Total quality management (TQM) is usually presented as a proven “win‐win” solution to the problems of private and public sector organizations. However, actual TQM programmes (under a variety of names) have a poor track record in their own terms and a strong faddish appearance. Despite the record and the sharp disagreements among quality gurus, unions are frequently presented with finished programmes requiring major union and employee concessions. Further, despite TQM’s claimed concern for the welfare, dignity, and creative input of employees, the reality of TQM is a model which places most employees last. Beneath the rhetoric of many TQM programmes is a system of management control and unappealing work organization best described as “Management‐by‐stress”. Unions need to understand the basic TQM themes, examine their impact on employees and their unions, and propose alternatives which start with basic social needs.

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This paper traces the connections between Antonio Gramsci's ideas and developments in Western gender and women's history. The revival of women's history in the West in the 1970s brought the discovery or reacquaintance with Gramsci's writings, and this essay looks at examples of recent scholarship in gender and women's history that employs Gramscian theory. Equally important will be a consideration of Gramsci himself as an actor on the stage of women's history in the years before World War II. The last third of the paper places Gramsci in Italian family life, Communist Party politics and men's and women's prison experiences in the first half of the twentieth century. This discussion benefits from the growth of secondary literature on gender and women's history in Italy for this era, and rests on the many primary accounts left by women who lived and worked with Gramsci.

In New Orleans, as corporate profiteers scramble to benefit from the aftermath of the flood, the history of Black‐Brown relations has been compressed into a volatile six months. As contractors welcome Latino immigrants, displaced Black New Orleanians find they neither have jobs nor homes to return to. Unions and grassroots groups, using different methods, are trying to build unity as they fight for a voice for workers in the city's rebuilding.

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