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Ray Rogers and his organization have been featured many times in major publications such as Time, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsday, USA Today, and The Washington Post, as well as many television programs. Rogers is cited in Marquis' Who’s Who in America.

Time said Rogers has "brought some of the most powerful corporations to their knees, and his ideas are spreading." In 1995, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, and other big business interests launched an unsuccessful effort to outlaw "corporate campaigns," the term Rogers coined to describe strategies and tactics that help achieve victories for labor and other victims of abusive corporations and politicians.

During some of the most turbulent labor management struggles from 1980 through 1991, Corporate Campaign’s strategies and tactics proved decisive in victories for pilots at Texas Air and flight attendants at American Airlines.

In 1999, Corporate Campaign developed a contract campaign for Transport Workers Union Local 100 in New York City. The local’s 33,000 members, who operate and maintain New York City’ s subways and buses, won a settlement described on the front page of The New York Times as containing "the largest annual raises received by any of New York City’s public employee unions in nearly a decade." In the spring of 2000, CCI developed a campaign strategy for the 53,000-member New York State Public Employees Federation that put Governor George Pataki and other politicians on notice and led to major contract gains for the union. In 2001-02, CCI helped Pacifica Radio listeners take back the nation’s first and only non-commercial, free-speech radio network from a predatory, pro-corporate faction that had seized control of its national board. CCI raised funds for the campaign and helped develop and implement the strategy that led to the resignations of several board members.

In 2001-02, CCI was involved with national environmental, public interest, and religious organizations in the successful struggle to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain. CCI has developed, and is currently directing, the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke (www.killercoke.org), aimed at holding Coca-Cola’s policymakers and key shareholders accountable for the murders of union leaders and other gross human rights violations in Colombia.

Rogers was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, and is the son of a union machinist and an electronics assembler. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1967 and spent two years working in Tennessee as a VISTA volunteer. His work on behalf of poverty-stricken people in Appalachia was cited and commended by the Tennessee legislature and featured on NBC Nightly News. Later, he worked with reformers in the United Mine Workers Union to oust its corrupt leaders. From 1976 to 1980, while on the staff of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, he devised and led its pioneering corporate campaign against the notoriously anti-union J.P. Stevens & Co. Two years earlier, he organized a unique boycott in Alabama that led to the historic Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America victory for 3,000 Chicanos against Texas-based Farah Manufacturing Co. In the mid-1980s, Rogers developed the corporate campaign strategy for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, representing thousands of migrant farm workers, which was instrumental in ending a six-year strike and boycott and winning the union its first contract. In that same period, Rogers became one of the most controversial figures in the labor movement when he developed a campaign on behalf of UFCW Local P-9 against Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in Austin, Minnesota.

"Workers and other victims of corporate greed cannot legislate, litigate, or advertise away their problems," Rogers says. "They must organize aggressively and take their fights into the boardrooms of those at the center of the corporate and political web of power… Corporate, financial, and political power brokers can be pitted one against the other, to divide and conquer them the way they have divided and conquered poor and working people."

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New Arrivals

Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane—Abilene loves her blue china rabbit, but Edward Tulane is extremely vain, and only loves himself. On a voyage to London, Edward falls overboard and starts on an amazing journey of discovery... A heartwarming tale from the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Tale Of Despereaux, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, is a beautifully produced gift book featuring atmospheric, sepia-colored text, and ten full-color illustrations. The spare, incandescent prose leaves a rich and lasting memory.

Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon—Dennett has written an eye-opening exploration of the role that religious belief plays in our lives, our interactions, and our country. In a spirited argument that ranges widely through biology, history, and psychology, Dennett explores how religions evolved. He maintains that the widespread assumption that they are the necessary foundation for morality can no longer be supported.

Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan—The author of The Birth of Venus has set her new novel in Renaissance Italy. A courtesan and her dwarf companion escape the sack of Rome in 1527 and infiltrate Venetian society. This is a story of desire and deception, sin and religion, loyalty and friendship.

Please visit us at www.carletonbookstore.com.

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Wednesday, February 22: Lee Shulman Essay Discussion Group
4:30 to 6 p.m., Headley House

We'll read "The Doctoral Imperative: Examining the Ends of Erudition" (in the book, Teaching as Community Property) and also Signature Pedagogies in the Profession (available on the table in the LTC and in the summer 2005 issue of Daedalus).

Even if you could not attend the first meeting, you can still join for this second meeting. Please contact Jennifer Cox Johnson in person, by phone at x4192, or e-mail at jcoxjohn@carleton.edu.

Thursday, February 23: John Bransford, Bush Visiting Writing Scholar

Noon to 1:30 p.m.: "Research on Learning and Transferring Learning: Implications for Instruction," Alumni Guest House Meeting Room, lunch provided for 50.

7:30 p.m.: "Learning for the Twenty-First Century: Some Suggestions From the Learning Sciences," Olin 149. Please invite your students and friends to this stimulating talk.

John D. Bransford, James W. Mifflin University Professor of Education and Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle; Director, Center for Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE).

Co-sponsored by Mellon Faculty Life Cycles Grant, The College Writing Program, the Department of Psychology, and St. Olaf College Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts

Read Bransford’s "How People Learn, Brain, Mind, Experience, and School" online.

Looking ahead:

Tuesday, February 28: Is the Visual Ascendant?: Images, Imaging and Education in the 21st Century

Laurel Bradley, Director of Exhibitions & Curator of the College Art Collection
Cathy Manduca, Director, Science Education Resource Center
Beverly Nagel, Associate Dean of the College
John Schott, James Woodward Strong Professor of the Liberal Arts
and other members of the Visuality Working Group

Alumni Guest House Meeting Room, noon to 1:30 p.m.
Lunch provided for 50

See the LTC Web site for up-to-date information and events.