Labor Reality Research Articles

Art, labor, and the market: Jacques Rivette and Maurice Pialat at Cannes

AbstractAuthors are creators; authors are also workers. Conventional understandings of film authorship, however, tend to privilege the former and obscure the latter. While hallowing film art and granting it a legitimacy equal to that of the other arts, the politique des auteurs, or auteur theory, had little concern for the realities of artistic labor and did not address the socioeconomic determinations that weigh on filmmakers. This article reconsiders film authorship in the light of its social and economic dimensions. Departing from a case study focusing on the 1991 main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, I will focus specifically on two French entries, Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse and Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh. In these examples the festival selection displayed a predilection for films addressing the fragile and endangered condition of the artist. This renewed focus on the precarious status of the filmmaker as an artist subject to financial hardship and industrial constraint found a haven in the grand bastion of cinematic originality, the Cannes Film Festival. For this reason, these films have often been read as confirmations of widespread critical anxiety about the precarious state of film and film authorship. Upon closer consideration, though, the films themselves do not sustain the rhetoric of peril and endangerment. Instead they offer portraits of artists in their working milieu, the “studio” in Rivette and the art market in Pialat. Reflecting on the artistic means and economic ends of cinema, they urge critics and spectators not to reduce the dynamic of artistic creation to a phantasm and foreclose its economic dimension or its empirical reality as a function of human labor. Rivette’s and Pialat’s films allow us to reconsider the longstanding and spurious discursive opposition between art and labor, and to appreciate the ways in which film authors are also workers and, as such, subject to the laws of the market.RésuméLes auteurs sont des créateurs, mais aussi des ouvriers. La conception générale du cinéma d’auteur a tendance à privilégier le côté créateur en négligeant les règles de la profession. En élevant le cinéma au rang des arts, la politique des auteurs s’est dérobée aux facteurs socioéconomiques qui déterminent la production cinématographique et surtout a prêté peu d’attention à la réalité du travail artistique. Cet article se propose de réévaluer la notion de cinéma d’auteur à la lumière de ses dimensions socio-économiques. Pour ce faire, nous allons nous pencher sur la sélection officielle du Festival de Cannes de 1991, et en particulier sur deux films français en compétition, à savoir La Belle Noiseuse de Jacques Rivette et Van Gogh de Maurice Pialat. Ces deux entrées officielles témoignent de la prédilection du festival à sélectionner des films sur la condition fragile de l’artiste. Cet intérêt renouvelé pour le statut précaire de l’auteur de cinéma, victime des difficultés financières et des contraintes de l’industrie, a trouvé un vrai refuge dans le Festival de Cannes, le bastion par excellence de l’originalité. À force d’être sélectionnés en compétition, ces films ont souvent été interprétés comme des signes de l’angoisse de la précarité du cinéma d’auteur. Regardés de plus près, les films eux-mêmes ne reproduisent pas la rhétorique du danger et de la détresse, et offrent à la place des portraits d’artistes à l’œuvre au milieu du travail, soit à l’atelier dans le cas de Rivette, soit dans la communauté de marchands d’art dans celui de Pialat. Les films mettent en scène plutôt des artistes-travailleurs, en soulignant les moyens artistiques et économiques du cinéma. Critiques et spectateurs sont invités à contempler la réalité empirique comme fonction du travail humain et donc à ne pas réduire la dynamique de la création artistique à un phantasme. Les films de Rivette et Pialat nous permettent ainsi de revisiter la vieille et fausse opposition entre art et travail, et d’apprécier les divers moyens qui confèrent aux artistes le statut de travailleurs.

Child Labour: Analysis and Implementation of a Model Multinomial Logit, Considering the Different Choices between Work and Study

Since ancient times there is a record of children acting in the labor market, but this time child labor was seen as a craft and vocational learning. Currently, such work is condemned because of their negative effects on people current and future life. For many researchers, poverty is identified as being the main reason for the occurrence of child labor. Therefore, this study aims to investigate what is the probability of the choice for a child: work or study. To achieve the proposed objective was used as methodology statistical and econometric analysis from the database of the National Household Sample Survey of 2012. We selected a population aged between 10 and 17 years and the main conclusions are that: the older the child, the greater the probability of this work and study in relation to her/him only to study. It was also observed that males children, living in the northern region of Brazil, are more likely to work and study in relation to only study. In addition, black and mulatto children are more likely to work and study when compared with children of white color. Finally, it is understood that the reality of child labor mainly involves discussing the urgency of economic policies that redistribute income more fairly, providing the necessary structural reforms and implementing specific programs to meet families living in extreme poverty.

Employment Regulation and Youth Employment: A Critical Perspective

In their contributions to this panel, Professor Heriot and Professor Epstein advance a decidedly anti-regulatory thesis. They argue that U.S. employment laws harm American workers by significantly impairing the efficiency of U.S. labor markets. According to their account, firms would react to the repeal of existing labor regulations by hiring more workers, and, especially, by employing more young people. In this brief essay, I offer a critical perspective on their hypothesis. First, the neoclassical economic theory on which they rely rests on several empirical assumptions that are at odds with the reality of contemporary labor markets. Indeed, no economic theory can provide a compelling a priori reason to repeal any of these regulatory measures. Second, concerns other than economic efficiency quite properly influence public policy. Plausible non-efficiency justifications support many current U.S. labor regulations and may trump the efficiency goals that Professors Heriot and Epstein wish to promote. Finally, the available empirical evidence casts considerable doubt on the argument that labor regulations in the United States dramatically reduce employment opportunities for young people, though most studies suggest that minimum wage laws modestly diminish youth employment.

Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai‘i by Franklin Odo (review)

Reviewed by: Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai‘i by Franklin Odo Christen Sasaki Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai‘i. By Franklin Odo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xxviii + 242 pp. Bibliography. Index. Lyrics. $55.00 cloth Franklin Odo’s study of the folk tradition, holehole bushi, provides a unique and in-depth look into the lives of issei, or first generation Japanese immigrants, in Hawai‘i. Through careful analysis of numerous folk songs, Odo successfully complicates the narrow image of the issei that is largely, “of a generation that suffered grievously, but with great patience and humility … in order to create better lives for their children …” (pp. x–xi), and offers an alternative narrative that is filled with fluidity, despair, love, lust, violence, and hope. This book is an important read for scholars of Japanese American history and historiography, ethnic studies, and labor history. It will also be especially useful to those engaged in comparative migration history, women’s history, Hawaiian history, and ethnomusicology. Adapted from traditional Japanese folk songs and poetry, holehole bushi were composed and sung by a generation of Japanese men and women who toiled in Hawai‘i’s sugar plantations from 1885–1924. Odo’s meticulous attention to this local folk tradition of Hawai‘i opens up the global and fluid world of the issei. The holehole bushi in chapter 1, “Japan to Hawai‘i,” creates a complicated picture of this first generation of immigrant laborers and the transnational world in which they lived. The issei are depicted as men and women straddling a home society in transition, while also inhabiting a contested space between two emerging empires and the independent kingdom of Hawai‘i. Chapters 2 to 5 are organized around themes found in the holehole bushi: work, despair and defiance, love and lust, and reflections. In chapter 2, “World of Work,” Odo tackles the harsh realities of plantation labor. Using holehole bushi lyrics, Odo adds to the scholarship on Hawai‘i’s sugar plantation labor by questioning the taken-for-granted gendered nature of work. He also successfully draws out the life choices that many issei faced when nearing the end of a three-year contract, and underscores the mobility of this generation within the islands and between nations. The holehole bushi analyzed in chapter 3, “Despair and Defiance,” breaks through “Hawai‘i’s plantation mythology” (p. 58) and offer a gritty depiction of issei life. Subjects such as gambling, gangs, rage, depression, prostitution, and alcoholism are among the topics covered. Chapter 4, “Love and Lust,” presents a unique glimpse into the intimate and sometimes scandalous world of plantation life. Here Odo shines as he reminds the reader through holehole bushi of the relative power some women wielded in a society where female companionship was scarce. In chapter [End Page 216] 5, titled “Reflections,” the holehole bushi reveal issei thoughts on their lived experiences, ranging from regret to gratitude. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the process of recovering this particular folk tradition. Chapter 6, “A Last Hurrah,” examines the collective and constructed identity of the issei decades after their last days on the plantation. The holehole bushi examined in this chapter were submitted in response to a contest sponsored by a Japanese language newspaper in 1960. “Renaissance of Holehole Bushi,” chapter 7, charts the recuperation of this folk tradition by Harry Minoru Urata and traces its usage in popular media and academia. Odo writes in style that will entertain and engage a general audience. While there is some repetition in each of the chapters, they could easily be used as stand-alone pieces. Finally, having raised a number of issues for further study, including the mobility of the issei generation, “rurality,” and the fluidity of the plantation world, Odo leaves the reader with a collection of over 200 translated holehole bushi for their own reading and analysis. This project is clearly a labor of love for Odo, one that makes holehole bushi accessible to a new generation of Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i, as well as scholars and practitioners around the world. Christen Sasaki Assistant Professor, Department of Asian American...

Contratos flexíveis de trabalho: diferentes perfis de trabalhadores qualificados brasileiros

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to discuss how professionals who have gone through traditional work relationships organize themselves in the new labor reality of flexible contracts experiment, considered in this research as contracts that are not governed by the Brazilian Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT). Through interviews with 43 well-qualified workers, we built a typology consisting of nine profiles with specific characteristics, namely: the PJ, the Parachutist, the Indif ferent, the Pragmatist, the Independent, the Autonomous, the Businessman, the Resentful, and the CLT. The results showed that the construction of profiles allowed to understand how skilled professionals face the new reality of work and concluded, in this case, that flexible work is not a synonymous of job insecurity, because it does not entail neces sarily losses from professional or personal perspectives for the individual that choses to execute this kind of contract.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Mythology of dwyl in the Neoliberal Marketplace of Academic Labour

I thought i was lucky when I landed my first contract academic faculty (CAF) position right after I finished my comprehensive exams for my doctorate. That was twelve years ago. Like many others, I thought this was beginning of a long line of employment that would eventually land me in a tenure-track job. I loved my job as a teacher and a researcher. I was doing what I loved, and I figured that this love would carry me through to a full-time career. This was not necessarily a naive point of view, as many of my CAF colleagues were doing that. But in past twelve years there has been a radical shift in academic labour market. Not only are there a small number of tenure stream, or regular academic faculty (RAF), positions, there are so many contract academic faculty that even securing enough courses every semester to pay rent is becoming a precarious situation. There are too many CAF fighting over too few crumbs, and for some only recourse to ensure a livelihood is to formally grieve when crumbs don't come one's way, a situation that further alienates RAF from CAF. But love was not enough. Doing what I loved would still leave me in a precarious position every year and constantly under threat of being bounced from my courses with every new hire, curriculum review, or teaching overload of an RAF that department undertook. My feelings resonated with Miya Tokumitsu's article Name of Love originally published in Jacobin, 13 January 2014, and reprinted in Slate two days later. In article, Tokumitsu shreds DWYL (doing what you love) mantra, arguing that it actually works to reinforce exploitation and functions as the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. The mythology of DWYL is deeply entrenched in academia. Choosing to continue in school instead of entering labour market immediately after high school, then choosing to take valuable asset of an undergraduate education and go back into academia instead of entering open labour market where one could (in theory) make much more money, is underpinned by romantic notions of academic labour as being fulfilling beyond its monetary compensation. But, as Tokumitsu points out, DWYL rhetoric has a dark side; it works to legitimate divide of academic labour between RAF and CAF by individualizing realities of academic labour as loving This mythology is embedded through academic system and functions to hide structural conditions that value PhD labour for graduate student but not for graduated student on job market. First, DWYL is a tool to justify exploitation and devalue labour. Only certain jobs are ascribed a DWYL; there is little DWYL rhetoric to justify labour of accountants or ceos who are allowed to be motivated by compensation packages and not passion. Instead DWYL functions as a means to extract cheap or free labour by making certain types of work feel like non (Tokumitsu). DWYL is middle-class version of it's better than nothing rhetoric that is used to justify meager wages of working poor. These are stories told by capitalism to justify existence of precarious, poorly paid jobs that are structurally designed to lock workers in. DWYL locks workers into academic piecework of CAF by deflecting attention away from real problem. Implied in DWYL rhetoric is that one gets stuck in a CAF position, never winning an RAF job, because one didn't love profession enough to get prestigious grant or right venue for publication that would have made difference in job market. What is erased from this debate is a dialogue on how structures of universities have shifted to rely on precarious, just in time academic piecework as their main labour force. In neoliberal marketplace, DWYL shifts conversation away from structural realities to individual deficits. Secondly, with DWYL we can ask, What is to love? …

On the Abolition of Academic Labour: The Relationship Between Intellectual Workers and Mass Intellectuality

This article analyses the ways in which academic labour as a productive activity is subsumed inside the circuits and cycles of finance capital. These circuits are redefining universities as transnational associations of capitals, through which the concrete and abstract realities of academic labour are recomposed for value production and accumulation. One way of critiquing and moving beyond such a recomposition is through a reconsideration of academic labour as a fetishised form of labour, and subsequently framed in terms of the idea of “mass intellectuality”. The potential for mass intellectuality to enable liberation from the domination of capitalist social relations is contested, but the idea of socially-useful, living knowledge offers a mechanism for rethinking the value of academic labour, and pointing towards its abolition. Thus, the article asks whether it is possible to dissolve academic labour into the fabric of society as intellectual work, through which another image of society and social production becomes possible. Here the ideas of open co-operativism and fearless practice underpin a politics of alliance against capital that seeks to abolish the present state of things.

Colonial ideology versus labour reality: a history of the recruitment of Italian workers to the colony of Eritrea, 1890s–1940s

This article analyses the labour history of Italy's recruitment of workers for settlement in the Italian colony of Eritrea. The quest for full employment, both in Italy and within its nascent colonial ‘empire’, was the main driving force behind Italian colonialism in general. Italy's labour policy, which started to take shape in the 1890s, was never linear. Unlike the previous liberal Governments, the Fascist regime's policy was far more determined to use its colonies as places to settle the Italian peasant masses (the same that were migrating to the Americas for a better life, a trend which Fascist Italy considered humiliating to the mother country). In keeping with its vision of the colonies as a means to attain full employment, Fascist ideology characterised the Italian colonial empire as an ‘empire of labour’. In fact, the reality of the labour situation that Italian workers found themselves in after settling in Italy's African colonies would soon show the fallacy underlying Fascist colonial ideology.

Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla & Nesqualy, 1846–1879 by Roberta Stingham Brown and Patricia O'Connell Killen Roberta Stingham Brown

 OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 pation in the West morphed along racial lines into a national era of exclusion. Smith excels at illustrating her arguments with the stories of real people struggling to make a living and find their place in California ’s society and polity. Rather than abstract nameless victims of bound labor and a legal system dominated by faceless white men of power and greed, she reconstructs individuals with agency, motive, and history. Smith mines information from newspapers, memoirs, letters , and legal cases, introducing readers to a parade of characters who illustrate the ambiguity and historical contingency of unfree labor.Readers meet indentured Indian servant Augustín, a New Mexican genízaro, who along with Mexican debt peons Benito Pérez and his wife, travelled from Sonora to California to dig gold and wash laundry for their patrone Antonio Francisco Coronel. There is James Brown, who legally converted his hereditary slaves,Richard and Lucy Brown,to contractual employees in order to use California’s legal system, which had banned slavery, to protect his rights to the Browns’labor until they could meet his emancipation fee. Smith describes Oliver Wozencraft and hisYuki Indian domestic servant, Shasta, held under legal guardianship as his ward, as well as Lucy Young of the Lassik people, stolen, sold, escaped, captured, and traded between white owners most of her life. And then there is the story of Ma Ho, her six-year-old daughter Quin Ti, and the Chinese man Chu Quong,who was either Ma Ho’s wronged husband or the person who held her in prostitution and kidnapped her daughter to do the same. These are poignant portraits of the visceral reality of unfree labor, race, and the law in a free state. Freedom’s Frontier is thoroughly researched, but it is also well written and a pleasure to read. Smith makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on the antebellum West and the complicated story of human bondage that unifies western history with our national history of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. David Rich Lewis Utah State University Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla & Nesqualy, 1846–1879 by Roberta Stingham Brown and Patricia O’Connell Killen translated by Roberta Stingham Brown University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2013. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 288 pages. $40.00 cloth. Although the Roman Catholic Church played a major role in the Pacific Northwest during the nineteenth century, for many decades research on the church’s activities was largely the realm of Catholic scholars,such as Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., author of A History of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest (1987). With the publication of the Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla and Nesqualy, 1846–1879, editors Patricia Stringham Brown and Patricia O’Connell Killen have provided a useful resource that will appeal to a wider audience. Following extensive research on the A.M.A Blanchet collection of some 900 missives, Brown and Killen selected forty letters addressed to a diverse group of historical figures and organizations ,includingA.M.A.Blanchet’s brother F.N. Blanchet, Bishop of Oregon City; church officials in Quebec, the eastern United States, Europe, and the Vatican; the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in France; federal officials and military officers in both Washington Territory and Washington City; and local clergy and missionaries in Blanchet’s bishopric.  Reviews Brown and Killen open the volume with a preface that outlines the scope of the project, their method and approach to editing the letters, and their attention to three “sensitive topics”: the use of ethnic labels, relations between missionaries and Native peoples, and the connection (or distance) between the perspectives of the editors and those expressed in the letters (p. xii). In the introduction, the editors provide a concise overview of Blanchet’s biography and his career, beginning with his ordination in Lower Canada in 1821.As Brown and Killen observe, Blanchet’s life spanned a dramatic and tumultuous period in the Pacific Northwest, and his correspondence provides a window in the multi-cultural, “cosmopolitan reality of the Washington Territory” during the 1800s (p...

Reproduction and citizenship/reproducing citizens: editorial introduction

Book synopsis: Whilst politics of reproduction have been at heart of feminist struggles for over a century and a half, their analysis has not yet come to occupy a central place in interdisciplinary study of citizenship. This volume takes up challenge posed by Bryan Turner, when he noted the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and (2008), and offers first major global collection of work exploring this nexus of practices and political contestations. The book brings together scholars from across Europe, Americas, and Australia to develop feminist and queer analyses of relationship between and reproduction, and to explore ways in which is reproduced. Extending foundational work of feminist political theorists and sociologists who have interrogated public/private dichotomy on which traditional civic republican and liberal understandings of rest, contributors examine biological, sexual, and technological realities of natality, and social realities of intimate intergenerational material and affective labour that are generative of citizens, and that serve to reproduce membership of, and belonging to, states, nations, societies, and thus of citizenship itself. This book was published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Nationalism and immigrant labor in a tropical enclave: the West Indians of Colón City, 1850–1936

Focusing on Colón City, Panama, this article illustrates how early twentieth-century narratives about Central American enclaves as backward and isolated places contributed to the exclusion of West Indian immigrants from imaginings of the national citizenry. In showing how enclave narratives distanced tropical workers and places from the global economies and modern technologies they helped create, the article contributes to our understanding of the history of modern disconnections between the global realities of immigrant labor and the nationalist ideologies that exclude them.

The Presentation of Identity in the Work Songs of Johnny Cash

This paper approaches music lyrics as a delivery system for the presentation of identity and reports the result of a content analysis of the work songs recorded by Johnny Cash. Beginning with a discography of 684 songs, the analysis found that 115 mention jobs, of which eighty concern work, and eight pertain to factory work. The study provides a detailed description of the factory work songs and categorizes them in terms of four themes: (1) going to work; (2) being at work; (3) after work, and (4) post-employment—after one no longer has a job. Cash's work songs illustrate that identity is a polysemic construction connected to work in various ways. These songs reveal both the multiple realities of manual labor and the temporal variance of laborers' constructions of self.

Troublesome Professionals: On the speculative reality of theatrical labour

This article explores what might be at stake when art and performance exposes the apparently peripheral structures of value and labour that support the art-event. For example, in the piece attributed to John Baldessari in the 11 Rooms exhibition at the 2011 Manchester International Festival (UK), the organizers attempted to stage a previously unrealized concept by Baldessari that centered around the display of a real human corpse. For various reasons, they were unable to do so and instead displayed printouts selected from a year of correspondence in which the bulk of activity was undertaken by relatively anonymous members of curatorial and technical staff. Or in Quarantine's theatre piece Entitled (2011), technicians carry out the actions they would normally undertake during the day before an audience arrives, but, now that an audience is present, they narrate their actions as they perform them. One way of understanding these gestures is as attempts to present labour as something ‘real’ that might interrupt the fakery of art: the real corpse, the real stagehands, etc. However, drawing on Alice Rayner's reading of Derrida and Marx and John Roberts' arguments about the logic of the readymade, I argue that the usefulness of the staging of labour in this way is not in the way that it presents some authentic action that overcomes theatre's artifice, but instead in the peculiar failure of theatrical actions to be fully present. Rather than the ‘reality’ of the labour interrupting the ‘representation’ of the theatre, we might regard this as theatre that shows us labour as it really is; it is just that when we see it for what it is, it isn't there.

Social Upgrading and Labour in Global Production Networks: A Critique and an Alternative Conception

Over the last two decades the global commodity chain, global value chain and global production network (GCC/GVC/GPN) frameworks have facilitated valuable research into contemporary global capitalism. However, much of this research has paid insufficient attention to work and workers. Recently, the concept of social upgrading, with a strong emphasis on workers' conditions, has been advanced by leading GCC/GVC/GPN theorists, as a potential remedy to the previous lacunae. This article welcomes this development, but also argues that the social upgrading concept represents an elite comprehension of relations between capital, the state and labour. It is argued that the concept, derived from the International Labour Organization's Decent Work Agenda, denies the reality of labour's exploitation by capital and is therefore only partially equipped to explain the existence of indecent work. The Decent Work Agenda and the social upgrading concept expect improvements in work to be delivered by elite actors such as firms, national states and international organizations. It is argued that, through re-visiting Marx's explication of the capitalist labour process, it is possible to comprehend the nature of capitalist exploitation, the root causes of indecent work and resistance to it, and thus to develop an alternative conception of social upgrading. The article presents evidence from North East Brazilian export horticulture to support these arguments.

Country Bumpkin and Cosmopolitan: Some Versions of Postcolonial Pastoral

The pastoral mode has historically been dismissed for what some scholars see as its aestheticization of the brutal realities of agricultural labor and rural life. This essay, however, complicates what critics have considered the inherently conservative ideology of the pastoral. I contend that contemporary Irish poets such as Seamus Heaney and John Montague mobilize the literary mode’s generic conventions to critique the processes of modernization at work in postwar Ireland that displaced their rural communities. In and , the pastoral opens up a language of socioeconomic critique unavailable in political discourse, dominated as it often was by proponents of modernization who derided the rural community as a bastion of backward nationalism or by conservative politicians who idealized it as a sanctuary of traditional values. These poets are acutely aware of the multiple ironies embedded within the pastoral, the discursive power of which can reveal the contradictions in politico-economic ideology and cultural expression in modern Ireland.

Non-communicable diseases diagnosed in a health care service for dock workers: a case study in a seaport of Brazil

Background: Dock workers are important for world economic growth. They develop work where they are exposed to risk factors for non-communicable diseases. Non-communicable diseases are characterized as disorders that affect the general population and in recent decades the number of deaths worldwide has been considered significant. The aims of this study have been to identify non-communicable diseases that affect dock workers, according to records from the Medical Outpatient Clinic for Dock Workers. Methods: Quantitative and exploratory study. Data were collected from all medical care files of dock workers in the period 2000 to 2009. A predetermined form was used, focusing on clinical data and diagnoses of non-communicable diseases. Descriptive data analysis was performed. Results: Data were collected from 953 medical care records. The population was predominantly male (90.47%) and the predominant age of workers was below 50. The most common non-communicable diseases were hypertension (8.3%); obesity (5.6%); diabetes mellitus (3%); acute myocardial infarction (0.5%). Conclusion: The results showed hypertension, obesity and diabetes as the more prevalent non-communicable diseases. Occupational health nurses possess the theoretical and practical knowledge to organize a process of care that includes prevention and promotes health strategies appropriate for the labour reality of this group of workers.

"When the Sun Goes Down": The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Jean Toomer's Cane

Darwin Turner once wrote of Jean Toomer's literary masterpiece, Cane, that inspires critical rhapsodies rather than (In Minor Chord 207). Turner's observation is suggestive of the critical challenges that Cane poses. While there is no consensus regarding Cane's formal structure, critics have often described it in thematic terms as pastoral work. Bernard Bell's reading of Cane as a pastoral work, contrasting the values of uninhibited, unlettered Black rustics with those of the educated, class consciousness Black bourgeoisie, privileges the lyrical elements of the novel and its indebtedness to Afro American tradition of music as major structural device (Portrait of an Artist 13). Yet his analysis here only extends to the poetic pieces that intersperse Cane without comparing them to the prose narratives that provide thematic and structural counter-point to them. Lucinda MacKethan also offers reading of the novel as pastoral narrative, arguing that Toomer mold[ed] [Cane] into version of Southern pastoral perceived with the black man's double of deep belonging and forced alienation (A Pastoral Problem 425). MacKethan's description of Toomer's ironic pastoral vision in Cane does not adequately attend to the rural and urban conflict that frames the novel's portrayal of culturally displaced blacks in the North. In this essay, I will argue that Cane is best understood as what Michael Denning has described as ghetto variant of the complex pastoral form that emphasizes the unique racial and ethnic conflicts associated with stories of deracinated (im)migrant peoples. Thus, my reading of the novel as ghetto pastoral examines the racial and cultural tensions that necessarily shape Toomer's aesthetic in the novel. In The Cultural Front, Denning calls the ghetto pastoral as yoking of naturalism and the pastoral, stories that dialectically represent urban experience as an allegorical cityscape composed in pidgin of American slang and ghetto dialect, with traces of old country tongues (231). According to Denning, these stories sought to provide more accurate portrayal of ethnic class experience. In contrast to traditional pastoral narratives, which privileged transcendent pastoral ideal in response to the alienating aspects of modern society, the ghetto pastoral narrative revealed the ways in which ethnic and racial categories the experience of class immigrants in the city. These are stories about how displaced immigrants in the city attempt to reimagine themselves in relation to pastoral landscape back home, but they are also stories about how race and ethnicity complicate that transformative ideal. As Denning writes, Ethnicity and race had become the modality through which class peoples experienced their lives and mapped their communities (239). Denning offers as examples of the ghetto pastoral mode the work of authors such as Mike Gold, Claude McKay and Anzia Yezierska, novelists whose works arose out of the proletarian moment of the 1920s and 1930s. As Denning points out, ghetto pastoral novels such as McKay's Home to Harlem and Mike Gold's Jews Without Money revealed the ways in which race and ethnicity challenged the transcendent ideal of green landscape that was at the core of conventional pastoral narratives. Instead, these ghetto pastoral narratives portrayed contested urban landscape composed of the old and the new, past and present--at once bringing together the symbolic elements of ethnic folk culture and the harsh material realities of urban life. Rather than the boundless potential expressed in traditional pastoral narratives, ghetto pastorals were stories that revealed how racial and ethnic boundaries delimited the lives of displaced (im)migrants. At the same time, these stories expressed the ways in which migrants pushed on these boundaries to create liminal spaces of existence, spaces formed at the interstices between the pastoral dream of transcendence and the urban realities of working class tenements, sweatshop and factory labor, and cheap mass entertainments (239). …

Labour and Employment in a Globalising World: Autonomy, Collectives and Political Dilemmas

This collection of essays provides new insight into the complex realities of labour and employment market globalisation. The pluridisciplinary and multi-faced understanding of globalisation is based upon ground research in ten countries from South to North. Its contextualisation of globalising labour and employment market, perceived as process, constitutes the originality of the book. Globalisation is understood through a single process of both standardisation and differentiation, which also underscores its political agenda. The globalising process incorporates trends of convergent and somewhat undifferentiated Southern and Northern situations in labour and employment. Strong political perspectives thereby emerge to help understand changes in current capitalism and question the longstanding North to South paradigm. As labour and employment markets standardise and differentiate, what other problematical threads can be pulled to strengthen the hypothesis that trends converge within a single globalising process? The comparative concepts and tools proposed in this volume help to answer these queries.

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Redefining Social Justice: New Labour Rhetoric and Reality

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Redefining Social Justice: New Labour Rhetoric and Reality

Implementing New Guidelines: How to Make It Happen Successfully

Childbearing Poster Presentation Purpose for the Program I nductions are the reality of labor and delivery units across the country. Concerns over the current induction process, available resources, and the communication of patients, physicians, and nurses within a busy labor and delivery unit provided an opportunity to formulate ideas to improve safety, quality, and efficiency with patient care. One identified goal was to minimize day-to-day volume fluctuations in scheduled procedures. Any multifaceted, complex issue requires the oversight and guidance of a special committee to evaluate problems, create solutions, and implement successful change.