American Workers Research Articles

Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class by Aimee Loiselle (review)

Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class by Aimee Loiselle (review)

Restrictive immigration policies and MNE innovation

AbstractHigh-skill migrant workers significantly contribute to advanced economies by directly generating knowledge-intensive assets and serving as bridges to knowledge in their origin countries. However, rising populist sentiment has led to increased immigration restrictions in wealthy economies like the U.S. and the Europe Union. This study examines the impact of the 2004 H-1B visa cap reduction on U.S.-based multinational enterprises (MNEs). We use a sample of 371,856 patents assigned to 707 U.S.-based MNEs. We find that post-shock, MNEs increased the geographic dispersion of their global R&D workforce, rather than replacing foreigners with local American workers. Despite this, the firms experienced a decline in innovation performance, likely due to elevated coordination challenges. Interestingly, sectors relying more on codified knowledge demonstrated increased R&D team dispersion with less impact on innovation. This suggests that the geographic proximity of innovation teams is crucial for tacit knowledge-intensive sectors. These findings highlight the complex consequences of immigration restrictions and suggest boundary conditions on the effectiveness of work-from-anywhere models in knowledge-intensive industries.

A Workplace Physical Activity Intervention and a Smartphone App for Overweight and Obese Sedentary Women.

The sedentary aspects of many U.S. occupations and the amount of time American workers spend in the workplace make it an ideal location to implement health promotion programs. This study assessed the effectiveness of a free smartphone app with a goal-setting feature to increase physical activity (PA) and impact anthropometric, body mass (BM), and body composition (BC) changes among overweight and obese women within a community health workforce. Eighteen overweight and obese (body mass index [BMI] = 32.18 ± 4.48 kg/m2), adult (50.73 ± 8.76 years), female volunteers, tracked daily steps with a free smartphone app (StridekickTM) over an 8-week period. Pre- and post-program body composition (BC) measurements included: relative (%) body fat (BF), fat mass (FM), fat-free mass (FFM), and lean mass (LM), using dual X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA scan), and five anthropometric measurements (biceps, waist, abdomen, hips, and thigh). Pre- to post-program average daily steps resulted in significant anthropometric changes for biceps, hips, and thigh measures, with encouraging changes in FFM, LM, and relative (%) BF. The goal-setting feature of the app did not result in significant differences between the experimental and control groups. No differences were noted in FM, BMI, waist, and abdomen or step goals compared with steps completed. An occupational PA health promotion intervention program that tracked daily steps through the StridekickTM smartphone app resulted in anthropometric, BM, and BC changes. The workplace is an ideal location to affect change in health behaviors via a free smartphone app to increase PA and improve health.

Does Working Full-Time Guarantee Hospital Service Workers’ Material Well-Being? A Latent Class Regression Analysis

Abstract Despite efforts to maintain a satisfactory quality of life, a significant proportion of American workers face substantial material hardship. However, studies of material hardship have paid scant attention to lower-wage workers; hospital service, clerical, and technical workers represent a crucial yet understudied subset of this population. Using survey data from hospital workers employed by a large hospital in Pennsylvania, this research identified prevailing patterns of material hardship among these workers and investigated contributing factors, including hourly wages, utilization of public benefits, and demographics. The findings revealed the presence of two distinct material hardship groups: the high-hardship group (those with a high risk of experiencing multiple hardships concurrently) and the low-hardship group (those with a low risk). Notably, higher wages, better health, and being White were associated with a reduced likelihood of belonging to the high-hardship group. Conversely, an increased number of children in a household and utilization of a utility bill assistance program were associated with an elevated risk of belonging to the high-hardship group. The results hold several policy implications, including the need to increase hourly wages, enlarge antipoverty policy initiatives, enhance access to preventive health services, and offer more comprehensive childcare support.

Calling All Leaders

ABSTRACT The U.S. Surgeon General recently published two reports highlighting the current public health crisis of unhealthy work environments that are contributing to mental health and physical, emotional, and psychological challenges for 161 million American workers. He identifies leaders as crucial partners in addressing this crisis. This editorial presents an approach to leadership assessment not often discussed in the human services sector, namely, using evidence-supported tools to assess a leader candidate’s qualifications prior to hire. Details of this approach, specific tools, as well as implications for social work practice, are reviewed.

Impact of C-Reactive Protein and Liver Frailty Index on Sarcopenia and Poor Outcome in Liver Transplant Patients.

Sarcopenia is a complication that occurs after liver transplantation (LT), and it is a poor prognostic factor. A total of 23 healthy controls and 131 LT patients (18 - 76 weeks of age) were enrolled in the study. Pa-tients were grouped according to the North American Working Group on Sarcopenia in Liver Transplantation by performing pre- and post-transplant CT scans of the third lumbar (L3). The serum C-reactive protein (CRP) was analyzed and the liver frailty index (LFI) was assessed. Their associations with postoperative sarcopenia, skeletal muscle index (SMI), and poor outcomes were examined. Before LT, the serum CRP was increased in patients with LT, compared with the healthy subjects, and had the highest levels in patients with sarcopenia. There were seventy-nine patients with sarcopenia after LT, including 48 who had been diagnosed with sarcopenia preoperatively and 31 who had a new onset of sarcopenia after LT. There was a moderate-strength negative correlation between the preoperative and postoperative rates of change in CRP and L3 SMI. Patients assessed as frail preoperatively (LFI ≥ 4.5) were associated with postoperative sarcopenia, and 19 of the new postoperative sarcopenia cases occurred in patients assessed as frail preoperatively. The serum CRP levels and LFI were significantly higher in patients who experienced a prolonged hospitalization and early infections postoperatively than in patients without significant adverse events. CRP (post-LT) > 2.575 pg/mL (OR = 1.16, 95% CI: 1.06 - 2.39, p = 0.026) as well as frailty (OR = 1.36, 95% CI: 1.20 - 2.60, p = 0.001) were independent predictors of sarcopenia after LT in patients. Serum CRP levels and LFI may be effective for an early detection of sarcopenia in patients with LT.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s 1915 Pennsylvania Suffrage Speaking Tour Scrapbook

ABSTRACT In 1915 woman’s suffrage was on the ballot in Pennsylvania. State suffrage organizations mounted a vibrant campaign using a variety of strategies in support of enfranchising the women of the Keystone State. Speakers played a central role in this campaign, including a four-month lecture tour by African American author and educator, Alice Dunbar-Nelson. She kept a scrapbook of her tour that reveals her recognition of its historical significance. Her scrapbook also highlights the role of African American women who worked toward the goal of voting rights for all in Pennsylvania. Finally, it illuminates the strategies used by Pennsylvania suffrage leaders. While the men of the state voted down the suffrage referendum in 1915, the hard work of suffragists, including Dunbar-Nelson and other African Americans, paid off four years later when Pennsylvania became the seventh state to ratify the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution on June 24, 1919.

Building Strength in the African American Community: Pittsburgh’s Centre Avenue YMCA

ABSTRACT The Centre Avenue YMCA was a “colored” YMCA formed under the separate but equal doctrine, but its separate status did more than maintain segregation. Pittsburgh’s Centre Avenue YMCA was chief among the businesses, schools, and institutions established and led by African Americans, for African Americans, in the first half of the twentieth century. It shielded its members from the racism of White-controlled spaces, provided facilities and programs previously unavailable to Pittsburgh’s African American community, and nurtured leadership and activism toward greater equality and civil rights. Its upper floors provided hotel-like rooms to African American visitors, workers, and students denied entrance to mainstream accommodations. Its significance is embodied in its 1923 building, the only one still standing in Pennsylvania to have been partially funded by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald in an initiative to construct African American YMCAs nationwide; Pittsburgh’s African American community raised the required matching funds.

New Tropes for Old

Many of the celebrated and generative tropes that defined the work and self-image of American writing centres—tropes like Stephen North’s “fix-it shop in the basement,” Andrea Lunsford’s “Burkean Parlour,”and Kenneth Bruffee’s “conversation of mankind”—also helped create and affirm an apparent scholarly and pedagogic consensus about writing centre praxis in the Canadian context. I examine the way such tropes imagine our practices—dialogical guidance, collaborative learning, scaffolding, and relationship-building—and the bodies and minds that are enacting them. Using sonnets, narrative, and reflection to propose alternative tropes, I explore how the entry of othered bodies and minds, new perspectives, and marginalized cultures into the writing centre world might change the way we relate to each other and the way we re-imagine our collectivity.

The 2023 Technology for a Quieter America Workshop: occupational noise exposure - risks and controls

The 2023 Technology for a Quieter America (TQA) Workshop was held October 24-25, 2023, in Washington DC. The topic of this workshop was Occupational Noise Exposure - Risks and Controls. This was the 13th TQA workshop covering a wide range of topics related to noise control. With 22 million American workers overexposed in the workplace every day, this is an important topic. This workshop brought together a diverse group of people with differing perspectives on this problem. Included in the discussion were audiologists, nurses, medical researchers, physicians, engineers, industrial hygienists, and faculty working on this topic. This workshop demonstrated that there is practically no industry in which workers are safe from overexposure and US employers depend to much on hearing protection devices to protect workers.

The Gender Disclosure Gap: Salary History Bans Unravel When Men Volunteer Their Income

This study investigates whether the success of salary history bans could be limited by job-seekers volunteering their salaries unprompted. We survey American workers in 2019 and 2021 about their recent job searches, distinguishing when candidates were asked about salary history from when they were not. Historically well-paid workers may have an incentive to disclose, and employers who are aware of this could infer that nondisclosing workers are concealing low salaries. Through this mechanism, all workers could face pressure to avoid the stigma of silence. Our data shows a large percentage of workers (28%) volunteer salary history, even when a ban prevents employers from asking. An additional 47% will disclose if enough other job candidates disclose. Men are more likely than women to disclose their salaries unprompted, especially if they believe other candidates are disclosing. Over our 1.5-year sample covering jurisdictions with (and without) bans, unprompted volunteering of salary histories increased by about 6–8 percentage points. Funding: This work was supported by W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research; Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (Emerging Scholars Program). Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17384 .

Adapting of Mental Healthcare Facilities to the COVID-19 Challenges

The healthcare sector is one of the largest in the US economy (generating about 18% of GDP). It is the main employer of American workers. Unfortunately, it has been one of those most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, as certain medical services had to be suspended under strict quarantine (at least 150 hospitals in the US were forced to send employees on leave or dismiss them, primary care practices reported a 70% decrease in the number of patients). The purpose of the article is to analyse challenges in the US healthcare sector during COVID-19 and to justify ways to overcome these challenges (on the example of the Life Chance Mental Health Medical Group, a leading provider of mental health services in the US with a strong regional network, established good reputation and a wide and loyal customer base). The case of this company was chosen in this context based on the fact that, as the SWOT analysis in the article showed, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the greatest vulnerabilities of medical institutions in the mental health sector are related to the quality of basic services (face-to-face therapy sessions). That is significantly reduced if provided online. In order to operate effectively even during epidemics and pandemics, companies in this specific area should expand partnerships with telemedicine platforms, transform their product portfolio, and ensure that their doctors’ qualification profiles meet the requirements of remote therapy. The article analyses the mechanisms for overcoming pandemic challenges in mental healthcare facilities using the postulates of transformational leadership theory, change management theory, theory of constraints, and organisational culture theory.

Sound Baths, Trauma Talk, and the Wellness Paradox in the USA

ABSTRACT Yoga-informed sound bath providers orchestrate vibrations from singing bowls, chimes, gongs, and other simple instruments to promote client well-being – sometimes in ways that create a trauma trap. Drawing on immersive research with sound bath providers and receivers in California, USA, I explore how these ritual performances feed on and fuel narratives regarding trauma, stress, and dysregulation, diverting attention from structural and cultural factors creating said disharmony. Beyond thereby ensuring a market, they can perpetuate a trauma-informed self-identification and subjectivity that harmonizes with the American work ethic, diminishes nonproductive sensual enjoyment, promotes self-care over community care, undermines resilience, and amplifies suffering.

Preferences for Remote and Hybrid Work: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic created an opportunity for many American workers to work from home. Did the rapid and widespread adoption of remote work arrangements influence workers’ preferences? This study analyzes the early pandemic work experiences of 52 participants (20 men and 32 women) in dual-earner households with children through in-depth interviews conducted in 2021 and 2022 via Zoom. The study explores respondents’ desire for remote and hybrid work, considering job satisfaction as well as job characteristics, family structure, and household organization. Unless their jobs were poorly suited to remote work, most workers with pandemic-era remote work opportunities—and even some who had not worked remotely—wished to keep remote access in their post-pandemic work arrangements. Respondents reported enhanced job satisfaction and productivity from remote work, as a result of greater schedule control and flexibility. We found that some workers were willing to change jobs to maintain their preferred work arrangement, while others acquiesced to employers’ return-to-work policies. The study highlights the need to understand workers’ preferences in supporting flexible work arrangements and contributes to the understanding of remote work on family dynamics during the pandemic and afterwards.

What's Love Got to Do with It?": A Roundtable on the Cultural Legacy of Eric W. Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class on Its Thirtieth Anniversary

What's Love Got to Do with It?": A Roundtable on the Cultural Legacy of Eric W. Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class on Its Thirtieth Anniversary

THE STRUGGLE FOR A NEW AMERICA

A special resolution had the president of the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL), Vicente Lombardo Toledano, travelling all around the continent in the months following the confederation’s First General Congress. The trip was planned to be between August and December of 1942 and included 12 countries; it was an opportunity to consolidate the continental unionism organized around CTAL. During the trip there were acknowledgements, workers’ renewed expectations that they would indeed achieve labour rights, as well as conflicts due to CTAL’s political, union and strategic influence. The popular workers’ unity, the opposition to “nazi-fascism” and the desire for a better future for the continent were all part of the scope of the trip.

Communicating passion for work: examining the relationship between passion, self-determination, and communication behaviors

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 Pandemic, American workers began leaving their jobs in search of meaningful work. This change in the American workforce necessitated greater insight about what organizational members desire from their jobs. This study utilized self-determination theory (SDT) to explore workplace passion and its relation to members’ communication behaviors of voicing dissent, task and relational competence, and workplace relationships. These behaviors fulfill members’ needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, respectively. Results of an online survey of 308 people revealed that each of the communication behaviors were related to the corresponding psychological need. These findings contribute to passion and communication literature by identifying communication behaviors which members may use to communicate their passion. The findings also provide practical insights on how organizations can create cultures and environments that promote healthy communication behaviors that can foster passion within employees.

The Job Satisfaction Paradox: Pluralistic Ignorance and the Myth of the “Unhappy Worker”

American media coverage of the “Great Resignation” may have contributed to a belief that job dissatisfaction is widespread in the United States, even though surveys show relatively high and stable levels of job satisfaction among American workers. Using data from the 2023 Quality of Employment Survey, we investigate whether individuals’ beliefs about job dissatisfaction mirror empirical evidence or align more with media portrayals of widespread discontent. While most study participants expressed personal job satisfaction, over half believed that the majority of Americans were not at all satisfied, indicative of pluralistic ignorance—a phenomenon involving a collective misperception about a group’s norms or beliefs. Dissatisfaction beliefs were more common among remote workers and those with fewer work friendships. Moreover, believing in widespread job dissatisfaction was associated with lower organizational commitment, controlling for personal job satisfaction. We discuss the role of pluralistic ignorance in reconciling personal experiences with contrasting media representations of work and the economy.

Assessing Non-Laboratory Healthcare Professionals' Attitude towards the Importance of Patient Preparation for Laboratory Tests.

(1) Background: Various guidelines address patient preparation and its importance for venous blood sampling, such as the GP41 guideline issued by the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) and the blood collection guidelines published by the World Health Organisation. Recommendations provided by national societies or international organisations in the field of radiology, such as The Contrast Media Safety Committee of the European Society of Urogenital Radiology, or in the field of laboratory medicine, such as the Working Group for Preanalytical Phase (WG-PRE) of the European Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (EFLM) and the Latin American Working Group for Preanalytical Phase (WG-PRE-LATAM) of the Latin American Confederation of Clinical Biochemistry (COLABIOCLI), also guide this practice. There is a notable lack of understanding regarding the viewpoints held by non-laboratory healthcare professionals concerning the significance of patient preparation for laboratory testing and the impact of typical factors associated with patient preparation. This study endeavours to bridge this gap by assessing the attitude of non-laboratory healthcare professionals in Lithuania regarding these pivotal aspects. (2) Methods: A self-designed anonymous questionnaire was disseminated among 141 public healthcare institutions in Lithuania. The internal consistency of the questionnaire was evaluated by computing Cronbach's alpha. Descriptive statistics were utilised for the variables, while comparisons of attitude among groups were conducted using Mann-Whitney U (for two groups) or Kruskal-Wallis (for more than two groups) for categorical and discrete indicators. The Kruskal-Wallis post-hoc test was employed for pairwise comparisons. A significance level of p-Value < 0.05 was applied to establish statistical significance. (3) Results: A total of 158 respondents constituted two distinct groups of healthcare professionals: nurses and physicians. Most of the participants either agreed or strongly agreed that patient preparation could introduce bias into laboratory test results. Professionals with less than 20 years of work experience or those who attended training in patient preparation for sampling within a 5-year timeframe exhibited stronger agreement regarding different preanalytical factors in patient preparation and their impact on laboratory test results compared to their counterparts. (4) Conclusions: Non-laboratory healthcare professionals who participated in this survey consider proper patient preparation for laboratory testing to be a significant step towards obtaining accurate test results. They also recognize the commonly acknowledged preanalytical factors as important for ensuring reliable test results. However, attitudes towards the importance of several preanalytical factors vary depending on whether non-laboratory healthcare professionals have more or less than 20 years of work experience, as well as whether they have attended any training on this topic within the last five years or have never attended such training.

Biomarkers of Organophosphate and Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether (PBDE) Flame Retardants of American Workers and Associations with Inhalation and Dermal Exposures.

This study evaluated workers' exposures to flame retardants, including polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), organophosphate esters (OPEs), and other brominated flame retardants (BFRs), in various industries. The study aimed to characterize OPE metabolite urinary concentrations and PBDE serum concentrations among workers from different industries, compare these concentrations between industries and the general population, and evaluate the likely route of exposure (dermal or inhalation). The results showed that workers from chemical manufacturing had significantly higher (p <0.05) urinary concentrations of OPE metabolites compared to other industries. Spray polyurethane foam workers had significantly higher (p <0.05) urinary concentrations of bis(1-chloro-2-propyl) phosphate (BCPP) compared to other industries. Electronic scrap workers had higher serum concentrations of certain PBDE congeners compared to the general population. Correlations were observed between hand wipe samples and air samples containing specific flame-retardant parent chemicals and urinary metabolite concentrations for some industries, suggesting both dermal absorption and inhalation as primary routes of exposure for OPEs. Overall, this study provides insights into occupational exposure to flame retardants in different industries and highlights the need for further research on emerging flame retardants and exposure reduction interventions.