Example Of Workers Research Articles

The impact of education costs on income inequality

Reducing education costs is a crucial policy element with broad support in the U.S. However, is lowering the cost of learning a panacea for eliminating income inequality? In this paper, I theoretically examine the relationship between income inequality and the cost of education by building a three-stage overlapping generation model with two sectors and two education systems. In contrast to conventional studies treating education as a unified concept or in hierarchical order, I consider two types of education, each targeting the training of workers for different roles in production. Workers who decide to spend time learning and improving creativity skills can work to produce intermediate goods used in current production and illuminate future production technology. Coders who produce industrial robots are one example of workers who receive this type of education. The other type of education only improves workers’ efficiency and helps them become experts in positions. For instance, office clerks who receive computer training can become more productive in dealing with their daily tasks. I pick a reasonable set of parameters, and the simulation result implies that reducing the cost of practical training may end up enlarging income inequality. The key is whether the effect resulting from the wage gap between jobs (wageeffect) dominates the effect of changing the share of workers in jobs (compositioneffect). Reducing the cost of learning creativity encourages marginal experts to learn creativity and marginal basic workers to receive training, leading to declining wage gaps and income inequality.

Agency and the structural determinants of regional growth: towards a retheorisation

ABSTRACT This paper addresses debates on the role of agency in shaping the economic future of regions. Scholarship on agency departs from the earlier focus of evolutionary economic geography, which highlighted the role of pre-existing structural conditions. This paper challenges the notion that agency is only found in intentional action and is limited to key actors within a region. It questions exclusive focus on the impact of entrepreneurial leaders, place leaders and government, and identifies agency in the accumulated micro-decisions of multiple decision-makers, using the example of workers affected by the closure of Australia’s passenger vehicle industry. In so doing, it underscores the twin roles of collective vision and meaningful implementation in the successful transformation of regions.

Non-salary employment conditions as a factor shaping migration decision-making: an example of workers from Ukraine in Poland

The paper studies non-salary employment conditions as a factor affecting labour migrants’ choice the host country and a particular employer. It argues that the extant literature, focusing mainly on wage levels offered by employers, is insufficient to understand the decisions taken by migrants, especially if there is persistently low unemployment and high demand for foreign labour in a given market. A secondary analysis of the results of two empirical studies conducted in Poland in the period 2017–2019, focusing on various categories of Ukrainian workers, was used to shed a light on the role of non-salary employment conditions in the migration decision-making process. At that time, Poland encountered both low levels of unemployment and persistent demand for foreign workers, as well as liberal immigration regulations for labour immigration from selected Eastern European countries. Therefore, it met the conditions of the so-called migration laboratory.

On the development of a test for the selection of shift workers for work in the North based on the determination of the metabolomic profile of blood plasma, by the example of workers in water transport

On the development of a test for the selection of shift workers for work in the North based on the determination of the metabolomic profile of blood plasma, by the example of workers in water transport

Illusioned and Alienated: Can Gig Workers Organise Collectively?

By studying the fraudulent benefits of flexibility in the ride-hailing gig economy, this article explains alienation as a condition in which workers are excluded from the product, estranged, and disadvantaged. Material estrangement, an objective aspect of alienation exemplified by arbitrary distribution of income, capitalists’ exclusive access to data, and robotic communication between Uber and their drivers, has many physiological (subjective) manifestations. Dissatisfaction, powerlessness, and isolation as subjective expressions of alienation prominently shape the prospects of collective labour mobilisation by both sparking and hindering organisational potential. Additionally, the example of workers’ re-appropriation of Uber’s app against Uber explains how modern technologies serve not only as a medium to expand capitalist interests, but enhance possibilities for labour cooperation and liberation. The proposed argumentation uses the Autonomist Marxist concept of “social factory” as a meta-framework, drawing on original ethnographic and interview data on ride-hailing Uber drivers in the gig economy.

Risk Reduction of Occupation Diseases by Optimization of Schedule of Work and Rest on Example of Workers of Electrolytic Production

The article considers the actual question of risk estimation of non-evident professional diseases. On the basis of the conducted assessment of the acting schedule of the work of a pot operator of molten salts of one of the departments of the Urals aluminum smelter and determined unaccounted peculiarities of daily dynamics of the behavior of biological processes in the human organism while work scheduling, the authors have developed rational shift schedule, in which the time of a worker’s night shift is maximally cut. The proposed schedule is aimed at preventing accidents and decreasing the risk of occupation diseases of employees. The provided material has a great practical significance as the main principle of the management system of professional risks is health maintenance in the process of production activity.

Control, camaraderie and resistance: Precarious work and organisation in hospitality

With industrial action recently taking place at TGI Fridays, McDonald’s and Wetherspoons, the organisation of precarious workers within the hospitality industry has received renewed attention in popular and academic circles. The subject of this article is the result of a year’s worth of work, research and activism alongside co-workers within the sector. It takes the form of an insiders’ ethnography, positioning itself as an example of workers’ inquiry into precarious workplaces and collective resistance. The research addresses the subject of affective labour in customer-facing hospitality work, with particular attention paid to the sociability of the labour process. It also addresses the issues of the composition of labour and the material conditions that act as the driving force of precarity, while assessing the contours of flexibility, control and resistance. The wider social character of the work and the workers themselves, as well as the community and camaraderie of the workplace, is also studied. Using the 2018 TGI Fridays strike as a key example, the article outlines how, in harnessing the camaraderie of such social and communal work, workers have sought to realise their autonomy and resist precarity through collective struggle.

To the question of occupational pathology developing under acceptable working conditions (on the example of workers of enterprises in the Russian Arctic)

The purpose of the study is to investigate occupational pathology that develops under acceptable levels of harmful production factors. Results. It has been found that 0.77% of all cases of occupational diseases in 2007-2018 developed under acceptable working conditions in the enterprises of the Arctic (66 out of 8609 diseases). Their features were: 1) shortened length of service of the sick people (20.2 ± 1.5 years); 2) younger age (47.8 ± 1.2 years); 3) larger proportion of women among the sick people; 4) greater role of chemical factors and severity of work in the development of health disorders; 5) more frequent development of diseases among workers of certain professions; 6) different structure of classes and nosological forms of occupational diseases; 7) increased proportion of acute industrial poisoning in the structure of occupational diseases. Exposure to harmful production factors with exposure levels not exceeding hygiene standards became possible more often due to design flaws in machines, mechanisms and other equipment (54.5%). Detection of most occupational diseases in people working in acceptable working conditions took place because they sought medical help themselves due to deterioration of health (in 66.7% of cases). 59.9-66.2% of diseases in people working in harmful and dangerous working conditions were diagnosed according to the results of periodic medical examinations. Conclusion. There is a need for a deeper understanding of the causes and preventive methods of occupational health disorders that develop under acceptable working conditions.

Cоциально-экономическая адаптация рабочих горнозаводского Урала в конце XIX – начале XX в.

The instability of the social and economic development of post-Soviet Russia and the serious social costs of the reform course of its leadership have put forward among the priorities of Russian sociology the study of adaptation of various social groups to these reforms. Taking into account the duration of the formation of adaptation practices and their consolidation in the mass consciousness at the level of behavioral codes, this problem requires consideration on the historical material of Soviet and pre-Soviet Russia. This circumstance, as well as the lack of study of these subjects on the example of workers of the mining Urals at the turn of XIXth – XXth centuries due to the choice of research topics. All strategies of adaptation of the Ural workers considered in the article were divided into active and passive models of adaptation. The first includes various attempts to improve the production activities of their enterprises, including the introduction of working control over them, Handicrafts and secondary employment in agricultural work. The main manifestations of the passive version of social and economic adaptation were the appeal of the Ural workers to the past, the desire to preserve the various elements of the binding relationship and paternalistic attitudes of mass consciousness. In real life, the most widespread were mixed forms of adaptation behavior of workers in the Urals. Among the main adaptive factors, the influence of the features of the mining system, the psychology of local workers and the socio-cultural mechanism of «archaization of consciousness» are singled out. The latter two, in turn, made it difficult to modernize the mining industry of the region. Due to the lack of the necessary database to assess the level of efficiency of the adaptation process of the Ural workers to solve this problem, we use the criterion of its confrontational, equilibrium or harmonious nature. Taking into account the insufficiency of unambiguously active forms of adaptation and the mass character of Patriarchal and paternalistic practices, the conflict nature of land relations, the high level of the strike movement, including factory terror, we can talk about the predominance of the first option and therefore consider the socio-economic adaptation of the workers of the mining Urals to be of little success.

Afterwork and Overtime: The Social Reproduction of Human Capital

Afterwork and Overtime: The Social Reproduction of Human Capital

Assessment of personal and behavioral qualities of workers in system of interactive incident forecasting and occupational safety management

Interactive prediction of incidents is a modern direction of labor protection, that allows managing the occupational safety level. The paper shows that the so-called “human factor”, including the psychological unpreparedness of workers to perform work (both work managers and direct implementers), is the main cause of industrial injuries, in addition to technical and organizational causes. In this regard, the urgent issue is the need to take into account and analyse the psychological state of the worker for predicting incidents. The article discusses the psychological aspects of occupational safety on the example of workers performing work at height that relate to work of high danger. However, the “height factor” is common in various areas of production, which necessitates a scientific analysis of its impact on the psychological state of the worker and on the level of occupational safety. The paper provides information on the system of interactive prediction of incidents, one of the elements of which is the module of testing the psychological state of the employees for identifying workers who are least suitable for this type of work.

Selling the Object of Strategy: How Frontline Workers Realize Strategy through their Daily Work

This paper explores how frontline workers contribute to an organization’s realized strategy. Using a workplace studies approach, we analyse the work of museum tour guides as a salient example of workers engaged in frontline work. Our findings demonstrate the subtle and intricate nature of the embodied work of frontline workers as they ‘bring into being’ the strategic aims of an organization. We identified five elements as central to this process: (1) the situated physical context; (2) audience composition; (3) the moral order; (4) the talk, actions and gestures of the guide; and (5) the corresponding talk, actions and gestures of the audience. Drawing on these categories, we find frontline workers to demonstrate ‘interactional competence’: assessing and making use of the physical, spatial and material specifics of the context and those they are interacting with, and enlisting interactional resources to uphold a moral order that brings these others in as a working audience, encouraging them to respond in particular ways. Frontline workers thus skilfully combine language, material and bodily expressions in the flow of their work. Demonstrating these dynamics gives a more central role to material in the realization of strategy than previously recognized; demonstrates that ‘outsiders’ have an important part to play in realizing strategy; and highlights the importance of frontline workers and their skilled work in bringing strategy into being.

Criticism of misguided Chu et al. article

Chu, Brhlikova and Pollock's article suggests the WHO rethink its decision to include misoprostol on the Essential Medicines List. Their paper is a sad example of workers in an elite setting advocating policies with the potential to endanger the lives of thousands of vulnerable women in low-resource settings. The self-administration of misoprostol, or use by traditional birth attendants, is the most immediate and practical solution to help the least developed countries move towards achieving Millennium Development Goal 5.1 It is true that in some studies oxytocin performs marginally better than misoprostol,2 but as mentioned by Chu et al., oxytocin administration is not currently feasible in most low-resource settings. Misoprostol presents an opportunity to achieve some semblance of health equity.3 The paper is also methodologically and ethically flawed. It reviews the 172 published papers on the use of misoprostol to control postpartum haemorrhage (PPH) in the framework of high-quality obstetric services and it explicitly omits studies that are not randomized controlled trials (RCTs). However, RCTs are often impossible to conduct in most low-resource settings where maternal death rates are highest. The paper by Prata et al4. included in the review, in fact, was not an RCT. In the case of misoprostol, an undisputed powerful uterotonic, the most practical RCT would compare misoprostol to a placebo, since the reality in low-resource settings leaves only these two options. Consequently, a RCT would randomly allocate the risk of death to women in the control arm when we know that misoprostol might have the potential to save their lives. Since Chu et al. conducted their review; a RCT in Belgaum India found 400 μg sublingual misoprostol to be more effective than 10 IU intramuscular oxytocin, as measured by blood loss (mean blood loss 192 ± 124 mL with misoprostol and 366 ± 136 mL blood loss with oxytocin).5 These data, together with compelling literature from non-RCTs in low-resource settings, strongly endorse the WHO's decision, which weighed all of the evidence, with considerations of the larger context and implications. A reversal of their decision would only hurt the very women that Chu et al. purport to be helping.

Measurements and simulations of the radiation exposure to aircraft crew workplaces due to cosmic radiation in the atmosphere

As required by the European Directive 96/29/Euratom, radiation exposure due to natural ionizing radiation has to be taken into account at workplaces if the effective dose could become more than 1 mSv per year. An example of workers concerned by this directive is aircraft crew due to cosmic radiation exposure in the atmosphere. Extensive measurement campaigns on board aircrafts have been carried out to assess ambient dose equivalent. A consortium of European dosimetry institutes within EURADOS WG5 summarized experimental data and results of calculations, together with detailed descriptions of the methods for measurements and calculations. The radiation protection quantity of interest is the effective dose, E (ISO). The comparison of results by measurements and calculations is done in terms of the operational quantity ambient dose equivalent, H(10). This paper gives an overview of the EURADOS Aircraft Crew In-Flight Database and it presents a new empirical model describing fitting functions for this data. Furthermore, it describes numerical simulations performed with the Monte Carlo code FLUKA-2005 using an updated version of the cosmic radiation primary spectra. The ratio between ambient dose equivalent and effective dose at commercial flight altitudes, calculated with FLUKA-2005, is discussed. Finally, it presents the aviation dosimetry model AVIDOS based on FLUKA-2005 simulations for routine dose assessment. The code has been developed by Austrian Research Centers (ARC) for the public usage (http://avidos.healthphysics.at).

ON WORKERS' THEORETICAL (IN)VISIBILITY IN THE WRITING OF CRITICAL URBAN GEOGRAPHY A COMRADELY CRITIQUE

Marxist geography has been at the forefront of understanding the urban dynamic of advanced capitalism. There is, however, a paradox in much of this work. Whereas Marxist geographers implicitly take workers' experiences under capitalism as their political starting point, ironically, much Marxist work in urban geography has tended to ignore workers' proactive roles in shaping the urban landscape. Rather, Marxist urban geographers have focused largely on how capital and the state shape the built environment. Essentially, they have written urban geographies from the perspective of capital and the state and, in so doing, have failed to make working-class people the subjects of their own historical geographies. In this paper I argue that urban geographers need to pay much greater attention to how workers and their institutions shape the built environment. To illustrate this argument I draw upon the example of workers' struggles to control the geography of work in the U.S. East Coast longshore industry.