Labor Studies - Science topic

Gender inequalities we do face first at schools, later at workplace...

With outreach firmly on the agenda for the modern university, one way institutions can aspire to shape and transform local communities is by embedding service to society within the educational experience. As well as enriching students’ time at university, this can have both short- and long-term benefits to wider society....

Dear Hugh O'Donnell

I have developed a general approach to quantifying the division of labor using the example of the emergence of multicellularity. I believe that this approach can be applied to your case as well.

Check out the attached articles. And if you have any questions - write to me.

Good luck!

So what?!

Here is a recent application that uses the more recently developed framework

sorry not to be more helpful but your question is very encompassing, and this area is not my specialty!

Dear Prof. Vidoni,

Thank you very much for your time and thought-provoking inputs and the article.

Regards

Rao

Dear Jeroen, you could have a look on at article - Rego, R., Sprenger, W., Kirov, V., Thomson, G., & Nunzio, D. D. (2016). The use of new ICTs in trade union protests–five European cases. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 22(3), 315-329. Good luck. Vassil

there can be many reasons behind this policy of the government... nowadays private culture is growing and people are choosing private sector over the government sector

As a general rule, in the United States, enterprises that have contracts with labor unions covering their employees insist on no-strike clauses, for which the union obtains the right to grieve and arbitrate labor disputes. That governs the relationship during the term of the labor contract, typically three years, Prior to the expiration of the labor contract, the union and management commence bargaining for a new contract. Typically, the union will hold a general meeting of the membership of the bargaining unit to receive their authority to call a strike once the contract expires if there is no contract offer from management that they find worth taking back to the membership for ratification. Members are told to stand by on the expiration date for updates on whether or not a strike was called, a deal was struck, or an extension of negotiations had been agreed to. This is called an economic strike, and workers on strike can be permanently replaced. In the event the employer violates the labor laws, or wrongly refuses to accept a grievance, arbitrate a dispute, or comply with an arbitrator's decision, that is called an unfair labor practice strike, and workers who walk out in protest have a right to be reinstated to their jobs, with back pay, upon a finding of unlawful conduct by the employer, Unfortunately, many times workers must decide whether they will walk out before there is a determination of whether the employer's conduct is or is not illegal, meaning they walk out without certainty that they will be entitled to reinstatement. Where a union has set up a lawful picket line (either due to an economic strike or an unfair labor practice strike), other unions may refuse to cross the line (as, for example, a truck driver union refusing to deliver supplies to a struck factory, or a maintenance crew refusing to cross a line to repair equipment during a strike), if their contracts with their employer permit such "sympathy strikes." Where there is no recognized union, or where there is a recognized union but no collective bargaining agreement, two or more employees banding together for labor causes are considered acting in "concerted protected activity," and action taken against them for engaging in such activity is unlawful, even in the absence of a union. However, if they desert their job for economic reasons, they can be permanently replaced, similar to the strikers who walk off at the expiration of the contract. If they walk off due to breaches of the law, they usually can claim the protection of an unfair labor practice striker and have a right to reinstatement. I hope this is helpful. The US has substantial  jurisprudence on the issue under its National Labor Relations Act.

Hi Murat,

I published a paper some years ago now that examined regulatory impact statements in Australia and NZ, and their relative effectiveness.  The reference is:

Adrian Sawyer, "Regulatory Impact Statements and Accountability: Recent Australasian Evidence" (2008) 11(1) Journal of Australian Taxation,  42-107.  It is available online. 

I am not entirely sure whether this is what you are looking for when you mention impact factors, which may be you are looking to journal rankings and impact factors. If so, then you may wish to look at tools such as Scopus.

All the best with your research.

Adrian

Look at the research of Thomas Bock at Technical University of Munich; extensive research in automation and expert on Japanese construction.

Numerous papers, not everything might be listed on his page here https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas_Bock2

Also, search for publications referencing Sekisui House http://www.sekisuihouse.co.jp/english/index.html

I have an article on root cause analysis (fishbone) as part of using LFA 

Buttigieg, S. C., Gauci, D., & Dey, P. (2016). Continuous quality improvement in a Maltese hospital using logical framework analysis. Journal of Health Organization and Management, 30(7), 1026-1046.

A working definition for healthcare:

Uberoi, R. S., Gupta, U., & Sibal, A. (2004). Root cause analysis in healthcare. Apollo Medicine, 1(1), 60-63.

"Root Cause Analysis is a tool for identifying prevention strategies. It is a process that is part of the effort to build a culture of safety and move beyond the culture of blame. Thus it can be said that Root Cause Analysis is interdisciplinary, involving experts from the frontline services, involving those who are the most familiar with the situation, continually digging deeper by asking why, why, why at each level of cause and effect; a process that identifies changes that need to be made to systems and a process that is as impartial as possible. The goal of a Root Cause Analysis is to find out what happened, why did it happen and what do you do to prevent it from happening again. In Root Cause Analysis, basic and contributing causes are discovered in a process similar to diagnosis of disease -with the goal always in mind of preventing recurrence. To be thorough a Root Cause Analysis must include determination of human and other factors, determination of related processes and systems and analysis of underlying cause and effect systems through a series of why questions like identification of risks and their potential contributions and determination of potential improvement in processes or systems. To be Credible a Root Cause Analysis must include participation by the leadership of the organization and those most closely involved in the processes and systems. It should also be internally consistent and include consideration of relevant literature."

Gracias!!

For your region not, but I can send you comparatives of Latin America, does this serve you?

As a social work practice professional for many years (moved to research and policy), our skills are taught as "generalist practice" such that I/a social worker can apply them with different groups, individuals, etc. These include compassion, sensitivity, non-judgemental, and client centered. Most important, the social worker should be comfortable with persons in such sensitive situations and sometimes what is needed  is specialized training with "... " a specific group or population.  Here in US, (at least in the urban area where I live) even a Masters level social worker has to take a 40 hr training to work with this group

You could start with visiting a shelter or look for a social worker who works with victims of gender violence or maybe just observe such a case in the courts. (I am assuming lots of things here that ARE possible in US). Interestingly, there are many persons working with this group who are not SW professional but volunteers or w/o college education.

Re the research:  perhaps also looking at skills of persons who work with gender violence victims (in general) to include hospital personnel (doctors, nurses, orderlies, assistants), EMT, police, clinic, counseling centers. 

Please say, "social worker should act toward or with a woman...". "against"  means "en contra."

Respected Sir Hameed Rafiee!

My model is about to evalaute the impact of some main and also some conditioning varaibles on physical capital per worker. As physical capital is my dependent variable and that is calculating by prepetual inventory method than divided by labor force. Including some other control variables one of the varaible is gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) as %of GDP.  When i run the model the coefficient of (GFCF) shows negative sign. My question is about the theoretical reason of such negative sign for dependent varaible

You could try looking up Greg Bamber's work on comparative IR.

I agree Mikhail.

The OECD produced a guide 16 years ago - it is interesting now to see how they think about productivity (see link), and some of the limitations that Mikhail reminds us of.

I also like this other article, which is a much more humanistic approach:

This is exactly what I am using. The problem is that this report has only 65 countries.

Dear All.

Firstly, the above question says, "...in his field?". That means the question is specific to a person's field. But generally, there are as many fields as there are human beings to create them.

Now, to the specifics of the question, as applied to JUST a field.

Efficiency (measured in percent) = (Output divided by Input) multiplied by 100. SIMPLE.

This applies to all things, human-machines, mechanical-machines, electronic-machines, digital-machines and so on. But when we consider human-machine, then we are talking about INITIATIVE and ECONOMY.

So, a person who PRODUCES results with LESS supervision, and being most ECONOMICAL on energy, time and resources is efficient. But his/her efficiency is just still in a vacuum until applied.

The application happens when a third party comes into the scenario, that is, BUSINESS. The manager on one side, the client on the other side and the professional in between, being briefed about a job that is near a deadline. This is where his/her performance skills are put to test.

If the professional can scale the above job hurdle and goes on to scale much others over a period of time, without a single miss, the he/she is regarded as a WIZ. But, if he/she misses one or two, then he/she is said to be efficient.

Observe very carefully that the criteria normally considered are very dynamic and real-life in nature. Change is there only characteristic.

Thanks All.

@ Harkusha, the answer lies in your question itself - the measurement - which involves a metric.

Baba Gnanakumar aptly listed the several metrics. However, most ratios depend upon the market scenario, pricing et al. what I mean is that if the market is not responding in terms of acceptance of the product, then will the organisation be competitive?

Perhaps, competitiveness is never absolute. It being a relative /comparative study the tools explained by Gnanakumar appropriately will be handy.

 I did compare competitiveness w.r.t competence. Following link will drive you to that:

Holean Human Leadership - Developing from First Principles 

ssrn.com/abstract=2116262, IBA Journal of Management ...   This paper makes an interesting reading  making similes comparing wife vs mother for competitiveness vs competence 

Competitiveness Thru' a Competence Protocol 

Chasing Competence – A Journey through Metamorphosis Using Six Sigma

Each One is Capable (A Total Quality Organisation Thru' People)  Published in Foundry

Competitive Foundry Through Integration of TIPS (Technology, Innovation, Product Design and Process Systems) Published in the indian Foundry Journal (The Institute of Indian Foundrymen)

https://www.researchgate.net/.../228233868_Each_One_is_Capable_A_Total_Quality_O...

Це дуже важливе обговорення. Адже вимірювання та оцінка "гідної праці"  може грунтуватися на різних методологічних засадах і не всі дані для адекватної оцінки доступні

You might be interested in the attached papers on labour turnover.

Thank you 

I have some info about influence of Sufism on music.

Rahmah I have checked the wage data from ILO...it's quite relevant and good... But I find the UNIDO industrial statistics to be the best. But I will have to purchase the complete UNIDO dataset. It's not free, which I think UNIDO should make it available for free. cheers

Engaging youth as a direct substitute for local workers who would otherwise do the job is more job displacement than job creation—some distributional effects that may or may not add value, but little if any gain in economic productivity.

Youth employment schemes designed to build human capital are another matter. Challenging youth to design projects and their implementation (including budgeting), either narrowly construed around cleaning up the community or more broadly construed, not only produces a community service but also builds capacity, both for individual youth and for communities in developing an infrastructure to tap into opportunities for direct citizen engagement in community building and problem solving. Such schemes do not substitute for larger scale government projects, but can fill a niche locally for smaller scale, citizen driven initiatives.

There are many such examples in local communities throughout the US and some of these have been workshopped and implemented in South Africa and and Tanzania. See

Building civic infrastructure: implementing community partnership grant programmes in South Africa Charles F. Adams · Michael E. Bell · Trevor Brown Public Administration and Development 10/2002; 22(4):293 - 302. DOI:10.1002/pad.232 · 0.70 Impact Factor

In India data on child labour is abundantly available with the Ministry of Women and Children affairs under Central Government, and with the respective State Governments as 'labour' is categorized under concurrent list in the constitution of India. You may even refer government websites for more details...In India many Non Governmental agencies are also actively engaged in the area of eradication of child labour and doing lot of researches in these areas. Reputed research and academic institutions like Tata Institute of Social Service, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, can also be of immense help...

The collection of charters of demand submitted by unions and their agreements with the management as much as available in various steel factories by talking with authorized unions will be the best option. 

It's not a problem that R&D lost statistical significance when interactions were added. When interpreting the results of your model, you have to look not only on the coefficient of R&D, but also on the coefficient on the interaction term. That also makes sense, because the reason why you add interactions is because you want to see how the effect of R&D changes, e.g., with increasing youth employment.

In your case, when R&D is interacted with both young and old employment rates, the coefficient on R&D itself reflects the effect from R&D on your dependent variable when empl_young == 0 and empl_old == 0 (which might not be the most realistic scenario). See, e.g., http://www.theanalysisfactor.com/interpreting-interactions-in-regression/ for an example of the interpretation of an interaction with a discrete variable -- the logic behind the interpretation is the same here.

In your case, the situation is somewhat more difficult than in case with an interaction with a discrete variable, because it seems that you're interacting a continuous R&D variable with continuous variables (young and old employment). If you're using Stata, you might find the following links useful for the analysis of your model: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/faq/conconb12.htm (example with linear regression) and http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/faq/logitconcon12.htm (example with logit regression).

Here is a piece using data on individuals from the CPS.

Best, Sylvia

For Europe, the most complete and up-to-date data set is that operated by Jelle Visser at AIAS, to be found here: http://www.uva-aias.net/208

This is surely the most reliable and cited reference. For instance, see quotation in European Commission's report on "Industrial relations in Europe 2014" (http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=738&langId=en&pubId=7739).

There is some interesting work about trafficking that focus on sex labor migration from Latin America to Japan. 

Piper, N. (1999). Labor migration trafficking and international marriage: female cross-border movements into Japan. Asian Journal of Womens Studies, 5(2), 13.

Leheny, D., & Warren, K. (Eds.). (2009). Japanese aid and the construction of global development: inescapable solutions. Routledge.

Blanchette, T. G., & da Silva, A. P. (2012). On bullshit and the trafficking of women: Moral entrepreneurs and the invention of trafficking of persons in Brazil. Dialectical anthropology, 1-19.

I also attended this session at the recent AAAs titled "PRODUCING ANTHROPOLOGY IN/OF THE "NEW GLOBE": TRANSNATIONAL HUMAN AND CULTURAL MOBILITY IN JAPAN AND BEYOND". Probably some of the participants would be interesting for you.

Here is a reference that may help in one segment of your analysis:

The Research Productivity of New PhDs in Economics: The Surprisingly High

Non-Success of the Successful by John P. Conley and Ali Sina Önder in Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 28, Number 3—Summer 2014—Pages 205–216

Dear Professor Stein,

Unions and their impact on the public schools in America is, in my estimation, an understudied area. Teaching is one of the most heavily unionized work forces, yet little is understood about its effects. Opinions proliferate, but research supporting those opinions often lags.Your request extends the need for research and dialogue.

In response to your query, Case Cobb, University of Connecticut, and I studied the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of being a professional and being a member of a union. It was an exploratory study. Our conclusion is that it is tangled. Teachers think of themselves as professionals, yet they want the protection of a union. They want a contract but they perceive that the contract cannot reach those difficult places of professional practice. Some find the protection that a union provides to be necessary to their sense of professionalism while others find that the union to often protects incompetence thus diminishing their sense of professionalism. Teachers act as professionals and shift to acting as union members when there is a perceived threat.

If you would like to review our findings, you can find them at the following.

DeMitchell, T.A. & Cobb, C.D. Teachers: Their union and their profession. A tangled relationship. 212 Education Law Reporter 1 (2006).

DeMitchell, T.A. & Cobb, C.D. Teacher as Union Member and Teacher as Professional: The Voice of the Teacher. 220 Education Law Reporter 25(2007).

The issue of the impact of teacher unions on other school effects is discussed by such writers as Caroline Hoxby and Terry M. Moe. I found Tom Loveless’ edited volume, Conflicting Mission? Teachers Unions and Education Reform, to be quite informative and useful.

Thanks for starting this conversation. The responses from our colleagues are helpful as I work on the second edition of my book, Labor Relations in Education: Policies, Politics, and Practices.

Regards,

Todd A. DeMitchell

John and H. Irene Peters Professor of Education

Department of Education & the Justice Program

University of New Hampshire

As far as I know, in the AET intention to quit should be considered as an example of judgement driven behavior. So it is already an attitude.

Try also: The institutionalist tradition in labour economics, byChamplin and Knoedler. It is an oldie but goodie!

That sounds like a "forbidden regression." Endogeneity would be a big concern, since the quantity of hours worked also affects wages-- you have more accumulated human capital, are potentially earning overtime, etc. You would want, at least, a very compelling instrument. 

This question goes far deeper than one might think. The key to the answer is provided in Karl Polanyi's book called the Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times. Polanyi argues that capitalist economies created capitalist ways of thinking which are contradictory to natural ways of thought. In order to function, capitalist economies need three ARTIFICIAL commodities -- labor, land and money. These are not commodities -- labor is actually stuff which makes up human lives, Human lives are not commodities and not for sale at any price.  In traditional societies, people find work meaningful and take pleasure and pride in as it makes them useful members of society. The idea that labor is for sale, turns people into wage slaves, and deprives them of a very meaningful component of human living. The idea that human lives are an input into production processes, captured in the term Human Resources, and also  reflected in standard economic treatment, IS AN INSULT to human dignity. Actually production of wealth should be an input in order to help improve human lives. Taking this point of view (which is one of the goals of Happiness Economics & also of Amarty Sens capabilities approach) changes economic theory very drastically.

I have provide a very brief summary of the main arguments of Polanyi in my blog post entitled: A Summary of The Great Transformation, which is linked to below. 

you can see my artical titiled" Parametric study on equivalent damping ratio of different composite structural building systems" ,Steel and Composite Structures 02/2013; 14(4):349-365

Hello, do you mean the marketing of the domestic workforce (e.g., as educated, compliant)?

Service organisations are more amenable to automation . Thanks to the advances in technology. there is lot of re- engineering effort that has gone into this. Look at the way service portals operate these days. This is true for many service encounters , be in banking, be it insurance etc.

Though the manufacturing organisations have also gone for automation, the scope may be limited based on the typical characteristics of the concerned sector, such as automobile, electronics etc.

Due to automation, the bargaining power of unions get reduced , hence , we may be seeing less of unionization efforts in services as compared to manufacturing. A case in point is Indian banking industry. the unions were very strong in early 80's. However, due to automation (such as ATMs, web based/internet banking ) and due to streamlining of paper transactions, their bargaining power has substantially reduced.

The other reason as the discussion says, may be due to secure positions in service sector , there may not be any motivation for union efforts !

Have you tried this page:

I would prefer uniform for all employees including the management. That kind of uniform dress code helps to keep all the employees feel as if they belong to a family. A discipline is needed to inculcate that kind of feeling of belonging to the organization helps to boost the morale. If necessary you can have free dress day such as all Fridays.

I believe it does not matter where the knowledge is coming from. What is more important is that it is relevant and contextual.

Just capturing knowledge is not enough, it must be reused to provide the ROIs, the company is expecting.

Here are some techniques of how such knowledge is captured and manged (KM ) and re-used in industries.

The commitment vs. engagement debate is for many an issue of semantics. Simply, personnaly, I would say that employee commitment may be the extent to which employees are bound emotionally to their organization, while employee engagement would be the degree to which employees are passionate about what they do, about their work, and committed to their coworkers, and their organization. So I would say that probably, as used nowadays, the concept of engagement would be a wider and better measure that gives the organization a better barometer about the employee work environment. But the truth is that it is not easy to differenciate both concepts.

There might be some reasons for not controlling. For instance, immigrants are not randomly selected, which means that if you want to know about the impact of a characteristic on the decision made by a person from a certain country in a host country, such estimate is likely to be biased. However, this statement refers to the whole population from the country of origin.

If your focus (and surely it is) is on the effect for the immigrant in the host country (irrespective of what people in the country of origin would do in such situation), you do not need to address the selection process, as you are interested in what happens in the selected sample.

Another example: if studying the effect of schooling on education you are interested only on employed population, there is no reason for controlling for selection into employment. If you are interested in what happened with the whole population, you should control for selection into employment (it is possible that unobservable skills of employed individuals are higher than those out of the employed population and such skills are correlated with education).

Thanks alot Angel Martin Roman, this has been very useful. I have explored the reference suggested and it has provided further leads to other equally pertinent literature on the the economics of trade unions. This has set me on firm ground to model the objective function of trade unions by means of a utility function.

Hi Jim,

there are two lines of research on this subject, one that is retrospective and the other that is propective in regard to the focus of empirical data collection. The retrospective research is mainly based on questionnaires that assess attention and memory in the field. Usually, correlative relationships between self-report and laboratory measured attentional functioning are examined, comparing a specific sample of participants (e.g., construction workers) to a matched control sample. One of the best known instruments to conduct these kind of studies is the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ), developed by Broadbent et al. (1984). There are some more questionnaires, such the Short Inventory of Mental Lapses (SIML), developed by James Reason, and some more. The prospective studies in that area are more expensive and thus less often found in the literature. But the common practice of researchers using this method of diary recording. Participants were required to give notes about their attention and memory efficiency in an electronic diary (an app), either in an even-frame or in a certain time-frame.

To find good literature, you may go to google-scholar and look for the original Broabent paper, then analyse the citations (about 800) and you will find all the studies that have used this instrument in a field setting. Note that most of the studies do not deal with "construction workers" but with related work place settings. But I hope that the theoretical reasoning of previous studies may help you to achieve your research goals, though.

Some References (that came to my mind)

Broadbent, D. E., Cooper, P. F., FitzGerald, P., & Parkes, K. R. (1982). The Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ) and its correlates. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 21, 1-16.

Wallace, J. C., & Vodanovich, S. J. (2003). Can accidents and industrial mishaps be predicted? Further investigation into the relationship between cognitive failure and reports of accidents. Journal of Business and Psychology, 17, 503-514.

Day, A. J., Brasher, K., & Bridger, R. S. (2012). Accident proneness revisited: The role of psychological stress and cognitive failure. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 49, 532-535.

Hopefully, I could help you a little bit,

Best regards,

Michael Steinborn, University of Wuerzburg

Both parties should share the same objective which is to produce value for the society the business serves. Value can only be sustained with the constant effort of management to guide the vision in the correct direction and with labor to engage in the process of producing engaged customers by producing valuable goods and services.

When either management or labor pursues a selfish agenda the business will suffer. But this does not seem to keep stupid managers demoralizing their workforce and selfish union bosses from driving the costs of production to un-competitive levels. Reality does not match theory far too often. In great companies it does and management and labor both pull in the same direction.

Very interesting topic! I only know the case of Latin America, where La Vía Campesina -an international peasant organization- tries to bridge that gap with its concept of Food Sovereignty. I worked on the concept of Good Life that does the same thing in Ecuador - bridging the gap between the somewhat syndicalist indigenous movement and the environmental movement with great success (I attach a little text of mine on this topic).

As you can see, I would opt for some kind of combination between discourse analysis and content analysis - however, that depends on what exactly you are going to analyze.