Minority Workers Research Articles

Job Demand and Early Retirement

Policy initiatives such as increases in the full retirement age implicitly reduce benefits for early retirement. Yet research suggests that those in physically demanding jobs may be particularly adversely affected by such policies. We examine to what extent physical job demand relates to early retirement decisions in a population of aging manufacturing workers. We follow a cohort of approximately 1,500 stably employed male Alcoa employees aged 51-58 in 2001 followed forward to 2008. We use a variety of models to examine whether externally rated physical job demand at middle age is related to early retirement. We also examine whether pension eligibility and payouts induce earlier retirement, especially for those with more physically demanding jobs, while accounting for wage differentials, injury history, and underlying health. Our results suggest that workers whose jobs have high physical demand retire earlier after accounting for the wage differential and health. We also find that the minority of workers who transition to lower demand jobs, due to previous injury or health issues, are less likely to retire early. Finally, while we find evidence that pension eligibility and wealth accumulation induce earlier retirement, there was limited evidence of a difference by job demand.

Later Historical Archaeology in Iceland: A Review

This paper offers a general review of past and present archaeological work on the later historic period of Iceland, i.e. from the sixteenth century to the present day. Introduced by a brief sketch of the nature of Iceland’s history and archaeology, a chronological approach is taken in presenting previous and current research on sites and material of the later historic period. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, with minor work focused on a single ordinary farmstead, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed a growth of excavations largely on elite residences. Since the 1990s and into the present, such a focus has continued while also seeing a rise in development-led projects. Despite this, lack of publication or even general discussion of the archaeology of this period dominates the field in Iceland, problems which are only now being addressed.

Industrial and Occupational Change in Los Angeles: The Concentration and Polarization of Minority and White Laborers

Metropolitan Los Angeles is one of the laJgeSt inclustnal regions in the world and one of the most important destina­ tions of immigrants in the U.S. 1his artide examines the relationship between the city's old and new workforce (immi­ grants, women, and baby boomers). It addresses the ques­ tion: how did Latinos, Nrican-Americans, and whites rit into Los Angeles' economy between 1970 and 1980. Several theories about the position of minorities and women in post­ industrial society are analyzed for their applicability to Los Angeles: (1) mismatch; (2) polarization; and (3) ethnic succes­ sion. The author, using a shift-share method employed in a similar study on New York Oty, tests the ethnic succession hypothesis in Los Angeles. He condudes that, unlike New York, Los Angeles' white population did not decrease in its total employment, thus not allowing for a large minority employmentsuccession. Ukewise,themismatchandpolari­ zation theories do not fully capture what is occurring in Los Angeles. Instead, laborers in Los Angeles cOntinue to be con­ centratedinjobsalonglinesofraceandgender. Inaddition, minority and female workers are concentrated in /ow-paying and low-skilled jobs, which contributes to wase polarization by race and gender.

“Public Transportation is Very Important to Wal-Mart”

Over the past decade, cities across the United States eliminated bus service at an alarming rate. This article insists that a persistent association between the urban bus and racial others legitimized these cuts as their surrounding discourses highlighted tensions between the need to move low-wage minority workers from city to suburb to exploit their labor, and the desire to erase them as disposable elements of a neoliberal economy. It argues that this tension inclined politicians and voters in St. Louis, Missouri, and Atlanta, Georgia, to deny increased bus funding despite the prospect of reduced profits for suburban businesses.

Physically-based modelling, good modelling practice including uncertainty – reply to comment by Ewen et al. (2012)

As stated explicitly in the paper by Refsgaard et al. (‘Système Hydrologique Europeén (SHE): review and perspectives after 30 years development in distributed physically-based modelling’, published in Hydrology Research41 (5), 355–377), our paper was ‘confined to a historical analysis based on our own experience through our work at DHI and, to a minor extent, the initiatives and work by DHI's ASHE partners’. We therefore welcome the comments by Ewen et al. (in this issue's Comment paper, pp. 945–947) hereafter referred to as EOBBKPO, with the views of another ASHE partner. This provides us with the opportunity to state our views even more clearly.

A Comparison of Nonfatal Occupational Injuries and Illnesses Among Hispanic Versus Non-Hispanic Workers in the United States

This article investigates the trends and changes in patterns of nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses among Hispanic workers versus non-Hispanic minority workers in the United States between 1992 and 2009. Injuries and illnesses are also examined by the severity of cases and across industry sectors. The differences in the mean share of nonfatal injury and illness cases found between Hispanic and non-Hispanic minority workers in the top three industries are tested to determine if they are statistically different. The hypothesis that Hispanic workers experience a relatively higher incidence of injuries and illnesses because of the growing share of Hispanics in the U.S. labor force and relatively lower educational attainment level is established through a vector autoregressive (VAR) framework. These findings suggest greater need for safety efforts with Hispanic workers in industries demonstrating high rates of injuries and illnesses, such as education and training that addresses safety behavior, work conditions, and language and cultural barriers.

The 1921 Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Georgia: Looking Back after Ninety Years

The Article concerns the 1921 Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Soon after the adoption of the constitution, Georgia was occupied by Russia and the Constitution was suspended. During Soviet rule, analysis and evaluation of the Constitution were taboo and only minor works on the constitution by foreign and Georgian authors working abroad have been preserved. The 1921 Constitution can unquestionably be considered as one of the most advanced and perfect supreme legislative acts oriented towards human rights in the world for its time that is, the beginning of the twentieth century. The author argues that it reflects the most progressive legal and political discourse in practice or theory at that time in Western European countries or the USA. As the main law of an independent democratic state, it established representative democracy as well as the system of democratic governance based on popular sovereignty by ensuring an independent judicial system.

Respect, Recognition, and Appraisal: Are All Artworks Valuable?

The apparently simple claim that all artworks are valuable is articulated clearly by Alan Goldman, who writes: ‘‘according to one common conception of art, to call something an artwork is already to grant it a positive evaluative status. What counts as a genuine artwork must meet some minimal threshold of artistic value, so that minor or mediocre works of art are still better than objects that purport to be works of art but do not merit that status.’’ The stakes of endorsing the view that Goldman lays out have generally been unrecognized. If all artworks are valuable, then there is at least one serious obstacle to any analysis that purports to define the concept of art. As Morris Weitz argues, using a version of the argument advanced by G.E. Moore that naturalists in ethics commit a fallacy, if the concept of art is laden with value, it cannot be defined using descriptive, naturalistic terminology. Even more importantly, if all artworks are valuable, questions about the classification and about the value of artworks cannot be separated; that strategy of responding to Weitz, employed by George Dickie, cannot be made to work. Responsible philosophical study of art, even its ontological aspects, would have to take a turn toward valuetheoretic considerations. Not only does the idea that all artworks are valuable have potentially serious theoretical entailments, but it is also widely endorsed by prominent writers on

Bucking the Odds: Organized Labor in Gulf Coast Oil Refining

100 The Journal of American History June 2012 The Gulf Coast of the United States has long been home to the world’s largest concentration of petroleum refineries and chemical plants. These sprawling, interconnected complexes of crude oil tanks, distillation columns, fractionating towers, lubricating oil units, alkylation units, dewaxing units, and monstrous catalytic “crackers” churn out the gasoline and other petroleum products that have helped sustain modern American society. Shortly after the 1901 discovery of oil at Spindletop, Texas, the region’s first large refineries, owned by Gulf Oil and Texaco, sprang up in nearby Port Arthur and Beaumont. With subsequent discoveries along the Gulf Coast, refineries spread southwest to Houston and Corpus Christi, and east to Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, Louisiana. By 1941 the Gulf Coast accounted for 28 percent of national refining capacity, rising to 32 percent by 1956, and 36 percent by 1976.1 Refineries depended on a large and stable work force—more than two hundred thousand people nationwide by 1955, in nearly three hundred refineries of all sizes in thirty-nine states—to keep the units running smoothly, around the clock. One-third of these workers were employed on the Gulf Coast, most of them concentrated in fourteen major refineries on the upper Texas coast and in Louisiana. Working-class people in the Gulf Coast region coveted refinery jobs, which were equivalent to positions in northern automobile or steel plants. Except for a brief period during World War II, these jobs went exclusively to men. Into the 1960s almost all the higher-paying skilled jobs were reserved for whites, which along the upper Gulf Coast included both Anglos and Cajuns. The jobs paid well, included generous benefits after World War I, and offered a means of upward socioeconomic mobility. Minorities, too, including African Americans as well as Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, found desirable wage-labor work at refineries, albeit in segregated classifications. Job losses in the oil industry during the Great Depression, however, forced white and minority workers alike to organize. The union movement in oil targeted refining, the least isolated and geographically dispersed sector of the industry. As was the case across the Jim Crow South, labor organizing in refining consisted of a dual Bucking the Odds: Organized Labor in Gulf Coast Oil Refining

Discrimination, technology and unemployment

I study the interaction between discrimination and investment using a directed search model where firms decide the capital intensity of their production technologies before being matched. Discrimination makes some workers cheap to hire. As a consequence, some firms might save on capital costs adopting labour intensive technologies. This framework allows one to reconcile search models with three well-known facts regarding the labour market outcomes of minority workers: low wages, high unemployment and occupational segregation. Furthermore, the model questions the role of equal pay legislation in reducing inequality since removing this restriction, i.e., allowing firms to post type-contingent wages, eliminates the negative effects of discrimination on investment and wages.

Cultural transmission and discrimination

Workers can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process, which depends on parents’ investment in the trait and the social environment where children live. If a sufficiently high proportion of employers have taste-based prejudices against minority workers, we show that their prejudices are always self-fulfilled in steady state and minority workers end up having, on average, worse work habits than majority workers. This leads to a ghetto culture. Affirmative Action can improve the welfare of minorities whereas integration can be beneficial to minority workers but detrimental to workers from the majority group.

Ethnic Disparities in the Graduate Labour Market

This paper examines ethnic wage differentials for the entire population of workers who enrolled for the first time as students at Dutch universities (WO) and colleges (HBO) in 1996 using unique administrative panel data for the period 1996 to 2005 from the Dutch tertiary education system. The study breaks down wage differentials into two components: a component which can be explained by the observed characteristics and an unexplained component. The analysis provides new evidence for the magnitude and the origin of ethnic wage differentials by gender. In general, ethnic wage gap is larger for migrant women than migrant men and larger for Western and Caribbean migrants than for Mediterranean migrants. Ethnic minority workers appear to have larger wage surpluses which is almost entirely explained by their observed favourable characteristics. Most notably, Mediterranean female graduates have significantly positive wage discrimination, while Western female graduates seem to face a small wage penalty.

Striking similarities: representing South Asian women's industrial action in Britain

The focus of this article is two significant episodes in British labour politics. The first is the Grunwick strike between 1976 and 1978; the second a dispute at Gate Gourmet that began in 2005. In both disputes, women of South Asian origin were the key actors and their legacy has been constructed through striking imagery as one in which against the odds exotic or passive Others became unexpected heroines of industrial struggle. These representations retained their power, despite significant social, economic and political changes in ‘post-Fordist’ Britain, including in the political rights of strikers, and in the participation and position of both women and minority workers in the labour force. Drawing on interviews with South Asian women involved in each dispute, this article challenges these representations and their significance in accounts of the action, documenting the complex, multiple motives of South Asian women involved in labour politics in the UK.

Pseudacteon tricuspis: Its Behavior and Development According to the Social Form of Its Host and the Role of Interference Competition Among Females

We studied how the behavior and performance of Pseudacteon tricuspis Borgmeier varies with the social form of its host Solenopsis invicta Buren, in its native range in Argentina where monogyne colonies are more abundant than polygynes (approximately 75 vs. 25%). Female, P. tricuspis took 44% less time (50 vs. 89 s) to attack monogyne than polygyne ants, but oviposition attempts were similar (23 vs. 18 attacks). The presence of the parasitoid affected the average size of foragers on the trail, with the proportion of minor workers increasing on both social forms. In the laboratory, P. tricuspis selected similar host sizes, although pupal survival was 25% higher on monogynes than on polygynes. Developmental times of both genders were similar (33-35 d), although larger females emerged from bigger hosts. The sex ratio of P. tricuspis was more male biased when exploiting polygyne ants. Intraspecific competition significantly affected parasitoid reproductive success, being significantly higher for a solitary female than when three females were present, although the size of workers selected did not vary. The male:female ratio also changed, being 1:1 without competition but 2:1 with competition. We demonstrated for the first time the consequences of interference competition among P. tricuspis females, a common behavior observed in others parasitoids. We discuss why P. tricuspis sex ratios are always biased toward males in both social forms and suggest that similar studies of interference competition within and between already naturalized Pseudacteon species in the United States could help predict establishment patterns.

Taxonomy of the ant genus Pheidole Westwood (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in the Afrotropical zoogeographic region: definition of species groups and systematic revision of the Pheidole pulchella group

This paper is a starting point towards a much needed comprehensive taxonomic treatment of the genus Pheidole in theAfrotropical region. Despite its hyperdiversity, the taxonomy of this globally distributed ant genus is limited to importantrevisions for the New World and several Asian faunas. However, Pheidole of the Afrotropical zoogeographic region hasnever been revised. The most recent Afrotropical Pheidole species descriptions are fifty years old and many are consider-ably older. Identification keys are not available and many species descriptions are of limited diagnostic value. This callsfor a series of taxonomic revisions in order to resolve the complicated taxonomic situation for the complete AfrotropicalPheidole fauna. In this paper the following preliminary morphological species groups for the Afrotropical region are de-fined: P. aurivillii group, P. excellens group, P. megacephala group, P. nigeriensis group, and P. speculifera group. We also establish and revise the P. pulchella group, which currently contains eleven species, of which seven are new. The four spe-cies described prior to this study are: P. pulchella Santschi, P. dea Santschi, P. nimba Bernard, and P. batrachorum Wheelerstat. rev., which is removed from synonymy under P. dea and regains species status. The following new synonymy isproposed (senior synonym listed first): P. pulchella Santschi = P. pulchella achantella Santschi. The following seven spe-cies are described as new: P. christinae sp. n., P. darwini, sp. n., P. glabrella sp. n., P. heliosa sp. n., P. rebeccae sp. n., P. semidea sp. n. and P. setosa, sp. n. An illustrated key combining the minor and major worker subcastes is presented.

Trade union inclusion of migrant and ethnic minority workers: Comparing Italy and the Netherlands

This article explores trade union policies and actions towards migrant and ethnic minority workers in Italy and the Netherlands, drawing on union documents and interviews with trade unionists at different organizational levels. It examines how far the explanatory factors addressed in the migration studies and industrial relations literatures help in explaining the observed differences. The findings suggest an inverse relationship between union institutional embeddedness and the perception of migrant workers as ‘power resource’. Of particular relevance, in comparative perspective, are differences in internal union structures and dynamics.

The model minority: problematizing the representation of Kodavas in Kannada cinema

This paper is an attempt to understand the representation of the minority community of Kodavas in cinema that is largely produced, controlled, and consumed by people belonging to majoritarian languages/communities, specifically in Kannada cinema. I argue that the of politics of representation, misrepresentation, and non-representation of the minority both conform to and extend the existing relations of power between the Brahmin mind and the Shudra body, the ever-changing minority and ever-concretizing majority. My attempt is to show how the categories of nation and minorities ‘have been put to use through a complex process of the politics of nationalism’. Representations of the Kodava as the exotic servile, as the model minority worker, have only served to construct a homogeneous Hindu majority that has defined the Indian nation thus far. I argue the above by looking at the representation of the Kodava male body in Kannada Cinema where the body gets counted and valorized only to be discounted, to be non-existent.

Division of Labor in the Hyperdiverse Ant Genus Pheidole Is Associated with Distinct Subcaste- and Age-Related Patterns of Worker Brain Organization

The evolutionary success of ants and other social insects is considered to be intrinsically linked to division of labor among workers. The role of the brains of individual ants in generating division of labor, however, is poorly understood, as is the degree to which interspecific variation in worker social phenotypes is underscored by functional neurobiological differentiation. Here we demonstrate that dimorphic minor and major workers of different ages from three ecotypical species of the hyperdiverse ant genus Pheidole have distinct patterns of neuropil size variation. Brain subregions involved in sensory input (optic and antennal lobes), sensory integration, learning and memory (mushroom bodies), and motor functions (central body and subesophageal ganglion) vary significantly in relative size, reflecting differential investment in neuropils that likely regulate subcaste- and age-correlated task performance. Worker groups differ in brain size and display patterns of altered isometric and allometric subregion scaling that affect brain architecture independently of brain size variation. In particular, mushroom body size was positively correlated with task plasticity in the context of both age- and subcaste-related polyethism, providing strong, novel support that greater investment in this neuropil increases behavioral flexibility. Our findings reveal striking levels of developmental plasticity and evolutionary flexibility in Pheidole worker neuroanatomy, supporting the hypothesis that mosaic alterations of brain composition contribute to adaptive colony structure and interspecific variation in social organization.

Workplace Racial Discrimination and Middle Class Vulnerability

Middle-class minority workers have skill and human capital credentials which should confer protections and relative workplace power. Moreover, they often work in more bureaucratic contexts where culturally proscribed status markers, such as race, should matter little if at all. In this article, we challenge such assumptions by quantitatively and qualitatively examining several hundred cases of workplace racial discrimination and the degree of middle-class African American vulnerability. Notable are significant levels of firing discrimination for all African American workers and a heightened likelihood of mobility-based discrimination and day-to-day racial harassment for middle-class African Americans. Through qualitative case immersion, we show the core practices and processes through which these patterns manifest.

Aging brains and social behavior in an invertebrate model: neuromodulation and neuroanatomy of task attendance across the worker lifespan of the ant Pheidole dentata

Aging brains and social behavior in an invertebrate model: neuromodulation and neuroanatomy of task attendance across the worker lifespan of the ant Pheidole dentata