Service Employees International Union

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is a labor union representing almost 1.9 million workers in over 100 occupations in the United States (including Puerto Rico), and Canada. SEIU is focused on organizing workers in three sectors: health care (over half of members work in the health care field), including hospital, home care and nursing home workers; public services (local and state government employees); and property services (including janitors, security officers and food service workers).

SEIU has over 150 local branches. It is affiliated with the Change to Win Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress. SEIU's international headquarters is located in Washington, D.C.

The union is known for its strong support for Democratic candidates. It spent $28 million supporting Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. In 2012, SEIU was the top outside spender on Democratic campaigns, reporting almost $70 million of campaign donations, television ads and get-out-the-vote efforts in support of President Obama and other Democrats. SEIU is a major supporter of the Affordable Care Act and of increased minimum wage laws, including wage increases for fast food workers.

Lionel Richie

Lionel Brockman Richie, Jr. (born June 20, 1949) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer and actor. Beginning in 1968, he was a member of the musical group Commodores signed to Motown Records. Richie made his solo debut in 1982 with the album Lionel Richie and the number-one hit "Truly". He has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the world's best-selling artists of all time.

Early life

Lionel Brockman Richie, Jr. was born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, the son of Alberta R. (Foster) and Lionel Brockman Richie, Sr. He grew up on the campus of Tuskegee Institute.

Richie graduated from Joliet Township High School, East Campus. A star tennis player in Joliet, he accepted a tennis scholarship to attend Tuskegee Institute, and dropped out of Tuskegee Institute after his sophomore year. Richie seriously considered studying divinity to becoming a priest with the Episcopal Church, but ultimately decided he was not "priest material" and decided to continue his musical career. He is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi and an active life member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.

Horror fiction

Horror fiction is a genre of literature, and film which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten, scare, disgust, or startle their readers or viewers by inducing feelings of horror and terror. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon has defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". It creates an eerie and frightening atmosphere. Horror is frequently supernatural, though it can be non-supernatural. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.

History

The genre of horror has ancient origins with roots in folklore and religious traditions, focusing on death, the afterlife, evil, the demonic and the principle of the thing embodied in the person. These were manifested in stories of beings such as witches, vampires, werewolves and ghosts.

Gothic horror in the 18th century

18th century Gothic horror drew on these sources with the seminal and controversial The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. This marked the first time a modern novel incorporated elements of the supernatural instead of pure realism. In fact, the first edition was published disguised as an actual medieval romance from Italy discovered and republished by a fictitious translator. Once revealed as contemporary, many found it anachronistic, reactionary, or simply in poor taste — but it proved to be immediately popular. That first novel of Gothic horror inspired such works as Vathek (1786) by William Beckford, A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1796) by Ann Radcliffe and The Monk (1797) by Matthew Lewis. A significant amount of horror fiction of this era was written by women and marketed at a female audience, a typical scenario being a resourceful female protagonist menaced in a gloomy castle.

Industrial relations

Industrial relations is a multidisciplinary field that studies the employment relationship. Industrial relations is increasingly being called employment relations or employee relations because of the importance of non-industrial employment relationships; this move is sometimes seen as further broadening of the human resource management trend. Indeed, some authors now define human resource management as synonymous with employee relations. Other authors see employee relations as dealing only with non-unionized workers, whereas labor relations is seen as dealing with unionized workers. Industrial relations studies examine various employment situations, not just ones with a unionized workforce. However, according to Bruce E. Kaufman "To a large degree, most scholars regard trade unionism, collective bargaining and labor-management relations, and the national labor policy and labor law within which they are embedded, as the core subjects of the field."

Initiated in the United States at end of the 19th century, it took off as a field in conjunction with the New Deal. However, it is generally a separate field of study only in English-speaking countries, having no direct equivalent in continental Europe. In recent times, industrial relations has been in decline as a field, in correlation with the decline in importance of trade unions, and also with the increasing preference of business schools for the human resource management paradigm.