation and all excavated deposit was processed by flotation, with a 250 μm mesh to recover floating material and a 1.0 mm mesh to recover the heavy fraction. The total assemblage comprised 5780 individuals (MNI) among 33 taxa, the sieved sub-assemblage having the highest proportions of these (2841 MNI in 31 taxa) and the hand-picked sub-assemblage the lowest (698 MNI in 11 taxa). Eleven taxa were absent from the flotation sub-assemblage, although the recovered MNI (2241; 39% of the total MNI) was high. The palaeoecological implications of the results are considered. Adult and large-sized juvenile shells of the edible land snail Cepaea nemoralis are abundant in the hand-picked sub-assemblage, but it is the absence of small-sized juvenile shells in the flotation and wet-sieved sub-assemblages that permits the inference that the species was collected for consumption. Wet sieving is therefore essential, both for interpreting hand-picked samples and in particular for the recovery of representative assemblages of land molluscs.