Categories Of Labor Research Articles

Pathological changes on the skin due to the combined effects of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and ultraviolet radiation

Introduction. In the National Healthcare Project, one of the key areas is the federal project "Fight against oncological diseases for 2019-2024". The influence of the nature of work activities of workers in contact with industrial carcinogens — polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) significantly increases the risk of skin neoplasms, as evidenced by differences in the frequency of their occurrence among representatives of different labor categories. The leading factor in the development of skin neoplasms is ultraviolet radiation (UV) of the A and B spectrum. There is literature evidence of a possible mutual enhancement of the combined effects of PAHs and UV in the occurrence of skin neoplasms and their malignancy. The study aims to evaluate the role of the combined effects of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and ultraviolet radiation (UV) in the occurrence of pigmented skin tumors in workers engaged in the construction of highways and highways and in housing and communal services. Materials and methods. During periodic medical examinations (PMEs) in 2022–2024, specialists have examined 140 people who formed 4 study groups. The researchers have conducted a physical examination of skin tumors; examination in the rays of a Wood lamp; dermatoscopy of skin tumors using a Heine Delta 20 dermatoscope. Hyperpigmentation was assessed according to the hyperpigmentation area and severity index (NASI). Results. During the clinical examination, the authors assessed the presence of pigmentation and skin neoplasms (lentigo, ephelides, seborrheic keratomas). The most frequent localizations of pigmentation and skin neoplasms were open areas of the body: face, hands, upper third of the back. At the same time, in asphalt concrete workers — group I, working under the influence of PAHs and solar insolation (spectrum A and B, in the range of 320–400 nm and 280–320 nm), specialists revealed pigmented neoplasms in a larger number of individuals compared with the population control for all skin localizations. The HASI index (in the surveyed groups) showed that the highest rates (24–48) of HASI were observed in a larger number of individuals — 57.1% — from group I (UV+PAHs), compared with groups of individuals (II, III, IV) who do not work under conditions of exposure to solar insolation (spectra A and B, in the range of 320–400 nm and 280–320 nm). The authors noted that the intensity of pigmentation is higher and the lesion area is larger when assessing the foci of hyperpigmentation in the rays of the Wood lamp compared with the clinical examination in all the examined groups. Limitations. The study is limited by the number of subjects examined, corresponding to the design of the study and the time interval of the study. Conclusion. To obtain objective results of the study of the role of the combined effects of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and ultraviolet irradiation (UV) in the occurrence of pigmented skin tumors, scientists used a method for determining the hyperpigmentation area index and severity index (HASI) in the rays of a Wood's lamp. When comparing the results obtained, experts revealed an increase in the area of hyperpigmentation and its intensity with localization in open areas of the body in workers engaged in the construction of highways and housing and communal services, in contact with the combined effects of carcinogens (PAHs) and ultraviolet irradiation (UV A and B). Further in-depth studies are needed to study the etiopathogenesis of photogenotoxicity depending on the dose-effect ratio. Ethics. The work was performed in accordance with the ethical standard set out in the Helsinki Declaration of the World Medical Association of 1964 (as amended and supplemented in 2013). The authors conducted all the studies after receiving informed consent and a decision of the Local Ethics Committee (extract from Protocol No. 7 dated 10/21/2020).

What counts as productive? Redefining ‘producers’ in economic discourse, 1890–1960

In this paper, we analyse economic discourse in debates over the production boundary, asking how the boundaries around economic categories change over time. Using a sample of economic textbooks from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century we analyse the evolution of the category of productive labour, finding that in the mid-twentieth century economists came to cohere around a conceptualization of productive activity that framed productive labour as any utility that was paid for on a market. Central to this outcome was the development of national accounting statistics that economists came to adopt in their analytical toolkit, which rendered invisible unpaid labour activities. Through this case we can see that statistical representations of the economy can redefine theoretical concepts and redraw the boundaries around economic categories, in this case transforming the boundary of productive labour into that of paid labour.

Workforce forecasting in the building maintenance and repair work: Evaluating machine learning and LSTM models

Effective workforce forecasting is critical to strategic management in construction projects, particularly ensuring staffing is optimized for efficient and timely project completion. This aspect holds particular importance in densely populated urban environments, where the complexity and scale of high-rise building construction exacerbate the need for proactive maintenance strategies. This research aims to compare the efficacy of various machine learning models, including support vector machine (SVM), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models, in predicting the workforce demand for building maintenance and repair work. Accordingly, 128 sets of data composed of seven indicators collected from the Hong Kong building maintenance and repair contractors were curated to serve as input-dependent variables to forecast the demands for different labor categories in addition to the overall workforce demands. The performance metrics for the four machine learning models were evaluated using mean absolute error (MAE), mean squared error (MSE), root mean squared error (RMSE), and determination coefficient (R2), with GridSearch employed to optimize their hyperparameters for enhanced predictive accuracy. The evaluation using MAE, MSE, RMSE, and R2 revealed that the XGBoost model achieved the most favorable results for predicting workforce demand on the testing sets (0.1790, 0.0582, 0.2412, 0.9915). Compared to MLP (0.1828, 0.0775, 0.2783, 0.8821) and GBDT (0.1828, 0.0828, 0.2878, 0.8739), XGBoost demonstrated a stronger performance in this specific task. Furthermore, the study also explored the potential of a long short-term memory (LSTM) model to forecast the gross value of building maintenance and repair work undertaken by main contractors, which strongly correlates with workforce demand. This approach aimed to capture the consistent growth trend observed across various maintenance activities. Consequently, the models developed in this study serve as valuable tools for optimizing workforce allocation and financial planning, particularly in dynamic and ever-changing environments.

Transformative labor: The hidden (and not-so-hidden) work of transformations to sustainability

The urgent need for transformations to sustainability has been widely established, but the seeming lack of swift and comprehensive progress have led to well-founded doubts about meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and other related global agreements. Often vacuous and potentially misleading pointers to partial progress are not reassuring, while defeatist statements on blanket failure conceal important breakthroughs and advances. This paper resists the unhelpful extremes of this dichotomy and takes a closer look at the work done by activists, researchers and other supporters to mobilize for and foster transformative efforts even if they are often not easily visible. Based on an integrative synthesis of three international, multi-case research projects on transformations to sustainability, it introduces the concept of transformative labor – the work, inner and outer, that has the power to affect transformative change. Often hidden and largely underappreciated, transformative labor helps break through existing systems, and puts creativity, courage, persistence and other physical, social, cognitive and emotional qualities and skills along with physical and financial resources toward achieving system-transcending change. Seven overlapping and interacting categories of transformative labor are described: (1) Detecting & Naming Conditions (Symptoms); (2) Creating Transformative Spaces; (3) Fostering Agency & Empowerment; (4) Enacting Steps to Change Conditions; (5) Visioning & Moving toward Desired Outcomes (Purpose, Horizons); (6) Caring, Tending & Learning; and (7) Scaling Out, Up and Deep. Transformative labor is performed by advocates, researchers and other allies and is always political because it intends to advance a profound change in the status quo. The paper concludes with proposed future research directions to test and advance this novel concept.

Problems of taking into account the employee’s will when considering labor disputes on termination of the employment contract of their own free will

In general, a number of labor law institutions, taking into account the will of the employee plays a very important, if not the dominant role. However, at present, in labor legislation there are no legally established parameters for taking into account the expression of will. In this case, problems of proof arise related to issues of expression of will.These problems arise most acutely when considering such categories of labor disputes as voluntary dismissal. The article will discuss such concepts as will, expression of will, defect of will. When considering the means of proof, the main emphasis will be on the judicial practice of using certain means of proof. At the same time, the authors will consider only those means of proof that will help establish that dismissal by agreement of the parties actually contradicts the voluntary expression of the employee’s will.

Laboring Under an Illusion: Erasing Female Public Labor in Post-Abolition Zanzibar Islands, 1890–1910

Female workers were central to the coastal East African labor force during the 19th and early 20th centuries, yet their bodies have disappeared from the historical narratives of public and skilled labor. Colonial officials wrote copiously about African labor along the Swahili coast; how to find laborers, how to coerce them into working, the categories of labor, what skills laborers held, how much they should be paid, how to efficiently move them to where they were needed, among many other aspects. However, these same officials, when writing about female laborers, often eliminated mention of females from both the skilled workforce and from their status as an equal portion of free laborers in the post-abolition era. Women and girls in the nineteenth century were present in the public labor force throughout littoral communities, yet reading the records of colonial officials and historians would suggest otherwise. This epistemic erasure has warped the way historians have thought and written about labor across coastal eastern Africa. Colonial officials gendered almost all forms of public, and particularly skilled labor, as male – for both enslaved and freed workers – an erasure often mimicked in the work of historians, thus reifying colonial views of an idealized labor force that was dominated by skilled male laborers with a few low-skill female manual workers.The British belief in the “benevolence” of Arab slave-owners was a longstanding one, a belief that officials in the Zanzibar Islands used to justify their slow response to the metropole demand for the abolition of slavery. The “benignity concept” as Marek Pawelczak termed it was so pervasive in colonial reports that historians into the 21st century still use it as an argument for why slavery in the Zanzibar islands was “mild” and required “not more than twelve hours’ labour” in any given week. Hidden within the “benignity concept” is an image of enslavement as wholly domestic, and therefore implicitly feminized. What is more insidious about the benignity concept is that British officials used it in the late 1890s both to justify allowing slavery to continue and figuratively to erase female enslaved laborers as workers, rather making them “domestics” and as such part of the household. Beginning in 1895, descriptions of an enslaved female became either one of a luxuriously kept concubine who was in essence a “secondary wife” or simply of a wife and mother. Men were enslaved, women were wives, and children were no longer part of the conversation at all. Similarly, I argue here that referring to laborers as ungendered historical actors obliterates significant pieces of history and distorts our understanding of the past. The distortions in colonial record-keeping has perpetuated an epistemic erasure in contemporary literature on labor in eastern Africa, which is an act of epistemic violence.

СОЦИАЛЬНО-ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКИЕ ФЕНОМЕНЫ ТРУДОВОЙ МИГРАЦИИ И САМОЗАНЯТОСТИ МОЛОДЕЖИ НА СОВРЕМЕННОМ РЫНКЕ ТРУДА

The presented article discusses the issues of labor migration and self-employment of young people. On the basis of theoretical interpretations and research experience of domestic researchers, the category of labor is operationalized. Based on empirical data obtained as part of a sociological study with author participation, factors are shown that affect the reasons for the employment of young people in the recipient regions. Statistical data (ROSSTAT) are presented, reflecting the structure of the employed population by age and location of work. It was noted that one of the solutions in the issue of labor migration of youth may be self-employment, in connection with which its features are considered. The work also focuses on the need to find solutions and develop practices to support and develop the labor self-determination of the younger generation without a forced change of location – labor migration through self-employment opportunities. The further need to study the features of employment of various socio-demographic groups, the search and use of employment opportunities, types of employment is actualized.

사법부 경호보안 담당 공무원의 감정노동이 직무태도에 미치는 영향

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effect of emotional labor of public officials in charge of security and security at the judiciary on job attitudes. A total of 336 final study subjects conducted a survey of 20 research variables using the self-evaluation entry method. Exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, frequency analysis, correlation analysis, independent t-test, one-way variance analysis, and multiple regression analysis were conducted as research analysis methods.
 Depending on the results of the study, conclusions can be presented as follows. First of all, it can be interpreted that the difference in superficial behavior depending on age, education, work experience, and salary is due to the difference in knowledge and information ownership about the job and the difference in response and response based on experience. However, it is analyzed that the perception of emotional labor of public officials in charge of security and security at the judiciary shows no structural difference in job attitude depending on the demographic group classification, and the problem of emotional labor is recognized as a common problem for all members. Changes and improvements in the work environment due to emotional labor do not need to be made according to a specific sociological classification, and welfare and benefits for workers who feel tired by emotional labor need to be strengthened in general. In addition, job satisfaction represents the emotional state of the affectionate response that occurs when evaluating the job, so it may have a high relationship with inner behavior. Accordingly, it is judged that the individual employee's mood or emotional control is directly related to job satisfaction.
 The implications of this study are that the duties of public officials in charge of security and security at the judiciary fall within the category of emotional labor, which can environmentally cause or function as a medium among stakeholders and various job groups. Therefore, efforts will be needed to improve the negative perception of emotional labor of public officials in charge of security and security at the judiciary.

The historiography of social reproduction and reproductive labor

AbstractThis article tracks the categories of social reproduction and reproductive labor as they appear in historical scholarship. Both within and beyond the historical discipline, scholars of diverse political, theoretical, and disciplinary persuasions deploy these concepts to denote a wide range of labors and processes in a manner that seems at times to have little coherence. The intentions of this article are to bring further clarity to these useful, if rather sprawling, terms and to reflect on the analytical work that they can do for historians.

Automatic detection and characterization of uterine contraction using Electrohysterography

Preterm birth is the leading cause of perinatal morbidity and mortality. In clinical practice, the information of uterine contraction is an important reference for preterm delivery. The commonly used tocography method for detecting uterine contractions has low sensitivity and is not suitable for long-term measurement. The electrohysterography (EHG) can record the electrical activity of uterine muscle cells associated with contractions through electrodes on the abdomen. Therefore, this paper proposes a new automatic detection method of uterine contractions based on EHG signals. Specifically, utilizing the nonlinear property of entropy analysis, contraction and spike noise are distinguished in the complexity domain to highlight contraction activity. Then, the location of the contraction is detected by an adaptive thresholding method. Finally, the detected contractions are analyzed for pregnancy and labor. The results show that compared with the existing root mean square methods, the proposed method is less affected by spike noise, and the contraction detection rate on the Icelandic EHG database reaches 87.9%. Meanwhile, features extracted from detected contractions have significant differences between non-labor and labor categories. This demonstrates the feasibility of contraction detection by EHG signal, which can contribute to better care for high-risk pregnant women.

The One that Wasn’t: Child and Youth Labour in the Post-Stalin Era in the Soviet Union

This paper examines the phenomenon of child and youth labour in the post-Stalin era in the Soviet Union. The starting point for the consideration constitutes the analysis of the law adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1958 titled “On the strengthening of the link between school and life and the further development of people’s education in the USSR”. This law placed great emphasis on combining education with practice and involving pupils from the earliest grades in various forms of both productive and socially useful labour. Subsequently, four categories of labour to which children and young people in the USSR were systemically forced has been distinguished. These included: occasional labours, work and leisure camps, so-called subbotniki and little communal works, as well as compulsory recycling. The paper thoroughly depicts all of them in the light of memoir material.

Knowledge Production and Forced Labor: The Intellectual Work and Worlds of Andean Mitayos in the Late Colonial Period.

This article, which focuses on silver mining in the colonial Andes, attempts to bring silo-ed conversations in the history of science and labor history into a shared dialogue. In so doing, it offers a way to reassess the traditional historiographic consensus that independent wage laborers were “high skilled” and forced laborers were “low skilled.” Through linguistic analysis and legal case studies, it shows that miners often crossed back and forth between labor categories and positions, and that frameworks like skills and wages are inadequate to understand workers’ experiences and expertise in highly coercive extractive industries like mining in the colonial period.

Estimating forced labour: from a legal category to a statistical category for international political campaigns

ABSTRACT This article contributes from a sociology of knowledge perspective to the ongoing sociological debate about statistics produced by international organisations taking the Global Estimates of Forced Labour published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as a case of international quantification. We ask: what stages of negotiation were involved in the transformation of a legal category into a statistical category of forced labour oriented towards political action? The analysis combines the historical reconstruction of the political and organisational processes behind the production of the estimates with the study of the measurement framework of forced labour. The qualitative case study is based on semi-structured expert interviews and ILO documents. Our results highlight the processes by which a legal category was made practicable for statistical work and thereby point to the specific arrangements and connections between law, statistics, and policy within international organisations. As we argue, the estimates have provided consistency to a fragile social construct that originated in the imperial context of the interwar period, and that was turned into a ‘visible’ social and global phenomenon of the twenty-first century.

Child Labour and Capitalist Social Engineering in Africa: Divorcing Society from the Means of Production

Abstract This article engages with some salient issues relating to child labour in colonial and post-colonial Africa. The central argument hinges on the inconclusive assault of capital on pre-capitalist socio-economic formation in Africa and the urgent intellectual task of liberating the study of child labour from humanitarian, United Nations and non-governmental organisation bureaucrats by privileging the voices of children themselves. The first section deals with historiographical issues, while the second focuses on agriculture, aspects of urban poverty and the emergence of a Lumpenproletariat to examine the transformation from above which took place after the colonial state was created at the turn of the century. The third section addresses two insidious categories of child labour in the post-colony: child trafficking and child soldiers. The final section grapples with the moral economy of child labour by interrogating the complex array of instruments that have emerged on the global scene to address what is today seen as the child labour ‘problem’.

The Extent of Market Dependence and Expenditure Pattern of Casual Labour in Rajasthan

The study examined the challenges casual labour households faced in Rajasthan, specifically in terms of inefficiency, low wage rates and low consumption. Two categories of casual labour, i.e., rural and urban, were analysed using the primary data collected at four intervals during 2019-2020. The findings revealed that the Public Distribution System (PDS) played a significant role in ensuring food security for labour households, particularly in providing cheaper grains. Additionally, higher expenses on electricity, travel, education and agricultural inputs posed financial strain for both rural and urban households. Consequently, the study underscored the importance of targeted policy interventions to promote healthier consumption behaviours, address addiction issues and enhance livelihood sustainability among casual labour households in Rajasthan.

Provisioning for sufficiency: envisaging production corridors

This article deepens the framework of a sufficiency economy, defining sufficiency as the space between a floor of meeting needs and a ceiling of ungeneralizable excess. This framework can be applied to the domains of consumption and production. Complementing existing research on consumption corridors, our aim is to conceptualize the idea of a production corridor. To develop this notion, we survey a range of helpful concepts starting with objective and universal human needs to establish a “floor” and planetary boundaries to establish a “ceiling.” We then assess in some detail a range of conceptual debates that pertain to production: 1) Marxian categories of labor, 2) the production boundary, 3) provisioning and the foundational economy, 4) social reproduction, and 5) unnecessary labor. These debates permit us to start identifying essential production, which enables the satisfaction of human needs within planetary boundaries, and excess production, which contributes neither to need satisfaction nor human flourishing but drives planetary overshoot. This distinction further allows for an “in-between” domain of the economy, situated between the floor and ceiling. This discussion concludes with a more detailed model of production embedded in the framework of the sufficiency economy. We then “dynamize” this model to sketch a production corridor under climate-mitigation imperatives. It considers in turn the essential economy, the excess economy, and the in-between economy. The final section summarizes our depiction of the production corridor leading to rapid but fair decarbonization of the economy.

Gender, race and class at work: enlisting African health labour into the Gold Coast Medical Service, 1860–1957

From the mid-nineteenth century, the people of the Gold Coast formed an essential component of the missionary and early colonial medical services (CMS). The labour of the people was mainly...

Documenting Difference: Standardizing Foreign Physicians

This essay traces the transformation and standardization of the first cohort of Asian physicians trained outside the United States into Foreign Medical Graduates (FMGs) within the United States through documentary regimes. Congress solicited foreign physicians under the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 to address doctor shortages in inner-city and rural communities throughout the country—a trend that continues today. Central to their migratory journey was an archive of expertise, a compilation of documents intended to verify identity, skill, and competence. Through the analysis of a physician's case file, new relations to documentation emerge that reveal how claims of underdocumentation, incorrect documentation, and overdocumentation regulate immigrant possibilities. In adopting this approach, this case study moves away from the unskilled / model minority dichotomy to show how documentary proceduralism operates as a racializing, disciplinary strategy across categories of immigrant labor.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara We are delighted to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of American Quarterly. In the three-quarters of a century, the field of American studies has been a site of vibrant exchange of ideas and gone through dynamic changes in terms of the agents of knowledge production and objects of study, the approaches to archives and tools of analysis, and the framing of questions and articulations of arguments. The six essays in this issue perfectly exemplify the kinds of scholarship enabled by both the accumulation of knowledge through the generations and the bold challenges to, and departures from, existing modes of analysis. The six essays all interrogate, in various contexts and through diverse approaches, the politics and expressions of the nation, state, capital, rights, body, and life. The first essay, by Emily Holloway, examines the archive of mid-nineteenth-century New York City public health administration that tracked the transit of corpses through Manhattan. Through an analysis of the intersections of biopolitics and urban space, she illuminates the layered meanings of "speculation" and its relations to surveillance and abstractions of financial value. In the essay that follows, Allan Downey also approaches New York City but through a very different lens: Haudenosaunee men who relocated from Canada and the northeastern United States to Brooklyn to work as ironworkers and their families that established the community of Little Caughnawaga. Downey demonstrates that, at a time when Indigenous peoples were removed from urban spaces and "Indian authenticity" was perceived to be the opposite of modernity, Kanien'kehá:ka citizens were central to building modernity and rearticulated their own nationhood, community, and self-determination. The next two essays look at the global circulation of text, body, voice, and their meanings in the Cold War era. In "If Books Could Kill," Mark David Kaufman mines the declassified archives of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Congress for Cultural Freedom to illuminate how these state institutions sought to manipulate the legacy of Leo Tolstoy as an instrument of the Cultural Cold War. He shows that while the US intelligence community sought to champion Tolstoy as a thinker whose individualist philosophy was assimilable neither to Marxism nor to capitalism, such appropriation conflicted with the writer's antipathy to the weaponization of culture for nationalist agenda. In the following essay, "Sonic Transness," Emmanuel David offers a reading of Christine Jorgensen's vocal performance in the 1962 Philippine film Kaming Mga Talyada (We Who Are Sexy), to analyze her voice and sonic practices in [End Page v] her self-constitution as a global, aspirational, and cosmopolitan white trans subject. By focusing on Jorgensen's performance in the Philippines, the essay also brings out the global production and extraction of value from trans and gender-nonconforming voices. The last two essays shed light on the legal mechanisms of racialization that manage knowledge, discourse, labor, and mobility of people of color. Through an interdisciplinary approach to the legal apparatuses surrounding the circulation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s image, likeness, speeches, and voice, Joseph Coppola illuminates the role of intellectual property in whitewashing King's legacy. By demonstrating how the structural commitments of the law contribute to racial hierarchy and economic inequality, Coppola addresses the power dynamics that shape the flow of knowledge production in the digital information age. In the final essay, Eram Alam traces the transformation and standardization of the first cohort of Asian physicians trained outside the United States into Foreign Medical Graduates within the United States. Analyzing the documentary regimes for verifying identity, skill, and competence, Alam shows that the documentary proceduralism operates as a racializing, disciplinary strategies across categories of immigrant labor. In Book Reviews, Paige A. McGinley discusses three recent works that advance the scholarship on the civil rights movement, and J. T. Roane examines three books on worldmaking practices, ecology, and environmental justice in the "Negrocene." In her event review, "¡No Vengan! Immigration Art in the Post-Trump Era," Maria Liliana Ramirez discusses Sergio de la Torre's exhibition put on as an artistic response to Vice President Kamala Harris's 2021 speech in Guatemala against the backdrop of the history of the history of undocumented immigrants in Santa...

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico