Search

This article explores how two African American Pentecostal pastors in Buffalo, New York (USA) promote a phenomenology of respect as they link imperatives to labour for the good of others to the need to discern God's purposes. In African American communities, church leadership has long elicited respect because pastoring is hard work, important elements of which consist of encouraging other members to labour for the church and seeking insights from God about believers' lived situations. Respect is likewise key to believers' relationships with God, in that pastors promote techniques that encourage them not only to recognise spiritual beings but to respect and obey God and their leaders. As a result, acts of respect shape bodily knowledge about relationships with powerful human and spiritual others. Such enactments of respect counter suspicions of exploitation that accompany relations of dependence among the urban poor, so that believers' idioms of intercorporeal connection provide means for them to reflect on who has worked on behalf or taken advantage of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory report investigates how children, aged 6‐ to 12‐years, reason about divisions in labour. It focuses on understanding when in development children might associate higher status groups with intellectual as opposed to physical labour. It explores this question by introducing a sample of mostly mid/high‐SES American children to a novel factory setting and then asking them who is likely to have one of two jobs: a 'builder' (physical labour), or 'thinker' (intellectual labour) job. Older children were more likely than younger children to associate an individual's higher social status with intellectual labour work as opposed to physical labour work. Children also explained their reasoning, and with age their explanations focused more on social factors like the role of access to 'choices' or opportunities in shaping the nature of others' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1960s 'ad-hocracy', an approach to organizations that values provisionality and is especially advantaged by new technological systems, has been understood as a 'radical' challenge to the rigidity of bureaucratic institutions. This essay argues that commonsense championing of the temporary, the anti-institutional, and the flexible in corporate, political, educational, and daily life established the conditions that preordained the disastrous handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. Most hazardously, a powerful strain of Left critique also advances on a comparable tack, one that too easily embraces temporary and flexible organizational structures over lasting institutional ones, resulting in unintended ideological support for 'ad-hocracy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The declining pattern of population density from city centres to the outskirts has been widely observed in American cities. Such a pattern reflects a trade-off between housing price/commuting cost and employment. However, most previous studies in urban population density functions are based on the Euclidean distance, and do not consider commuting cost in cities. This study provides an empirical evaluation of the classic population density functions in 382 metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) in the USA using travel times to city centres as the independent variable. The major findings of the study are: (1) the negative exponential function has the overall best fit for population density in the MSAs; (2) the Gaussian and exponential functions tend to fit larger MSAs, while the power function has better performance for small MSAs; (3) most of the MSAs appear to show a decentralisation trend during 1990–2016, and larger MSAs tend to have a higher rate of decentralisation. This study leverages crowdsourced geospatial data to provide empirical evidence of the classic urban economic models. The findings will increase our understanding about urban morphology, population–job displacement and urban decentralisation. The findings also provide baseline information to monitor and predict the changing trend of urban population distribution that could be driven by future environmental and technological changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Amniotomy is a commonly used, inexpensive method of labour induction; however, the optimal timing of amniotomy during labour induction is debated. Aims: To investigate whether artificial rupture of membranes <4 cm dilation is associated with caesarean, severe maternal and neonatal morbidity, and labour induction duration. Materials and Methods: Retrospective cohort study of 228 438 deliveries at 19 US hospitals. Women with a viable, singleton gestation undergoing induction ≥37 weeks with cervical dilation <4 cm were included. Women were excluded if membranes spontaneously ruptured <4 cm. Women were compared by early amniotomy (<4 cm dilation) versus not early. The primary outcome was caesarean. Secondary outcomes included severe maternal and neonatal morbidity, and labour duration. Logistic and Cox proportional hazard regression estimated the association between early amniotomy and study outcomes. Results: Of 15 525 eligible women, 10 421 (67%) had early amniotomy. Early amniotomy was associated with higher adjusted odds of caesarean and severe maternal morbidity, but not neonatal morbidity. After accounting for interaction, early amniotomy was associated with increasingly higher odds of caesarean as body mass index increased. Early amniotomy was associated with lower odds of severe maternal morbidity among multiparas with mechanical ripening. Median labour induction was 2.5 h shorter with early amniotomy, significant in hazard regression. Conclusions: Early amniotomy was associated with increased odds of caesarean among obese women. The association between early amniotomy and severe maternal morbidity varied by maternal characteristics, but early amniotomy was not associated with neonatal morbidity. Early amniotomy in labour induction may be advantageous in certain populations, particularly non‐obese women requiring mechanical ripening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the role that US Chamber of Commerce lobbyists and border politicians played in limiting restrictions on Mexican labour migration to the United States in the 1920s. Together, they successfully resisted calls for stricter statutory limitations on the admission of Mexican migrants by emphasizing their economic and civic contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative case study of travel journalism in the USA explores how freelancers produce on speculation because publications do not contractually guarantee pay or advanced resources for travel. Freelance travel journalists therefore experience their work as an investment into an uncertain return in an undefined future. This article shows how such speculation manifests itself as a new productive process and relations of organisational externalisation in lean capitalism. Examining the changing obligations between freelancers and publications without assignment-contracts, this study argues that speculation presents the obfuscation of production. It externalises the risks of production onto the freelancer; reduces organisational control over production; and changes occupational norms and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canada and the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts from the 1940s to the 1970s. Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentation of the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants, but the legacy of earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Portrait of a Madonna by paying closer attention to the playwright's representations of labour, gender, and especially sweat – a typically overlooked by-product of performance that Williams consistently foregrounds. I argue that the way these plays represent sweat encapsulates their portrayals of theatrical labour in a historical moment in which both American theatre and American labour were undergoing profound transformations. Different responses to sweat reveal different valuations of labour that fall along gendered lines, and both plays ask why this difference poses specific risks for female performers, who must efface their exertions and are thus more at risk when new economic and social situations render them more visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1980s, the way in which goods and materials are exchanged and moved has changed in what has been called the 'logistics revolution'. In the USA, the value of goods moved as freight has doubled since the late 1990s, the number of warehouses has grown by two-and-a-half times, while the amount carried by intermodal transport has grown by five times over these years. This article will argue that the system of logistics that has taken shape in the last two or three decades is deeply affected by contradictions inherent in capitalism that magnify the potential power of labour to disrupt supply chains. Among these are: the tension between the desire for the seamless movement of goods and the disruptive reality of competition and the fight for value appropriation up and down the supply chain; the push by both retailers and manufacturers for ever faster delivery of goods to market; the burden of high fixed costs that underlie the structure of contemporary logistics; and the growth of huge 'logistics clusters' concentrating tens of thousands of manual workers in important metropolitan areas. It will be argued that each of these contradictions renders the firms in these logistics networks highly vulnerable to worker actions. While such actions have been relatively rare so far, communitybased pre-union organising in some major clusters, such as Chicago, is laying the basis for a future upsurge in worker organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing together leading observers of the 2018 teachers' strikes in the United States, this forum surveys the origins, character, and trajectory of the rebellion as a whole. We examine the relations between union bureaucracies and the rank and file, the wider political context of the United States, the geography of the strike, immediate and longer-term grievances in the public-education sector, spontaneity and organisation, local cultural contexts and labour histories, strategies and tactics, social reproduction and gender, race and racism, and the potentialities and obstacles facing the movement in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of race in structuring the movement of seasonal tobacco workers from the Southern United States to Ontario from the 1920s to the 1960s. Over this period, tens of thousands of southern migrant workers of varying skill levels travelled to Ontario to take up jobs in all aspects of tobacco production. Participation in the movement was limited exclusively to white workers until 1966, when it was integrated at the behest of American officials fearful of contravening the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Methodologically, the article follows Michel-Rolph Trouillot and is an exercise in uncovering silences in the archive, as civil servants in both countries and employer representatives in Ontario were extremely hesitant about mentioning the movement's racial character on record. Beyond methodology, the findings presented contribute to developing a better understanding of the uneven nature of the "deracialization" of Canada's immigration policies in the 1960s and to charting more of Canada's role in the construction and maintenance of transnational systems of white supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines representations of mental illness in North American network television. It is particularly drawn to the CBS police procedurals Elementary (2012–present) and Limitless (2015) as distinct but overlapping stories of mental illness, addiction and intellectual labour. Though depression, drug addiction and anxiety disorders are treated differently in each series, Elementary and Limitless offer complementary narratives of occupational therapy that equate work with mental well-being. While they seem to present a positive image of mentally ill characters with meaningful jobs, Elementary and Limitless measure mental fitness by one's capacity to work in the same industries often linked to mental illnesses in the first place, resulting in a paradox of productivity. Here the television programmes, much like occupational therapy, tend to overlook critical questions about the socio-economic underpinnings of psychological disorders and encourage viewers to understand the links between mental illness and work in rather myopic ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The Tiwanaku ( AD 500–1100) colonized ecologically diverse, lower elevation areas to produce goods not easily grown in the high altitude heartland (3,800 m a.s.l.). One colony near present‐day Moquegua, Peru (900–1,500 m a.s.l.) was composed of multiple Tiwanaku settlements. Colonists farmed products like maize and coca and transported goods via llama caravan between the colony and heartland. Two subsistence groups emerged in terms of settlement, those of “Chen Chen‐style” affiliation associated with an agrarian lifestyle and those of “Omo‐style” representing more of a pastoralist lifeway. Considering Tiwanaku people likely began light chores around 5 years of age (e.g., babysitting siblings), with heavier labour beginning at approximately 8 years of age, we questioned if these social and occupational differences translated into skeletal changes associated with osteoarthritis (i.e., porosity, lipping, osteophyte formation, and/or eburnation). Individuals from 5 sites, 2 that represent the Omo‐style (M16 and M70) and 3 that are in the Chen Chen‐style (M1, M10, and M43), were evaluated for osteoarthritis while controlling for age‐at‐death and sex using 25 total joint surfaces in the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, ankle, and sacroiliac. Overall, our comparisons show no combined significant differences between the Omo‐style and Chen Chen‐style groups. Instead, distinctions in osteoarthritis evidence by age‐at‐death and sex emerged, reflecting the likelihood of specific age‐ or sex‐related tasks. Arthropathy evidence among children in elbow and ankle joints also supported the cultural legacy in the Andes that work begins at a relatively young age and would show up in patterns of adult osteoarthritis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to add information on which voices contributed to the scientific management narrative from Frederick Taylor’s 1915 death to the early 1930s with a focus on the role of labor union representatives. The strategy is to analyze the role of labor representatives as participants in Taylor Society meetings and publications. The research contributes to the management history literature by bolstering the picture of the Taylor Society as a liberal, pro-labor organization. The research also shows that the Taylor Society was an early proponent of the idea that assembling diverse groups for dialogue improves organizational problem-solving.Design/methodology/approach The research analyzes historical sources including all issues of the Society’s bulletin from 1914 to 1933 and unpublished material from the Morris Cooke papers and the papers in the Frederick Taylor archive at Stevens Institute of Technology.Findings Taylor Society leaders took a proactive view of encouraging labor voices to join managers and academics in society meetings. At the beginning, few labor leaders spoke at the society, and often, at least some of their comments were critical of scientific management. By 1925, labor participation increased with William Green, American Federation of Labor (AFL) president appearing several times. In addition, labor leaders became positively inclined toward having scientific management experts working in industrial settings. The labor leaders who participated at Taylor Society meetings in the late 1920s and early 1930s considered scientific management insights as useful for labor and wanted to cooperate with the researchers.Originality/value The paper augments a revisionist view of interwar scientific management as progressive and pro-labor, a contested point in the management history literature. The research also shows how the Taylor Society was an early proponent of the importance of diversity, at least in the areas of gender and socioeconomic status, for effective problem-solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide background on the US living wage movement, with particular attention to recent victories, and also the ways in which the US movement differs from living wage movements in other countries. It begins with some technical distinctions of terms, then analyzes the campaigns and movement for higher wages, and considers some of the challenges the campaigns have faced. It will conclude with some discussion about the future of the movement.Design/methodology/approach This is a general review of living wage campaigns in the USA. This is based on a review of existing literature and the author’s own prior research and participant observation.Findings The author argues that the initial living wage movement that began in the early 1990s was limited in scope but successful in building coalitions and political power to launch a much more expansive movement to raise wages in 2012.Originality/value This paper is a general summary of the last 20 years of living wage campaigns. It does not include new research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine my practice-as-research piecesWhat The Money MeantandSERVUS!in terms of how their design and delivery make visible those labour and exchange relations characteristic of late capitalism. After a brief introduction, I take the reader through theoretical debates around service work’s proliferation and existing arguments about its relationship to performance, as well as an argument for the ‘agonistic’ potential of aesthetic activity. I move on to argue that SERVUS! provides an example of how the one-to-one performance form can both reveal reification in action and rupture or speak back to its enactment, via techniques including explicit payment, over-enunciation or ‘flourish’ and what I term affective dissonance. I then demonstrate howWhat The Money Meantextends these techniques by applying them across a specific scenographic design and participatory structure.What The Money Meantinvites audience members to communicate with the performer by tipping, which I argue might be seen as a dramaturgical tactic of audience participation. I conclude by arguing that the performance of service, especially that which plays upon the one-to-one structure, can work ‘agonistically’ by both revealing the precarity of late capitalist labour and subverting its delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose Discrimination and hostility in the workplace prevents homosexual workers from performing their core functions on the job. Moreover, it introduces unnecessary costs by increasing absenteeism, lowering productivity, and fostering a less motivated, less entrepreneurial, and less committed workforce. By means of an agent-based model, the authors simulated the effects on unemployment rates of an increasing of sexual orientation (SO) disclosure in the workplaces. The authors tested the effects on workers’ utility, level of job satisfaction and segregation. The results show a complessive improvement of the firms’ performances and a better job satisfaction for undeclared and homosexual workers and employers. With a homosexual employer, the authors can observe an increasing homosexual utility and firm profit, with a low decrease in undeclared utility. Instead, with an undeclared employer, the firm’s profit decreases but the total effect is positive. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach An agent-based model applied.Findings Effects of sexual disclosure on unemployment rates, job satisfaction, and job segregation.Originality/value The economic literature on SO and job satisfaction is very meager. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour is construed as an income-generating capacity or as creative activity in the capabilities approach. This rendition misses a vital capability that Marx articulates: labour as a potential to produce surplus. Accordingly, following Marx, I define labour as the ability, freedom and willingness to produce more than what labourers deem necessary to sustain themselves. I argue each has this capability and should willingly realise it in accordance with their ability. With this definition, additional questions arise as to who should appropriate the surplus or receive a portion of it. I contend that each, irrespective of their role in production, should have the capability to appropriate surplus, just as each should have the capability to claim and receive a portion of the surplus according to their needs. I finish by showing the prevalent normative framework of the capitalist economy, 'equal rights and equal exchange', is nothing other than exclusive rights (capabilities) and unequal exchange, which results in exploitation, now defined as a violation of capabilities equality. By contrast, I call for a non-exclusive, 'radical equality' à la Sen: no one is excluded from participating in or having access to any moment of this surplus economy, one that is non-exploitative and communal, as each capability is extended to each individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay analyzes representations of neoliberal labour in two films by the U.S. filmmaker Ramin Bahrani: Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2007). By focusing on working-class labour in New York's informal economy, the films undermine the prevalent characterization of contemporary labour as "immaterial" and fundamentally new. The essay argues that, in the latter film, the Willets Point neighbourhood appears as an area of "uneven development," which gives the working-class characters a modicum of autonomy and a chance to transform their spaces. Yet the films' greatest strength is their resistance to clichéd representations of workingclass characters as oppressed "others"--objects of ethnographic fascination and paternalistic sympathy. Instead, Bahrani encourages the audience's identification with the characters by using innovative filmmaking practice and focusing on the structures of "entrepreneurial governmentality," usually associated with white-collar work. Bahrani's films also highlight the contradictions of contemporary filmmaking and neoliberal culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since Marcel Mauss wrote The Gift, the notion that things exchanged as gifts take a personalised social form, and that they partake of and mediate relational sociality, has held an important place in anthropology. Examining material practices among contemporary Pagans in the Reclaiming tradition, this article shows how they seek to imbue things with personhood, exploring the sacredness of things as alive, active and participating in social relations. In doing so, these Pagans work to forge an alternative economy founded on gift exchange and generous labour, which they hope might form a basis for a different kind of sociality from the capitalist system dominant in the United States. In practice, the encounter between gift and commodity forms in this community is a source of both conflict and emergent forms of sociality, as these alternative economic practices are fashioned around the margins of mainstream economic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much attention has been paid to the entrepreneurial “base” of the ethnic economy, the enclave is primarily composed of thousands of hourly employees working in small co-ethnic or multi-ethnic immigrant firms. The US economy benefits from over 10 billion dollars in taxed income and wages from immigrants whose social security numbers do not match up with their employee tax identification numbers. Multiple mismatches and misinformation about immigrants (from an economic, cultural, and political standpoint) demonstrate the need to understand the unique potential of immigrant communities in facilitating urban growth. Koreatown in Los Angeles, an ethnic enclave economy that is also a central business district for many immigrant workers, is one emergent example of new types of flexibility around citizenship status and semi-formal jobs as they are negotiated on a daily basis in the neighbourhood. Previous studies of the ethnic enclave have maintained that there is a singular importance to the co-ethnic network (Korean to Korean, or Cuban to Cuban, for example), and yet this traditional characterisation of the ethnic enclave does not hold true in most urban ethnic enclaves, which include multiple ethnic groups working side by side. Interviews with Korean and Latino workers demonstrate the ways in which people (including undocumented individuals) contribute to the local economy, and informally communicate in neighbourhoods and cities to build a broader social and economic network outside of enclave boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Approximately 60% of women who labour in the USA receive some form of neuraxial analgesia, but concerns have been raised regarding whether it negatively impacts the labour and delivery process. In this review, we attempt to clarify what has been established as truths, falsities and uncertainties regarding the effects of this form of pain relief on labour progression, negative and/or positive. Additionally, although the term 'epidural' has become synonymous with neuraxial analgesia, we discuss two other techniques, combined spinal-epidural and continuous spinal analgesia, that are gaining popularity, as well as their effects on labour progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I undertake count data estimation with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort and the Health and Retirement Study to evaluate the relationship between time spent out of the labour force and the frequency of religious service attendance for individuals of working age. I also examine whether being out of the labour force is correlated with the frequency of religious service attendance.  Results using Poisson fixed-effect and negative binomial estimation suggest that men under age 50 appear to attend religious services less frequently when out of the labour force. I ascribe this finding to younger men’s religious service attendance being related to having work or the pursuit of work. Men between ages 50 and 65 attend religious services less frequently when out of the labour force, which I attribute to serious health problems in later age forcing labour market exiting and reduced frequency of religious service attendance. Women between ages 50 and 65 attend religious services more frequently when out of the labour force, which I ascribe to having more time to pursue religious activity in addition to women’s established proclivity to religious commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that affect a person's choice to work in a specific sector to understand the overrepresentation of women in the nonprofit sector in the USA. Design/methodology/approach – This study views a sector choice of prime-age salaried workers as a three-way choice among for-profit, nonprofit, and public sectors. One's choice of employment sector in this study depends on extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, and is also shaped by structural factors. These benefits, in turn, tend to be determined by individual characteristics. Consequently, this study estimated the endogenous switching regression of earnings and sector choice. Findings – Results from 2003 to 2007 Current Population Survey (CPS) September supplement data indicate that the so-called “feminine” industries are concentrated in the nonprofit sector, and this gendered industry structure attributes to women's overrepresentation in the sector. The results also suggest that women with more education and experience may choose nonprofit jobs over jobs in the other sector while nonprofit employment is generally associated with negative wage differentials. Research limitations/implications – This study does not model employers’ behaviors while gender segregation and discriminatory hiring practices may have contributed to women's overrepresentation in the nonprofit sector due to the lack of employer-side information in CPS. Consequently, the estimation of sector choice without employer information is likely to suffer from an endogeneity problem. Practical implications – This study highlights the factors affecting the concentration of women in the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit organizations may use the information to better understand their employees. Social implications – The findings suggest that women's sector choice is largely embedded in the industry structure of the nonprofit sector. Originality/value – This study examines a sector choice of prime-age salaried workers as a three way choice, instead of a binary choice, among for-profit, nonprofit, and public sectors, which reflects the reality better. Further, this study contributes to the literature on nonprofit employment by testing the impact of nonprofit status on an individual's earnings. Lastly, this study contribute to understanding women's overrepresentation in the nonprofit sector by examining both the structural and utilitarian aspects of sector choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparisons of industry sectors in advanced economies since the 1960s show that the construction sector has lagged in productivity growth rates, especially in the United States. Although the US and Canadian economies are highly integrated, Canada’s experience differs in key ways. Analysis of these differences offers insight into fundamental construction productivity drivers. Three levels of analyses of construction productivity in the US are provided in this study. The first analysis compared international levels of labour productivity growth. The second compared construction productivity between the US and Canada, and the third analysed cost estimating data from RS Means estimating manuals to measure the changes in labour and partial factor productivity in the US from 1995 to 2009. Statistical significance testing indicates that labour productivity remained nearly constant in the building sub-sector and that partial factor productivity has improved at an annual compound rate of 0.66%. This supports previous findings that US construction has stagnated but is still improving in Canada, with wage differentials and training systems as potential drivers of this difference. While growth rates of productivity seem to decline with higher absolute levels of productivity, there is no evidence that high absolute productivity levels preclude significant growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the time of this writing, the United States Senate has passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S. 744). The bill is the product of countless political compromises and would significantly transform the U.S. immigration system. This paper explores shortcomings in U.S. immigration policy, deconstructs provisions in the bill, and makes policy proposals that would protect and empower migrants who interface with the U.S. immigration system in dangerous and under-regulated environments at the border and in sending communities, in labour recruitment networks, and in the U.S. workforce. Ultimately, the paper seeks to continue an ongoing conversation that challenges the criminalisation of migration which perpetuates vulnerability, and instead forwards rights-based policies that would promote shared prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black music is an ideo-aesthetic practice that highlights the making of myriad identity positions, including race, citizenship and class. Under globalisation and the mass commodification of US life, however, corporations have co-opted Black musics for various ends to manufacture alternative desires and realities to those of the musicians themselves, whose visions are better understood as ‘freedom dreams’.1 This article examines one such abuse, in which Black music was used as both foil and concealment for an (enforcedly) idle working class in the majority Black city of Detroit. Through close analysis of two 2011 Chrysler Corporation commercials, the article demonstrates how the radical disarticulation of location, labour and race within popular culture has reconfigured Black labour into an ephemeral cultural influence, rather than a tradition of economic affluence. By dislocating the manual and cultural labours of Black Detroit from the scenery and products that it sells, Chrysler abandons the city that made it, opting instead to locate itself in a site of cultural and economic make-believe through the medium of a white male rap emcee. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the national and global entertainment media production centre of ‘Hollywood’, the fiscal crisis punctuated a long-term trend towards declining employment and production capacity. Two factors explain why entertainment media production workers faced the contemporary fiscal crisis in a vulnerable position: (i) media conglomerates adopted a global strategy that severely limited financing and distribution options for medium- and low-budget films; and (ii) the decrease in mid-budget projects in film and television reduced opportunities to compose a sufficient income from project-based work in entertainment media production. This analysis demonstrates the critical role the labour force plays in project-based industries and has implications for how we understand adaptation and change over time in production ‘clusters’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Labour epidural analgesia (LEA) is an evolving field. Various neuraxial techniques and dosing regimens are available to the modern obstetric anesthesia provider, allowing for significant practice variability. To begin a search for consensus on optimal care, we sought to query fellowship training practices for LEA., Methods: We conducted an electronic survey of institutions with American Council for Graduate Medical Education-accredited obstetric anesthesiology fellowship programs. We studied the frequency of epidural initiation techniques, including combined spinal epidural (CSE), dural puncture epidural, and epidural bolus. For maintenance techniques, we appraised the use of continuous epidural infusion, programmed intermittent bolus (PIEB), and patient-controlled epidural analgesia (PCEA)., Results: Of 40 institutions surveyed, we received 32 responses (80% response rate). Twenty-eight of 40 (70%) were included in the analysis. A plurality of institutions (12/28; 43%) preferred CSE, and among those who used CSE, 23/27 (85%) included intrathecal opioids. A majority of institutions used protocols with PIEB (55%), while almost all (92%) used PCEA. Most participants (88%) reported using dilute concentration maintenance infusions of 0.1% bupivacaine/ropivacaine or less., Conclusion: Despite significant variability in LEA practice, some clear patterns emerged in our survey, including preference for opioid-containing CSE and maintenance with PIEB, PCEA, and dilute epidural solutions., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Emergency management systems are a critical factor in successful mitigation of natural and man-made disasters, facilitating responder decision making in complex situations. Based on socio-technical systems, have which four components (people, technology, structure and task), this study develops a research framework of factors affecting effective emergency management. People factors include psychological factors such as responders' self-efficacy, support from family, peers and community, and training. Technology factors are task technology and information sharing. The structure factors are leadership, labour and logistics. Finally, the task factor refers to effective emergency management. This study empirically tests this framework by collecting surveys from emergency responders who participated in the 2006 Buffalo October Storm. The research results demonstrate that training and support positively affect emergency management self-efficacy which, in turn, has a positive significant relationship with effective emergency management. Task technology and information sharing also have a positive impact on effective emergency management. However, findings suggest that the structure factors do not show a significant relationship with effective emergency management. This research presents that human factors in emergency management are essential to conduct effective operations. More importantly, investing in technology to assist responders in performing their jobs during the emergency is crucial during the emergency operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the contentious late 1930s and early 1940s, American education and American labour struggled with both internal and external concerns over Communist infiltration. These struggles converged on the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a union of 30,000 K-12 and college teachers. Through its focus on leftist politics and organised college faculty, this article contends that college faculty played critical roles in the debates over Communism within the union, that the end of the Popular Front fundamentally weakened the college locals and that the ultimate purge of Communist locals had devastating effects on faculty unionisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Industrial Relations / Relations Industrielles is the property of Universite Laval, Department of Industrial Relations and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The case for or against craft training in construction from the perspective of constructors, owners, governments, workers, and other stakeholders is not completely clear, despite several studies to date. The business case for investing in construction craft training is examined from the employer's perspective on a construction project. A survey of 93 training directors and construction managers from throughout the US construction industry was used to collect quantitative estimates regarding craft training benefits and learning rates. Using these data, a benefit to cost ratio was calculated for a hypothetical typical industrial project (the CII model plant). According to the analyses, the estimated benefit to cost ratios range from 1.5:1 to 3.0:1. While these ratios are based on expert opinion, the results were triangulated with actual data from company training and project performance records as well as results from other research studies. The estimated benefit to cost ratios on the study's hypothetical industrial project are sensitive to the craft workers' employment duration, assuming that the training is provided by a single employer. Training durations are likely to be longer under a 'community training' model in which firms collaborate to sponsor training and workers have greater opportunities to continue in their training programme as they move from firm to firm. Nevertheless, the results contribute to a growing body of evidence that an investment in craft training is economically attractive for an employer, even over a typical project life cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thousands of news workers were laid off in the United Kingdom and North America in 2008-2009. While daily newspapers were particularly affected, labour cuts also hit broadcasters and news magazines. Popular commentary has often attempted to explain the cuts as a result of Internet competition, aging audiences for news and a slumping global economy. Optimists suggest the rise of new media practices such as blogging and citizen journalism have, despite the contraction of newsrooms, expanded the range of information and opinion available to citizens. This paper is an attempt to clarify what is an unquestionably chaotic moment in journalism. Our focus is the labour of reporting—the quotidian work of gathering information of public interest and packaging it into a story. The paper uses Pierre Bourdieu's field theory to contextualize the use of new media technologies by amateur and professional journalists in an attempt to understand the power relations that inform the work of reporting. We argue that labour rationalization in combination with the use of new technologies, shrinking audiences, 24-hour news cycles, and intensified hyper-commercialization is fundamentally reorganizing the division of labour in newsrooms. Importantly, we argue there is little empirical evidence to suggest that unpaid citizen journalists will replace the lost labour of reporting—the work of collecting information, synthesizing it and presenting it for public consumption via storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The differing perspectives and actions of US government, business and labour towards the Guatemalan government and Guatemalan trade unionists themselves in the half-decade or so following the overthrow of the Arbenz administration in 1954 are the focus of this study. Few areas were more important to the US project for Guatemala following the Castillo Armas invasion than helping the Guatemalans to create a ' free' and 'democratic' labour movement - and few areas would prove more frustrating. Part of the problem was the intransigent stance of Guatemalan elites. An additional challenge was strong opposition from the major US-based companies operating in Guatemala, most notably the United Fruit Company and its affiliates. This work contests interpretations that regard US policy towards countries like Guatemala at the time as simply beholden to business interests or as seeking domination. Rather, as Washington's interest in the transition diminished, officials in the US embassy and representatives of US labour in Guatemala were left isolated, unable to fulfil their vision for a democratic labour movement in the teeth of such opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how current shifts in racial discourse and demographics are reflected within the negotiation of paid domestic work. Various scholars have pointed out that racism in the United States has become increasingly covert and institutionalized, void of racial terminology and invisible to most whites. This shift has been institutionalized in the negotiation of domestic work, as alternative racial markers such as language and citizenship replace explicit racial terminology. Through an analysis of thirty interviews with white women who employ domestic workers this research examines contemporary negotiations of racial privilege and subordination in domestic work. Overall, white employers insisted that race did not matter when making hiring decisions; however other cultural markers such as language mattered greatly, at times even resulting in firing. In addition, complex and contradictory narratives about immigration were used to simultaneously both vilify immigrant workers and romanticize their work experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the ascendancy in the United States of the Homeland Security State, a peculiar ‘war against terrorism’ has been persistently waged against migrant non-citizens as its special targets. With utter rightlessness increasingly enforced as a defining horizon for migrants, the unprecedented upsurge of protest that took the country by storm in 2006, nonetheless, refigured the agonistic notion of ‘immigrants’ rights' as a prominent feature of political debate. If the state and capital work assiduously to render migrant labour a tractable object, therefore, the robust defiance of migrant workers (both the undocumented and guestworkers) audaciously reaffirms the primacy of labour as subject. Indeed, migrant workers have asserted their autonomy and prerogative through insubordinate acts calling attention to the mere corporeal fact of their deportable presence. Thus, the insurgent presence of migrant bodies emerges as a palpably corporeal and spatial form of subjectivity, and all the substantive social relationality that it manifests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The People's Republic of China (PRC) and the USA are, by long measure, the world's largest producers and consumers of coal. Coal production is inherently risky, and fatalities are unavoidable in these large coal economies. Both countries have developed complex systems of law to regulate coal mine safety. These systems share many attributes. Despite similarities between the separate systems of mining law, the PRC significantly trails the USA in terms of coal mine safety. Due to large disparity in economic development, it may be inappropriate to compare these two countries. However, the PRC's mine safety record is significantly worse than that of other large producers who are similarly underdeveloped. It appears that the PRC has failed to effectively implement its mining safety laws. Several arguments have been made as to the cause of this failure, including lack of judicial review of agency actions, lack of meaningful trade unions, government corruption and geographical difficulties of controlling rural mines with a central government. This article explores similarities and differences between the coal economies of the USA and PRC, and introduces some of the arguments used to explain the gap in safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the homosocial world of hobos, tramps, 'casual labourers' and other itinerant workers in early twentieth-century North America. In addition to providing evidence suggesting that same-sex sexual behaviour was a common aspect of everyday life in this milieu, the essay also suggests that any serious consideration of it raises certain conceptual problems for the study of the history of sexuality. Among other things, the essay argues that the existing historiography on gay male life in the United States may over-privilege the enabling effects of urban space, and in so doing tilt a potentially geographically expansive prehistory of gay life in what theorist Judith Halberstam would call a 'metronormative' direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the lens of Charles Chesnutt's short story collection, Conjure woman (1899) and other tales of his in the same genre, to focus some of the theoretical problems and ontological struggles existing at the nexus of African-American labour and leisure in the late nineteenth-century US. Specifically, it illuminates an African-American counterculture of incorporation. While the national incorporation of political, economic and cultural interests required the disavowal of black citizenship, African-Americans defended their claims to national inclusion and attempted to repair the ravages of slavery and segregation on black bodies and black memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper's purpose is to investigate the claim that capital taxes imposed by a subnational government reduce the economic competitiveness of the geographic area in which these taxes are imposed. Design/methodology/approach A two-region, four-good, three-factor computational general equilibrium model of the USA is constructed. Simulations are performed to represent US state governments replacing wage taxes with capital taxes. Findings Household utilities rose when wage taxes were replaced by capital taxes, contradicting the conventional wisdom that capital taxes are harmful to a region's residents. Research limitations/implications--As with all computational economic models, there are simplifications in this paper's model that abstract from reality and may limit the applicability of model results to the real world. Practical implications Subnational governments need not shy away from capital taxes when funding government programs. Originality/value This paper contributes to the investigation of subnational tax incidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative study of masonry construction productivity among three countries, namely United States, United Kingdom, and Jordan. It aims at quantifying factors that cause significant changes in baseline productivity. This is done by theoretically reviewing, quantifying, and comparing the baselines among the three selected countries. Analysis showed the quantified differences in the baseline value from one country to another are due mainly to skills and work methods used especially the labor component that is frequently assigned to material handling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health care practitioners and researchers commonly call for greater reliance on evidence as a means to achieve improvement in quality of care. Systematic reviews provide a means to accelerate the use of evidence-based clinical interventions and public health practices. The extent to which these time- and resource-intensive systematic reviews currently address critical maternal health priorities in the intrapartum period is unclear. This analysis summarises key maternal health and research priorities, maps these priorities to existing reviews, identifies gaps in the literature that can be addressed with systematic reviews, and highlights key methodological concerns in conducting systematic reviews. The analysis draws on published data on maternal morbidities and an overview of 108 systematic reviews in Medline in the past 5 years using the MeSH terms ‘Delivery, Obstetric,’ to draw the links between health priorities, research priorities, existing evidence and missing evidence. Key causes of morbidity during labour and delivery in the United States include haemorrhage, pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, obstetric trauma and infection. Analyses of maternal morbidity and mortality suggest that key concerns include racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes and the prevention of adverse events. Systematic reviews, however, generally tend to focus on the reduction of harms associated with interventions, are frequently limited to randomised designs, and do not address issues of health disparities. The results suggest that advances in evidence-based care in maternal health require that systematic reviews address issues of prevention of adverse events, include a larger variety of study designs when necessary and pay closer attention to health disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the salaries of librarians in the U.S. A study was conducted that demonstrated the scope of library revenue redistribution to salary expenditures from other operating expenditures. Existing regional and national library data sources (1982-2003) of the U.S. were reviewed to assess the impact of salary expenditures on other operating expenditures and the impact of retirement on planning. It also demonstrates the use of existing data sources as planning tools to assess library salaries' overall operating expenditures, and to project professional staff levels. The American Library Association (ALA) Librarian Salary Survey has been published since 1982, and reports national-level mean and quartile data on librarian salaries in public and academic libraries. The ALA Allied and Professional Association will collect support staff salary data beginning in 2005. Another source of salary data is from the Association of Research Libraries, and its salary surveys have been published since 1973. The ALA Librarian Salary Survey reported the average salary for librarians increased each year between 1999-2004 from a low of 2.3 percent to a high of 4.7 percent. Several library statistics and salary data sources have been used to compare and contrast mean salaries among public and academic librarians.

The controversial notion of "transnationalism" has generated new insights into international migrants' on-going ties with their communities of origin, but its problematic conceptualization and vague usage in empirical studies needlessly inhibit the transnational perspective's utility. Understanding the political and economic incorporation of migrants in both their communities of origin and destination is facilitated by disaggregating the types of political borders, types of nationalism, and levels of identification that have been conflated in the framework of "transnationalism". I demonstrate the analytic value of these distinctions by using them to interpret evidence from a six-month ethnographic case study of an immigrant labour union in Southern California. A theoretically coherent typology applicable to both the case study and other migration settings provides a framework for explaining how institutions assimilate migrants into U.S. and local politics while simultaneously promoting cross-border ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US construction industry has witnessed a drop in real wages since 1970. The decline in real wages may be attributed to a combination of socio-economic factors like migrant labourers, fringe benefits, safety procedures, union membership and worker skills. Another factor that may be impacting construction real wages is technological changes over the past couple of decades, including technological changes in construction equipment. This paper examines the relationship between changes in equipment technology and changes in construction wages with the help of five factors of equipment technology change: control, energy, ergonomics, functionality and information processing. Furthermore, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey is used to examine the effects of computer usage on wages among US hourly workers in construction. The research findings show significant relations exist between changes in equipment control, functionality and information processing with wages among non-supervisory workers. Another finding indicated that although non-supervisory construction workers who use computers at work earn higher hourly wages, there was no added wage benefit after controlling for the effects of experience, education and age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiskilling refers to a labour utilization strategy in which workers learn multiple skills in one or more trades outside of their primary trade. Over 700 non-union craft workers across the USA were surveyed as part of a research effort. The data collected show that a slight increase in the breadth of skills positively impacts a worker's hourly wage, but only a weak relationship was found between multiskilling and more continuous employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an increasingly international, work-centred process of welfare restructuring through its effects on ideas and practices of social reproduction. The effects of intensified welfare restructuring on social reproduction are argued to be a neglected aspect of globalisation debates, connected to a posited ‘labour metaphysic’ within mainstream leftist politics. Analysis of relations between welfare restructuring and neoliberal globalisation suggests a crisis of support for practices of social reproduction, exemplified in US welfare-to-work programmes. The need for leftist politics to reconstruct ‘labour imaginaries’ in relation to issues of social reproduction is argued through an examination of welfare reform programmes in Texas. Welfare-to-workers are shown to live their class through painful and shameful ‘classifying practices’, which deny the class basis of their poverty, negate the value of their motherhood, and aim to construct individualised, psychologised and evangelised subjectivities for labour market participation. The struggle of programme participants for material and psychological survival is argued to be a class struggle, which presents a major challenge to the thinking and practice of leftist politics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]