Abstract:Wintertime warming trends experienced in recent decades, and predicted to increase in the future, present serious challenges for ski areas and whole regions that depend on winter tourism. Most research on this topic examines past or future climatechange impacts at yearly to decadal resolution, to obtain a perspective on climate-change impacts. We focus instead on local-scale impacts of climate variability, using detailed daily data from two individual ski areas. Our analysis fits ARMAX (autoregressive moving average with exogenous variables) time series models that predict day-to-day variations in skier attendance from a combination of mountain and urban weather, snow cover and cyclical factors. They explain half to twothirds of the variation in these highly erratic series, with no residual autocorrelation. Substantively, model results confirm the "backyard hypothesis" that urban snow conditions significantly affect skier activity; quantify these effects alongside those of mountain snow and weather; show that previous-day conditions provide a practical time window; find no monthly effects net of weather; and underline the importance of a handful of high-attendance days in making or breaking the season. Viewed in the larger context of climate change, our findings suggest caution regarding the efficacy of artificial snowmaking as an adaptive strategy, and of smoothed yearly summaries to characterize the timing-sensitive impacts of weather (and hence, high-variance climate change) on skier activity. These results elaborate conclusions from our previous annual-level analysis. More broadly, they illustrate the potential for using ARMAX models to conduct integrated, dynamic analysis across environmental and social domains.
Having negotiated challenges that contributed to the deterioration of most other unions, the United Packinghouse Workers of America entered the second half of the century with widespread support among packinghouse workers and a strong sense of purpose. In the late 1950s, however, meatpacking companies began a radical reorganization of the industry's system of production. Within the next decade, significant deskilling, the collapse of wage standards, and numerous plant closings facilitated the political emaciation of organized labor in meatpacking. Using event-structure analysis to systematically examine and compare labor struggles in the postwar years (1946)(1947)(1948) and during the Reagan era (1986)(1987), the authors find that the development of new corporate strategies fundamentally transformed the capital-labor relationship and led to the collapse of industrial unionism in meatpacking. Most important were the industry's development of new technologies, its geographical reorganization of production, and its ability to locate new sources of cheap, nonunion labor.
We examine working-class race relations during two steel industry unionization efforts: the 1919 AFL drive and the 1937 CIO drive. Racial conflict divided steel workers in 1919 but interracial labor solidarity prevailed in 1937. We contrast the two drives using event-structure analysis (ESA) to highlight the imputed causal connections in our argument. Comparison of the 1919 and 1937 cases suggests that three developments were necessary for interracial solidarity in steel. First, industrial unions had to replace craft unions, which promoted class-oriented organizing strategies. Second, interracial solidarity required an easing of split labor market conditions. Third, unions had to incorporate concrete strategies to recruit black workers. In both cases, state actions and economic conditions mediated the impact of these factors on interracial organizing.
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