Podcast appearances and mentions of Charles E Wilson

In Episode 2 of RoRICast - Adam Dinsmore and Suze Kundu speak to Karim Lakhani about the ways that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are changing the way that research is conducted, evaluated and disseminated. Karim is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at Harvard Business School.

Episode 63: We spoke with Karim Lakhani, Professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of the new book: Competing In The Age of AI. We discuss how AI is disrupting all kinds of businesses, how companies should think about implementing AI, and the rise of the AI factory. Enjoy! More about Karim Karim Lakhani is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at the Harvard Business School. He is the founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the faculty co-founder of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative. He specializes in technology management and innovation. His research examines crowd-based innovation models and the digital transformation of companies and industries. Lakhani is known for his pioneering scholarship on how communities and contests can be designed and managed to achieve innovative outcomes. He has partnered with NASA, Topcoder, and the Harvard Medical School to conduct field experiments on the design of crowd innovation programs. His research on digital transformation has shown the importance of data and analytics as drivers of business and operating model transformation and source of competitive advantage. He serves on the Board of Directors of Mozilla Corporation and Local Motors. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/besttechie/support

Written and researched by Deana Hale Narrator: Hello and welcome to this episode of Hurstories. My name is (name First and last) and I will be your host for this episode. Let us begin.  Narrator: Now, I want you to imagine yourself as a person trying to get a job to support your growing family. You find a job in the newspaper at the local GE plant, this means that you can potentially get a job. Once you get hired for the job you were taken to an orientation, where they proceed to tell you about the amazing wages and good benefits you were about to receive.  Narrator: But that was a complete and utter lie, it was like those seen on TV items that you pick up in a supermarket. They have these flashy and sugar coated words slapped onto the packaging, but in the packaging it was a big fat lie and it would fall apart in less than a few months. [sigh] I am getting off topic, we are not here to talk about my hatred for those infernal items and get back to our topic.   Narrator: In this episode we are going to be discussing the strike that happened at the GE plant. I will be talking about how it started, during the event, and the aftermath of the event.  Narrator: Back to the GE, the employees now have it much better than the ones in the past, it was because of this strike that the conditions of the facilities as well as the wages and benefits increased for the workers. But it was 70 years of struggling for it to come to that.  Narrator: Now the reason why this started could be from multiple factors from wages, working conditions, to the management or owners of the facility running it like total garbage. While strikes in general have a dual nature usually consisting of the employers and their employees, usually they try to reach a middle ground or have the errors be  righted in some way in a civil matter before having it come to a strike.  Narrator: This is not the case in the matter of GE, because on December 6 of 1918 there was a letter sent to the Department of Labor about a potential strike happening at GE’s Erie Plant, but they dismissed and rejected the claim. This in turn infuriating the workers and in turn had the gears turning for the strike to occur even without their consent of the Department of Labor. Narrator: Though this was because their wages were not adequate and the workers knew that they were entitled to it. John Nelson, the head of the United Electrical Union for the General Electric Employees, told the workers that the board denied them from initiating an organized strike, but he claimed to them that if they were not going to get a raise, then by all means they were going to get a raise.  Narrator: Though GE knew about the strike and that it would happen eventually, they took no action in preventing or solving this issue before it got to that point. Their reaction was before the strike took place was to have examiners go into the plants and decide which employees stayed and which had to be cut loose. Narrator: Though this was able to prevent the strike that started in 1946, major corporations like GE had made record profits from the World Wars. While making major profits, all of their employees' wages were let’s say frozen for the entire duration of the war. Not to mention the fact that the workers suffered from the massive increase to the cost of living during the wars. It came down to the employees of not only GE, but also the Auto Workers and Steel Workers, they started to combine their abilities to create a bargaining contract. Narrator: In November of 1946 will always be remembered by the Union members, around 500,000 aut works struck General Motors, though in GE, they only realized it after the union gave its notice. GE offered to raise their wages by 10 cents, but it still was falling short of the demanded wage the the workers asked for. In total there were around 200,000 UE members in both GE and Westinghouse who went on Strike from New England to California.     Narrator: Though within 1946 is when the Cold War struck, thus the corporations were determined to weaken the labor movement. They wanted to make it incredibly difficult for unions to organize and take action for issues that were present. The chairman of GE, Charles E. Wilson, said that the problems within the United States could be summed up within two statements, “Russia abroad and labor at home.” Narrator: Though admittingly, the union movements were subjected to ceaseless barrage of charges of being a communist plot against the United States. The union workers knew what was going on and one by the name of Jim Matles said “the damnable slander of communism as a line of propaganda against us started, to the best of my knowledge, on the same day the CIO was found.”   Narrator: Within 1950, that’s when things started to get interesting, there were two rival unions UE and IUE. Then in the middle of the decade, GE  decided to brag that they have dealt with other unions, though all of them with local contracts. The company decided to seek out a five-year contract for peace workers and local understandings including compulsory overtime.蜉 Though with this contract, the aspects were that the workers were to receive retirement at 65 for men and 60 for women, their pension was to be $125/month (that included social security), and pensions after 20 years. Narrator: In the years 1950 to 1969 became known as the age of Boulwarism, due to GE’s Vice President was named Lemuel Boulware. He was troubled by the strength that the Union had with the employees and the general public. He got an actor and started a TV show called GE Theatre. This basically has the actor travel across the country making speeches that were opposing unions as well as taxes and government special programs. Boulware then changed the slogan of GE to “doing the right thing voluntarily” which meant that he was no longer going to negotiate with its employees’ unions.  Narrator: There wasn’t a union that could take on the company by itself, IUE tried, but ultimately failed. Their strike lasted three weeks and it collapsed in on itself. 蜉 This convinced GE to start to call for repeated joint consultations and action with the other unions, but this was to no avail. This resulted in GE dictating the terms of six consecutive national agreements from the years 1950 to 1966. In this mess, GE workers found themselves falling behind in work compared to other industries. It even went as far as taking away the cost of living protection in 1960.  Narrator: Though in 1969 this is where the unions had enough and the leaders finally agreed for the first time in 20 years. The unions created a joint strategy and kept in communication, they waited for when the contract expiration drew near. Though GE stuck to their Boulware formula, its first and final “offer” was that the wage offer was 20 cents the first year, but there was nothing guaranteed the years to come. That’s when the unions presented the contract from 1938, the company proposed that newly organized shops were to not automatically come under the National Contract, this would have weakened the union’s right to strike. In October of 1969, over 150,000 workers walked out in their first national strike in 23 years.  Narrator: GE spent millions trying to undermine the strike with news articles, radio shows, TV ads, but the strikers had support that was widespread. GE tried to have a movement that got them back to work, but it flopped as soon as it was out of the gate. After New Years that’s when it finally came to an end and the two saw their sides. In February, after 102 days on the picket lines that’s when they made a settlement between each other.