Labor Pool Research Articles

Models for economic evaluation of multi-purpose apple harvest platform and software development

An increasing number of U.S. apple growers are now interested in using harvest platforms to increase harvest productivity, expand labor pool, and alleviate tough working conditions. To maximize benefits, functions of thinning, pruning & training, and infield sorting have been or are to be incorporated into harvest platforms. Though growers are most concerned with economic benefits, few cost-benefit studies had been conducted on different platforms. In the meantime, economic analysis procedure is complex and each analysis is for one specific machine (not for general purposes). No software has been developed as a general and ready-to-use tool for growers and researchers for the platform economic analysis. In this study, platforms, both available on the marketplace and developed in lab as pilot trials, were reviewed. Costs and benefits models were then established, based on which multi-purpose apple harvest platform economic evaluation software (iMPAHP) was developed (capable of evaluating a wide variety of apple harvest platforms). A case study (machine cost of $100 000, accommodating 6 workers, processing apple incidence of 10% with 90% sort-out rate, and harvest, thinning, and pruning & training productivity increase by 40%, 50%, and 60%, respectively) based on iMPAHP demonstrated that infield sorting, harvest, thinning, and pruning and training accounted for 48.4%, 23.9%, 14.3%, and 13.4% of the total benefits, respectively. In the case that the platform was in all-four-purpose-application, the net present value (NPV) analysis of a 10-year investment showed a positive return of $60 547. However, without infield sorting function, the NPV resulted in a negative value, indicating a loss for the machine investment. Though incorporating the modular infield sorting system certainly increased the overall machine investment by $30 000, the benefits outweighed the costs. Keywords: multi-purpose apple harvest platform, economic evaluation, infield sorting, pruning, thinning, training DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20191201.4360 Citation: Zhang Z, Zhang Z H, Wang X M, Liu H, Wang Y J, Wang W J. Models for economic evaluation of multi-purpose apple harvest platform and software development. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2019; 12(1): 74–83.

Decoding Worker “Reliability”: Modern Agrarian Values and Immigrant Labor on New York Dairy Farms

AbstractThis article examines the reasons offered by New York dairy farmers for hiring undocumented immigrant workers in their milking parlors, and connects those discourses to broader economic and cultural change in U.S. agrarian society. Based on interviews with 25 dairy farmers on 22 farms, this article examines farmers’ assessments of the Amish, white non‐Amish, Puerto Rican, and undocumented Latino labor pool. The analysis shows that farmers consider undocumented immigrants the most “reliable” workforce, and that their reliability stems from their deportability and from their separation from their families, which drives them to work long hours. I argue that farmer discourses about immigrant “reliability” must be understood in the context of economic pressure to adopt a more commercial orientation to dairying, and of modern agrarian values that prize urban middle‐class lifestyles. Ultimately, worker “reliability” is a euphemism for the transnational separation of workers from their families, and one that is operationalized by farmers to justify the pursuit of economic success and more leisure time off the farm.

The Widening Participation Agenda in German Higher Education: Discourses and Legitimizing Strategies

Although participation in higher education (HE) has expanded in Europe, social inequalities remain a major political challenge. As HE expansion has not led to equal access and success, the mechanisms behind policies seeking to reduce inequalities need to be examined. Focusing on the widening participation agenda, this article investigates how universities translate political demands to their local contexts. The translation perspective is adopted to study the German HE system as an example characterized by high social exclusion. Based on policy document analysis, the study first explores the rationales underlying the discourse on widening participation. Second, a multiple case study design is used to investigate the organizational responses to the demand of widening participation. The findings indicate that the political discourse is dominated by two perspectives that regard widening participation as either a means to bring about social justice or to ensure a reliable pool of skilled labor. The study further reveals that different legitimizing strategies serve to link the policy of widening participation to local contexts. This study contributes to research on social inequalities in HE by introducing a translation perspective that permits analysis at both macro and organizational levels, while acknowledging institutional variations in organizational responses to political demands.

A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 by Daniel J. Vivian

Reviewed by: A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 by Daniel J. Vivian Maxine Lutz Daniel J. Vivian. A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-108-41690-0 Hardback: 317 pages Daniel J. Vivian's A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 is an anthropological investigation into the social, material, and cultural lives of wealthy northerners who bought southern antebellum plantations and converted them into country estates. The book is a study of an area confined to a 175 square mile swath in lowcountry South Carolina in the interwar period, within the cultural context of nostalgia for the Old South coupled with prevailing national trends in historic preservation. Vivian uses the material, environmental, and social transformation of plantations into estates as a lens by which to examine how Americans dealt with the material and social vestiges of slavery in the early twentieth century. The plantations were material artifacts of colonial and antebellum periods, but their northern owners cleansed them of remnants of slavery through the destruction of material relics of slavery-based agriculture as they converted them into leisure and sporting estates. However, the new sites became the loci of reproducing racial hierarchies, which emancipation had attempted to upend. In fact, the racial order of the antebellum plantations was replicated in a new social order in which former slaves constituted a vast pool of impoverished labor in the Jim Crow era. Thus, Vivian argues that the intersection of race and class was the fulcrum around which the transformation of the plantations into leisure estates took place. The focus of the book is on seventy-six plantations lying between Georgetown, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, which aristocratic northerners acquired in the early years of the twentieth century. Sportsmen initially came to the South in the late nineteenth century for short periods of time to hunt. As women and children joined them, extended winter tourism became more popular and necessitated larger and more comfortable lodging. After 1910, "the second Yankee invasion," as it was known in the parlance of that period, began in earnest, and by 1925, northerners bought and consolidated huge tracts of land for seasonal residences and recreational venues. According to Vivian, there is a gap in scholarship on northerners' acquisition of southern plantations to establish country estates. He cites numerous memoirs, newspaper articles, books, and treatises written on individual plantations, but none of these accounts probe the correlation between the sociocultural and material realms in the makeover of the plantations into estates. Vivian posits that the northerners' estates on former plantations boosted the interwar national mythologization of the Old South through the omission of the inhumane treatment of thousands of former slaves who had been left in abject poverty in the aftermath of emancipation. The northern newcomers altered the land use, architecture, landscape, and organization of the plantation structures in order to model their new southern estates on the American country houses of the North. In the process, they demolished former slave dwellings, rice fields, privies, barns, and other material relics of slavery. In doing so, they conformed to the prevailing national historic preservation paradigm, which John D. Rockefeller sponsored in Williamsburg, Virginia (1920s and 1930s) and Henry and Clara Ford in Greenfield Village, Michigan (1933). The preservation of these sites comprised selectively preserved and aesthetically pleasing historic architecture, which was further embellished with carefully maintained landscapes that prominent architects formulated. Thus, [End Page 73] these sites were based on a romantic imagination of the past to recreate material worlds that could only be realized through an erasure of the unpleasant aspects of the past. In the interwar period, a national trend emerged in the popular media—film, literature, and advertising—that mythologized the South of the bygone era through descriptions such as "Moonlight and Magnolias" and "happy darkies." These romantic representations perpetuated the myth of the Old South as a golden age of aristocracy. The northerners actively contributed to this national trend of mythmaking through the conversion of plantations into recreational estates. Vivian examines the histories of two significant plantations, Mulberry and...

Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump by Kathleen M. Millar

Reviewed by: Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump by Kathleen M. Millar Luis M. Sierra Millar, Kathleen M. Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Garbage pickers, pepenadores, and catadores are the labels by which the subjects of anthropologist Kathleen M. Millar's Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump are known in Latin America. Uniquely, Millar does not focus on these workers as surplus to neoliberal capitalist labor markets or as marginal, precarious, or the detritus of society. Millar's ethnography instead offers a different perspective. What happens when one analyzes these lives not from the premise of lack—of skills, jobs, wealth, or social capital—but instead from their own perspective? Millar uses making a living as the conceptual framework in two interrelated ways: examining the formation of work culture and explicating the economic activities Rio de Janiero's catadores engaged in as recyclers. Her research was conducted at Jardim Gramacho, which was one of Rio's largest landfills, in the decade before it closed in 2012. Reclaiming the Discarded is part of a relatively recent body of literature that asks scholars to reassess their assumptions and to interrogate taken-for-granted categories of analysis. Millar's analysis highlights how scholars have assumed that the economy is a real object rather than a fluid social construction. She uses the catadores' picking of plastics to show how garbage becomes a valuable good through the workers' labor. It is weighed, packaged, and reprocessed into nylon rope that is sold to international clients and manufacturers. Reclaiming the Discarded demonstrates how the catadores' economic activities defy categorization as solely informal, reframing economic activity as fluid and fungible. She illustrates that late capitalism cannot have anticipated how the informal economy enables workers to create a different kind of culture and a unique way of making a living. "Form of living" is a useful a heuristic here, as a new way of assessing economic activity and as a category for understanding the lives of the catadores. Among the many strengths of Reclaiming the Discarded is Millar's analysis of worker culture. The book is thought provoking and insightful, but the explication of worker culture outshines even these qualities. As a participant-observer, Millar vividly details the lives of her coworkers. She highlights many reasons why people began to work in the landfill. She shows the reader that conceptions of a lumpenproletariat, a reserve labor pool, or even the detritus [End Page 436] of society are inaccurate and miss the important ways that catadores made a living in terms of work and life outside work. One would have liked to have seen more about the administration of the Jardim Gramacho and an explanation of the interactions between the drug gangs, the Gramacho administration, the scrap dealers, government authorities, and the catadores. While Millar does show the connections between these actors, one senses that the relationships were far more interwoven than she suggests. While these are minor points, they did detract somewhat from this reader's fuller understanding of the work. Millar's work potentially opens another avenue for theorizing how late capitalism is changing what it means to be a worker and the meaning of work as it relates to neoliberal capitalism. Put more simply, Millar gives scholars a meaningful framework for theorizing what the work and the workers of the future might look like. Millar deploys her theoretical frameworks brilliantly and concisely and grounds them in real-world examples. Readers from many disciplines could benefit from the insightful analysis Millar provides. Her insistence on reframing and replacing the value judgments of the middle classes is an important contribution of the work: it illuminates how academics can fail to interrogate their own biases to the detriment of knowledge production and social reform. In these ways, Reclaiming the Discarded might help workers reclaim the dignity of working-class culture and serve as the basis for activism in the future. Luis M. Sierra Thomas More University Copyright © 2019 Association of Global South Studies, Inc.

El imperio de la virtud by Jorge L. Terukina Yamauchi

Reviewed by: El imperio de la virtud by Jorge L. Terukina Yamauchi Charles B. Moore Terukina Yamauchi, Jorge L. El imperio de la virtud. Tamesis, 2017. 418 pp. Yamauchi's El imperio de la virtud is a welcome and much-needed critical tour de force in colonial Spanish American criticism. It not only takes a fresh look at Bernardo de Balbuena's often misunderstood and overly-simplified, if not ignored, Grandeza mexicana of 1604, but finally puts the work into the extremely complex literary and cultural context of its day. To this end, the author masterfully lays out in dense yet very readable and understandable language the personal and cultural baggage with which Balbuena pleads his case for continued peninsular hegemony of New Spain. Yamauchi's frequent summaries of the material guide the reader through what could have been an unforgiving quicksand of theories, quotations, and ancient debates on race, economy, religion, and ethnicity. His carefully chosen close readings from not only Grandeza mexicana but from an almost overwhelming plethora of other ancient and early modern works which influenced or challenged the poem's intent clarify and illuminate the book's thesis. He weaves his thesis concerning the cultural superiority of the Spanish into what is a true encyclopedic compendium covering ancient through sixteenth-century culture. The book is divided into two parts. Part I is then subdivided into a must-read "Introducción" and two sections, while Part II includes four sections. There are twenty-three supporting figures which illustrate tools used by Spaniards (i.e. portraits, coats of arm, maps) to support their claim of superiority over criollos in Mexico. The twenty-page bibliography is essential reading for any colonialist. Part [End Page 420] I, "Hacia Grandeza mexicana: una epistomología del 'centro,'" sets the stage for Balbuena's use of Greco-Roman praise of cities and theory of the five zones to support Spain's right to govern New Spain. According to these concepts, only Europeans from the Mediterranean temperate zone had the appropriate skill set (or "virtue" per the book's title) to govern, guide, and direct the progress of the colonies. These theories dismissed their criollo rivals as entitled inferiors who were opposed to real work and desired to live off the heroic exploits of their conquering ancestors. Peninsulars like Balbuena who lacked direct blood lines to power had to look for other reasons to substantiate their desire for control of the encomienda plantation system, its Indian free labor pool, and all the high-ranking (and paying) positions in the colonial bureaucracy. Spain's virtuous and intelligent temperament based on classical Greco-Roman determinist theories was the perfect answer to this dilemma. In Part II, "Grandeza mexicana y la polémica por la posesión de la Nueva España," I found Yamauchi's discussion of Balbuena's rhetoric on work and art particularly fascinating. He shows how, in Grandeza mexicana, Balbuena legitimizes the newly-established Spanish professional and artisanal labor force in New Spain. It is a generator of wealth and the Aristotelian "good life," as opposed to the landed aristocratic criollo mentality which drains the economy and sees "work" as only a corrupt accumulation of greed. Work shows the superior peninsular ability to govern and enables the polis to live in order and justice. The Spanish have worked to build a beautiful, albeit artificial, paradise out of the barbaric desert of Mexico. The marvels of this city now match the Greco-Roman model of the theory of the five (acceptable) inhabitable zones of Mediterranean stock. The "value added" price and speculation of any goods the Spanish are now selling here is a positive development in the early-modern capitalist economy which Balbuena glorifies in his long enumerations of professional jobs and architectural marvels the Spanish have brought to Mexico. Balbuena sees this commerce as an example of Spanish justice and virtue. The medieval criollo mentality considered profits on investment as evil, deceptive magic. Yamauchi clearly guides the reader to understand how Balbuena uses the vague term interés to legitimize the new art and act of making money. The poet inverts the Universidad de Salamanca's misreading of Aristotelian-Thomist economic theory by...

The household as a source of labor for entrepreneurs: Evidence from New York City during industrialization

Research SummaryThis article conceptualizes households as a crucial pool of labor for small entrepreneurs. The household varied historically in its scope (depending on whether bonded workers were included) and work intensity (depending on the authority or coercion exercised by household heads). Drawing on data that enumerate over 100,000 households in New York City, I examine how the shift from institutions of unfree labor to wage labor affected business proprietorship between 1790 and 1850. Given the disproportionate importance of unfree household labor to small entrepreneurs, the contraction of this labor source may offer one general explanation for their decline.Managerial SummaryHow does household scope and composition affect the ability of an individual to run their own business? Historical archives can provide useful insights into this question. They track long‐term declines in family size and the emancipation of non‐family members—such as apprentices, indentured servants, and slaves—from the authority of household heads. Examining records from early New York City, this study shows that business ownership was strongly linked with the ownership of slaves and the presence of dependent males after the American Revolution. Large households and unfree laborers were especially important for entrepreneurship among individuals with limited wealth. For modern economies, the results suggest that policymakers consider potential tensions between small business ownership and the development of free and equitable labor markets.

“A mild despotism of sugar”: Race, labor, and flood management in British Guiana

Volumes of research have demonstrated the ways in which the production of sugar served as a key economic motivator for the development of capitalism. Embedded within this extractive economy is a requirement for strict environmental management and large pools of seasonal labor, typically within the context of the racial geographies of colonialism. In this article, I draw on archival research conducted at the National Archives in London, UK to examine the relationship between these agrarian economies, the social and economic requirements for flood control on a low-lying coastal plain, and British colonial-racial politics in British Guiana. I argue that colonial planters manipulated flood control systems and legislation in a way that produced and maintained a reserve army of black labor and in the process producing a racial geography meant primarily to ensure the survival of the crop even as prices plummeted in the twentieth century.

The impact of minimum wages and foreign domestic workers in Taiwan

The purpose of setting the minimum wage is mainly to protect the rights and interests of vulnerable workers and to enhance productivity of labour. In this paper, an attempt has been made to explore the effect of the upwards adjustment of the minimum wage in Taiwan on the inflation rate, the unemployment rate, labour productivity, economic growth and other macroeconomic variables by means of an analysis of empirical data using a structural vector auto‐regressive model. The findings of the paper show that upwards adjustment of the minimum wage in Taiwan will not intensify the unemployment rate. On the contrary, it will help to promote labour productivity to an extent that will have a positive effect on the economic growth rate. In addition, this paper investigates, long‐term care system should incorporate the foreign domestic worker labour pool, which could provide the additional personnel necessary for the nation's long‐term care. Minimum wage should apply to foreign domestic workers, and foreign domestic workers should not be treated as a separate group of workers in minimum wage policy.

System Dynamics Approach to Mitigating Skilled Labour Shortages in the Construction Industry: A South Africa Context

Skilled labour shortage in construction industry is a major challenge in South Africa. Therefore, the objective of the study is to assess the factors that cause skilled labour shortage, its consequent effects on the construction industries and how the scenario can be improved. The study was conducted by considering construction industry in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and using a survey research method and conceptual System Dynamics (SD) modelling. Findings reveals that investment, wage challenges, talent management, work environment, training, experience, and Government policy are the important challenges for the skilled labour shortage. Inadequacy of skilled labour considerably impacts the quality of work, productivity, and scheduling. The causal loop diagrams show that enhancement in investment in the labour wages will strengthen the availability of skilled labourers leading to higher productivity, and vice versa. Talent management based on appropriate recruitment and retention policy, staff development programmes and investment in these aspects will augment the skilled labour pool. Also, a better work environment through a policy of health and safety, investment in working condition and supported by Government policy will reduce the attrition of the labourer because of job dissatisfaction, which consequently will reduce the skilled labour shortage in the industry.

THE ROLE OF HUMAN CAPITAL IN GAINING AND SUSTAINING COMPETETIVE ADVANTAGE OF COMPANIES

In today’s global competitive arena the term “knowledge economy” is no mere slogan. It points to the very real fact that economic activities are increasingly knowledge intensive and that in this globalized world, success will come to those that are able to generate and harness knowledge in order to stay ahead of the pack. Research shows that in economies that do not have sufficient infrastructure, natural resources or may be designed as high cost base locations, comparative advantage has shifted to knowledge-based activities that cannot be transferred around the world without a significant cost. High knowledge and skills based economies will most likely be able to attract and retain investments in industries with a strong future. It is no secret that good education lies at the heart of economic growth and development. At the same time, improving the quality and relevance of education is enormously difficult not least because there is no one single policy measure that will do so effectively.Macedonia is not exclusion to this fact. The Macedonia’s employers and employees face a huge talent management dilemma. Analyses by all relevant institutions (World Bank, NGOs) and interviews with multiple representatives from the private sector companies indicate that while the labor pool is growing (supply side), it does not provide the skills needed by employers (demand side) so, that they could be competitive and further grow in today’s market. Employers are nearly unified in their criticism of an education system that produces graduates with limited practical experience and no soft skills transferable to the workplace. This is largely due to a lack of experiential education, competency based curricula, pragmatic guidance, which fails to meet the needs of the business community. The burden falls most often on employers to provide practical training, usually on the job. While in-company training is good practice, the scale of the skill gap requires a cost and internal training capability that many enterprises cannot afford, creating a disincentive for businesses to hire new employees.The dilemma has impacted job seekers (official unemployment in Macedonia is around 28% as of December 2017) and contributes to lower overall economic growth. It is especially problematic for micro and small enterprises (MSEs), which make up a large proportion of employment in Macedonia. MSE size and limited capacity makes their employees skills, experience and multitasking capabilities that much more critical for growth. Additionally, MSEs often lack the resources necessary to effectively train and maximize the productivity of their staff. As a result, sustained employment growth within Macedonia must include the development of a pipeline of skilled employees for microenterprises, including bolstering the capacity of small businesses to organize and train their workers. On the other side, the formal education institution dislike they way the private sector manages their employees. According to many of them, this is due to the fact that companies believe that their performance in the market is not directly linked with the human capital performance. In addition, education holds to the belief that private sector companies are not engaged enough in creating the next pool of talents in Macedonia. When they are invited to participate in the classrooms as expert of guest speaker, hire or engage students they show little interest. To conclude, the education institution believes that private sector companies in Macedonia consider the investment in human capital as a cost and not an investment.

Comment on “Geographic Concentration in Indian Manufacturing and Service Industries: Evidence from 1998 to 2013”

Comment on “Geographic Concentration in Indian Manufacturing and Service Industries: Evidence from 1998 to 2013”

Impact of cluster building in labor intensive industries on regional economy (Western Romania)

Starting with the mid-1990s, the Western Romania footwear cluster has emerged and grown attaining a critical mass of producers and suppliers. Statistical data analysis based on Location Quotient (LQ) supports the relative concentration of firms and jobs in the footwear cluster as compared to the rest of the regions. The higher LQ values of firms are positively correlated with high levels of entrepreneurship and qualified and diversified labor pool, whereas the high LQ of footwear employment shows the large scale production at region-industry level. Better performance of the firms in the cluster is revealed by much higher averages of turnover, size and profit as compared to the national average. Along the process of cluster building, the composition of the firms has turned hierarchical by functions, and diverse by size and production capabilities. Therefore, the cluster has gradually made the transition from a low-tech, labor intensive manufacturing to a local production system based on skills, knowledge and end-of-line activities. The findings of the paper reveal the impact of the cluster building on the regional economy in terms of specialization, competitiveness, integration into the global supply chain, and spatial pattern. Finally, the analysis will provide insights into the relations between the footwear cluster, regional development and policy design.

The way employees are treated predict power feelings

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the perceptions employees have regarding how they are treated in the workplace environment by their current or most recent supervisor, and how this predicted their feelings of power within themselves. The perceptions were measured utilizing the Managerial Leadership Perceptions Questionnaire (MLPQ) created by Parmer (2017). Employee power was measured utilizing the Power Instrument developed by Hinkin and Schriesheim (1989) which stemmed from French and Raven’s (1959) five original bases of power theory to include referent, expert, legitimate, reward, and coercive.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected a sample of 199 participants gathered from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk digital labor pool. Participants completed a survey which measured their managerial perceptions, bases of power, and demographic characteristics. Statistical analysis was used, including a factor analysis, to explore the relationship between managerial perceptions, bases of power, and demographic characteristics.FindingsThis study demonstrated that there were no significant associations between the demographic associations and personal power. There were significant associations between the demographic associations and position power, managerial perceptions and personal power, managerial perceptions and position power, and managerial leadership style and power.Research limitations/implicationsFive bases of power were examined in this study to include referent, expert (i.e. personal power), legitimate, reward, and coercive (i.e. position power). There is a sixth power now, information power, as noted by Northouse (2016) that needs to be additionally examined. Self-confidence and empowerment feelings were not technically measured quantifiably in this study but were expected feelings based on what mindsets power can produce within a person. Researching these additional feelings of self-confidence and empowerment and how this relates to follower power is needed moving forward in this research area. Finally, ethnic differences need to be measured moving forward.Practical implicationsThe practical implications of this study show that employees do embody perceptions and attitudes regarding their current or most recent supervisor based on how they are being treated. This, in turn, can affect their own personal feelings of power within themselves and within the overall organization at large. Careers can be affected, both good and bad, organizational cultures can be impacted by both good and bad, workplace assumptions and norms, as well as, workplace relationships can be affected, both good and bad.Social implicationsThe social implications of this study indicated that employees’ perceptions and attitudes regarding their immediate supervisor can create positive or negative feelings toward the supervisor which can, in turn, affect the organization’s culture and workplace environment, both good and bad. Working at an organization is within a social environment that needs to be managed and cultivated appropriately for all parties involved.Originality/valueThe majority of the prior research examines leader–follower relationships. No prior research has utilized this particular perception and attitudinal model, the MLPQ developed by Parmer (2017), and the five bases of power model developed by Hinkin and Schriesheim (1989) together in one study. This study explored employee managerial perceptions and their feelings of power within the follower–leader dyadic relationship, as opposed to the leader–follower dyadic relationship which has been more commonly reported within the literature.

Tighter labour market is doing little to boost pay growth

▀ A wide range of indicators suggest that the labour market has become tighter in recent years, but the existence of some degree of ‘underemployment’ and structural factors have meant that the pickup in wage growth has been modest. Though we think that we are now close to the effective floor for unemployment, these structural factors are likely to continue to weigh on pay growth, even as underemployment is eroded. ▀ A 43‐year low for the unemployment rate is far from the only sign that the labour market has tightened. Vacancies have risen sharply, an array of business survey data report recruitment difficulties and flows out of unemployment are at their lowest level for 13 years, suggesting an increasing mismatch between job opportunities and the pool of available labour. ▀ Firms are increasingly relying on luring the inactive and increasing the hours of existing workers to fulfil their demand for labour. Such behaviour has driven only a very modest pickup in wage growth thus far, because the degree of underemployment was relatively high and a series of structural factors have depressed wage growth. ▀ We see some scope for further rises in participation – largely among older age groups – and for underemployment to drift a little lower. And the structural factors – namely low productivity growth, increases in other labour costs caused by factors such as pension auto‐enrolment and that rising activity amongst older age groups tends to depress wage growth – are unlikely to go away. Therefore, we expect only a gentle acceleration in wage growth over the next couple of years, particularly while the public sector continues to exercise significant pay restraint. ▀ The MPC has proved persistently over‐optimistic on the outlook for wages and we fear it will prove to be so again. If we are correct, their justification for tighter monetary policy will come under increasing pressure as we move through 2019.

Paying the Hidden Bill: How Public Health Can Support Older Adults and Informal Caregivers.

The article explores how public health systems in the U.S. can support older adults and informal caregivers. Topics discussed include how informal caregivers, an unpaid labor pool, are the cornerstone of long-term care in the U.S., forming a national caregiving strategy and ways these caregivers could be paid through medicaid, paid sick leave and providing tax credits.

Measurement of Market Concentration Faced by Labor Pools: Theory and Evidence from Fast Food Chains in Rhode Island with No-Poaching Clauses

Contractual restrictions on mobility of workers across units within a franchise – “no-poaching” clauses – have recently attracted attention. The restrictions are claimed to concentrate labor markets to the detriment of employees. Previous research has found that they do. However, previous research has not relied on measures of concentration reflecting that, while no-poaching clauses limit movement of laborers within a franchise brand, they do not directly limit labor movement across franchise brands. This paper challenges assumptions in previous research and develops a new measure of market concentration reflecting the competitive experience of different groups of workers within the same market that face differing and changing restrictions on their employment opportunities. This paper demonstrates how a set of no-poaching clauses alter concentration reflected in the new measure as compared to previously proposed measures of concentration. The paper provides an empirical comparison of performance of the new concentration measure vs. the previously proposed measure of concentration in the same population (restaurant workers in Rhode Island) used in research cited in support of new legislative restrictions and corporate changes in labor contracts.

Networked Employment Discrimination

Employers often struggle to assess qualified applicants, particularly in contexts where they receive hundreds of applications for job openings. In an effort to increase efficiency and improve the process, many have begun employing new tools to sift through these applications, looking for signals that a candidate is “the best fit.” Some companies use tools that offer algorithmic assessments of workforce data to identify the variables that lead to stronger employee performance, or to high employee attrition rates, while others turn to third party ranking services to identify the top applicants in a labor pool. Still others eschew automated systems, but rely heavily on publicly available data to assess candidates beyond their applications. For example, some HR managers turn to LinkedIn to determine if a candidate knows other employees or to identify additional information about them or their networks. Although most companies do not intentionally engage in discriminatory hiring practices (particularly on the basis of protected classes), their reliance on automated systems, algorithms, and existing networks systematically benefits some at the expense of others, often without employers even recognizing the biases of such mechanisms. The intersection of hiring practices and the Big Data phenomenon has not produced inherently new challenges. While this paper addresses issues of privacy, fairness, transparency, accuracy, and inequality under the rubric of discrimination, it does not pivot solely around the legal definitions of discrimination under current federal anti-discrimination law. Rather, it describes a number of areas where issues of inherent bias intersect with, or come into conflict with, socio-cultural notions of fairness.

The Reserve Army of Labor in China's Economy, 1991–2015

Since the late 1990s, China's economic expansion has depended on an immense pool of cheap labor. Today, as wages increase and manufacturing operations leave the country, there are constant complaints about shortages of peasant workers. But has China really entered a new era of labor shortage?

Precarious Entrepreneurship: Day Laborers in the U.S. Southwest

With the advent of globalization, neoliberalism, and immigration policy reforms that enlarged the non-White workforce in the United States, precarious employment—work that is contingent, risky, and socially stratified—has increased dramatically. The 2008 Great Recession exacerbated labor market uncertainty, deepening the demand for precarious labor. These same structural forces have conditioned a rise in precarious entrepreneurship in the informal economy; yet little is known about how precarity is experienced among “survival entrepreneurs” or its effects on their entrepreneurial outcomes. This study uses unique ethnosurvey data collected between 2012 and 2018 on 116 street corner day laborers in Texas, a state in the Southwest region of the United States, to investigate these relationships. In the context of a more precarious economy, findings reveal that undocumented Latino immigrant men continue to dominate day labor activity; however, the expanding supply and demand for day laborers has resulted in a more diverse day labor pool that includes legal permanent residents, naturalized citizens, and U.S.-born citizens, including Black and White Americans. At the same time, day labor remains a “bad job” characterized by exploitive and abusive working conditions and low hourly income. That said Latino immigrant day laborers are subject to a distinct process of criminalization and racialization that conditions a lower hourly income for this group, regardless of legal status. Findings suggest that day labor is a form of precarious entrepreneurship that is polarized by race and nativity.